No. 1 Urban Art Marks

April 2011

Nº1

Hochschule Luzern Design & Kunst

Urban.Art.Marks Art explores the urban space

Introduction S. 1

Art marks the development of urban centres By Gabriela Christen

Performative research

Observing

N° 1  —  LUCERNE SCHOOL OF ART AND DESIGN  —  URBAN.ART.MARKS

S. 5

By Gesa Ziemer

Telescope in an urban setting

S. 10

By Stefan Kaegi

“Fuck Olympia”

S. 14

By Juri Steiner

Researching S. 17

Insight and intensification By Christoph Schenker

S. 22

BaBeL in Lucerne

By Silvia Henke and Nika Spalinger S. 27

Mapping the public sphere By Peter Spillmann

S. 31

Cooperative building and spatial productions By Elena Wilhelm

Speaking S. 36

The inexhaustible need for dialogue By Christoph Doswald

S. 37

The city as a dubious system Manfred Seiler in conversation with Till Velten

Action S. 42

Art needs the urban realm — and vice versa? By Ruth Genner

S. 45

Pamela Rosenkranz

Research and Speculation on Schwamendingen S. 50

Axes as urban spaces in the city of Zurich By Jacqueline Parish

S. 53

Hyper-sculptures & non-spaces By Marcel Meili

S. 58

No one knows how things will turn out

Beat Schläpfer in conversation with Marina Belobrovaja

1

Introduction

Art marks the development of urban centres By Gabriela Christen

The public space of our urban centres was invented in the nineteenth century and serves as a mental space that continues to shape modern thinking. Special places such as those invitingly strollable boule­vards; the first display windows that offered the nascent middle classes reflections of themselves; alleyways where artists lived and observed the town – these represented the emergence of fundamen­tal philosophical categories for understanding the present. This is where the poet Charles Baudelaire discovered the transient, the epheme­­ral that, to this day, perpetuates the glamour of both the contemporary and the impermanent. Today, the public space of our urban centres has changed. Whereas it used to be a place for thinking and for the schooling of percep­tion it has, in contemporary society, become a contested place, now primarily subordinate to commercial rather than philosophical interests. Every square metre of urban land has a price tag on it, which creates a highly competitive environment in terms of its utilisation. Innumerable laws, rules and object catalogues govern, organise and protect this urban space, which is a complex system of super­ imposed regulations. When it comes to the use of this public space, an array of urbanbased agencies divide the town between themselves, spatially and functionally. Urban public space is divided up according to an administrative logic that meets managerial rather than artistic require­ments. Artists, however, see themselves as specialists in perception who reveal new dimensions of the present. Through their creation and their manipulation of the world, they explore realms of possi­ bility beyond what exists, rather than merely recording the categories of that which already exists. In recent decades artists have turned towards the current society in the spirit of a broadened concept of art and have increasingly favoured interventions in the urban context. Earlier artists would have embellished buildings under the guise of art in architecture or some other public art programme then they would have turned their attention to parks and squares as spheres of activity. In recent decades, art has increasingly adopted the “non places” of today’s urban contexts as arenas for its privileged interven­tions: motorways, underpasses, building sites, brownfield sites. Through context-specific projects and interventions set in the urban realm, art has discovered a whole new potential for defining itself that goes beyond its traditional role as embellisher. Passive integration within the existing contexts of urban development and architecture has not satisfied the expansionist designs of art and its agents. The latter have sought to take an active role. It is true that artists in the 1990s were supported on a collaborative level by important architects such as Herzog & de Meuron and

2

Introduction

Gigon / Guyer. However, the lead in these projects was almost invariably taken by the architects. Artists were given responsibility for facades, colour design and creative interventions in the interiors of buildings. At the same time urban planners were becoming increasingly interested in art. It was becoming evident that architecture as the lead discipline was failing to deliver solutions to complex urban planning issues by not opening itself to interdisciplinary discourse. The challenges generated by integrated urban planning are too complex for a go-it-alone approach. Since the 1990s, therefore, urban centres and cultural patrons in Switzerland have been asking themselves how the practices specific to art could be brought to bear on the conceptualisation, planning and realisation of our complex urban habitats. The reciprocal interest is very much rooted in pragmatism. Towns have recognised that art in the public sphere has a marketing value for them and art for its part has realised that the vast budgets earmarked for expensive civil engineering projects – renewing roads and sewage systems, building motorways – holds latent potential for generating funding from infrastructure projects. The first major project in Switzerland involving these novel spheres of artistic activity in the public realm was the Basel-based project, Nordtangente-Kunsttangente. Here, for the first time, the question was systematically posed: How could a civil engineering project like the Nordtangente (North Tangent) – the most expensive section of Switzerland’s motorway network, which features a tunnel under the Rhine that required the wholesale uprooting of entire districts – be used for art projects? This led to questions on art projects in infra­ structure projects, on the possibility of collaboration at the level of urban planning and on art in public space. What form could project organisations take if engineers, urban planners, artists and politicians (to name just a few of the stakeholders) all worked together? These issues, still current now, were addressed by pioneering research and district development projects. One such major district development project – named ‘BaBeL’ – took place in Lucerne from 2001 to 2006. The name is inspired by the names of two major arterial routes – Baselstrasse and Bernstrasse – in the west of Lucerne. These roads, with their high volumes of traffic, their location on the edge of the town and their lack of sunlight, pass through a multi­ cultural and very lively residential district, which happens to be home to most of the Lucerne School of Art and Design. It is an area, however, that is very much under pressure with a fast-changing and relatively poor population. The upgrading of the BaBeL neighbourhood saw four schools from the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts – Art and Design, Engineering and Architec­ture, Business and Social Work – get together with the municipal authorities and local stakeholders to work on a broad-based development scenario for the neighbourhood. The project’s managers decided that a turnaround for the area would be possible only if it involved a broad range of disciplines working together over a long period of time. Alongside specific measures at an urban

3

Introduction

development and communicative level, the BaBeL project also inte­grated art (this is documented graphically on pages 23 to 26). A communications tool was created – the BaBel Street Channel – which provided a means of intercultural exchange involving displays showing news and activities that were of relevance to the resident population. The BaBel project is a highly significant pioneering undertaking demonstrating how art and urban development can work together at a cross-disciplinary level. The results can be seen not only in the realisation of the art projects, but on a variety of other levels as well. What is important is the participation of the residents. This enables them to identify with their neighbourhood and creates an endur­ing place of encounter and, in turn, facilitates the emergence of social structures in problematic areas along with networks and a new relationship of accountability between people and place. One spin-off of this successful urban development project with its artistic dimension was the creation by the Lucerne School of Art and Design of the master’s degree programme Art in Public Spheres. This, alongside numerous artistic interventions by students, has led to research projects in the fields of tourism, art and urban deve­ lopment. This was followed some time later by a major research project – Art Public Zurich (Kunst Öffentlichkeit Zürich) – initiated by the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK) in partnership with the City of Zurich. This undertaking carried out art projects in public spaces around the city, but it also defined structures that placed the interaction bet­ween municipal authorities and art on a new footing. In 2006 Zurich City Council established a Public Art Task Force (AG KiöR) that is affiliated not only to culture, but also to its civil engineering and waste disposal department. “Art goes hand-in-hand with the deve­ lopment of the city” – this important principle guides the work of the task force, which develops strategies for art in the public realm, initiates projects, organises competitions and symposia, and oversees research projects connected with its mandate. Following some setbacks – including Thomas Demand’s Nagelhaus project, which was rejected by voters – a promising working relationship between municipal authorities, artists and art mediators has emerged. Because artists are involved at an early stage in planning activities, they have a chance to influence the development of the city. A research project is currently being conducted – an initiative of the Public Art Task Force and the city of Zurich – to examine the potential for interaction between art and urban development in problematic locations such as inner-city axes. The Lucerne School of Art and Design and the Zurich University of the Arts are seeking to form an interdisciplinary team – including urban experts – with the aim of studying, over a number of years, how art could be deployed to upgrade the public realm along urban axes in Lucerne and Zurich. The idea of the research project being planned – Kunst auf Achse – is that it should produce innovative concepts involving art and the urban setting, come up with a tool for the planning departments capable of showing how art can be deployed in urban planning processes, and finally oversee the realisation of art works.

4

Introduction

This publication, urban.art.marks, marks an attempt to chart a course for new tendencies in the interaction of art and urban development. The wide-ranging territory will be presented in four sections: Ob­ servation, Research, Dialogue, and Action – all activities that make the full sense of an interdisciplinary approach to art in the public realm of urban environments plain. Each of the sections features artists, politicians, sociologists, architects, theatre professionals and urban planners who discuss their various opinions on the subject. The gallery of images on the the BaBeL project, created by artist Nika Spalinger, and the artistic observation of the town by Pamela Rosenkranz demonstrate that this diversity of perspectives does not lead to a fragmentation of the view of public space. Instead, the eschewing of disciplinary localisation and specialisation creates an opportunity for the emergence of new spaces in art itself as well as in the urban realms of our everyday reality. Prof Dr Gabriela Christen , Dean of the Lucerne School of Art and Design since March 2010, studied Art History,

Romance Studies and Philosophy. Appointed to the post of Culture Editor by Swiss German-language broadcaster DRS in 1996, she became a lecturer in the Theory specialisation at the Art and Media Department of Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK) in 1999, a post she held until 2009; latterly she was appointed Deputy Head of the Institute for the Performing Arts and Film.

5

Observing

Performative Research — exemplified by urban spaces By Gesa Ziemer

Over the past two decades within the field of re­search the talk has been increasingly of performative research. What is the definition of this concept? How can it be applied to the research of the urban situation? In what way is performative research linked to the real world – or is it to be understood as a practical activity in its own right? The adjective “performative” can be traced back to the linguistic philosopher John L. Austin and his text How to do Things with Words (1962), which saw the birth of speech act theory. On studying language, Austin discovered that there are statements “in which saying something means doing something; in which we do something by saying something.”1 He is emphasising that the “how” of a statement has a cultural effect and a social function, not just the “what”. His most famous example is marriage. The statement “I take this man to be my lawful wedded husband” completes the matrimonial contract. The point is that a person has to convincingly per­form this statement physically while being present at the right time. It is not true or false in the traditional epistemological sense. It can only succeed or fail, be effective or ineffective, turn out well or badly, convince or fail to convince. Austin called statements of this nature “performative utterances”, in contrast to constative ones that can be true or false.

This in effect quite small linguistic discovery has, since the 1980s, been usefully applied to a variety of cultural research paths. One aspect appears to be of particular interest for research; by emphasising the act of performance, Austin was placing the act and the performance centre stage. In his interpre­ tation of the wedding situation, it was not only the contents of the statement – the yes or no – that played a role, but also the doing, as demonstrated by the correct sequence of the process or ritual, the bodily presence and the earnestness of the delivery. Austin was also shifting the research interest to the sensory level of a performance, which is why the focus shifts to the forms, styles and processes of a social interaction. Is my speech act loud or quiet, hesitant or compelling? Am I adhering to or transgressing the ritualistic guidelines? From this point on the interpretation of his theory was to open the broad field of performative research, which exa­mi­ned the text not just for its truthfulness, but also examined the sensory dimension of an action. How investigations of this nature might occur has been a source of intense debate ever since. A view, which has been given strong backing by art colleges in the last two decades, is that the research itself

must take place not only textually, but also at a sen­sory level. If, ultimately, the sensory aspects were only transferred back in the form of text the performative aspects would be lost through the purely linguistic translation. The following definition could be suggested: Per­for­mative research is research involving performance. Performative research examines a range of performances and itself researches in a performative way by making transparent its own research in various formats and media. Given this definition, visual, aural, physical and tactile forms of performance are no longer integrated into the research as illustrative appendages to the text, but become an autonomous expression of the research. This found Austin indirectly postulating a much discussed – and criticised – extension of the research methodologies, which took the dictum – valid at that time – that thought in language and writing was an expression of insight, and he extended it into performative research, which renders plurimedial processes transparent instead of producing fixed, generally accepted and purely linguistic/academic knowledge.

Urban research

This performative approach is suited to urban re­search because urban centres are highly complex and dynamic entities that cannot be rationally de­fined using units of measurement, layouts, mappings, diagrams and statistics. In urban sociology, towns and cities are no longer viewed merely as objects. Since the 1970s they have been a “laboratory for the study of social practices”2, in which the creative use of the resident population is key. This finds the focus shifting to the lifestyles or ways of life in the city and away from the form the city takes as an overall entity. Uses that are more dynamic than the built environment lend themselves well to performative research methods. I am less interested in the appropriation of the city by major events such as Love Parades, music festivals or sporting events than I am by small everyday urban practices, or re-encoding as a result of cycling, walking, rollerblading, wheel-chair use, playing or gatherings. In these examples, urban structures are principally explored, used or circumvented through movement. The use to which a city is put by its residents often reveals its quality to be quite different from that suggested by the given structures. Michel de Certeau delivers a theoretical module in performative urban research focusing on movement

6

Observing

through spaces. In his book The Practice of Everyday Life (1980) he refers to numerous micro practices in spaces and attempts to describe them by distin­guish­ing between two perceptions of the rooms of a New York apartment. One functions as a map, the other as a circuit or tour. “The first type goes like this: the girls’ room is next to the kitchen. The second: you turn right and come into the living room.”3 He was primarily interested in the tours that result from movements in space. You walk, look right and left, forge paths, associate with rooms accor­di­ ng to their usability, stand still, find some paths immediately or others not at all. Activities of this nature are mobile and not static; they create different spaces to those defined through rational calculation (e.g. square metres) or predefined arrange­ments of space. Tours or circuits consist mainly of action instructions and show how to find every room.4 In addition, perceptions of tours of this nature are linked to imaginary rooms: a cramped attic that contains all kinds of things reminding one of one’s family history is different than an attic merely described as being x square meters in size. De Certeau’s proposal regarding the perception of a room created through tours provides a theoretical approach to a performative research model, in that he puts going above seeing which, in the research context, enjoys a higher status. Going is seen as a spatializing action and can be researched as a perfor­mative act. How do people perform that act in the urban context as they go about their daily lives? And what does the performance tell us about urban structures? The following artistic example shows how movement is elevated to an artistic research method and the results that emerge. Boris Sieverts: Labyrinth and Prairie — a Village Square for Ödenwaldstetten

Urban researcher Boris Sieverts conducted research in the locality of Ödenwaldstetten in the munici­ pality of Hohenstein (3750 residents) in Germany’s Swabian Alps. He called the project Labyrinth und Prärie – ein Dorfplatz für Ödenwaldstetten5 (2003). The question had arisen in the village as to why it had no central village square. Should one be built? Would it improve communications within the village and/or enhance its image? Even though this particular example relates to a village, the process involved applies equally to the urban context. The researcher was interested in studying the perception of space and communicative processes within the resident population. This can be performed in exactly the same way in individual districts or urban focal points. Boris Sieverts began his study by exploring the histo­ri­cal core of the village in detail to try and identify a village square. He created a map incorporating all the existing – if not public, not exactly, at first glance, private – open spaces such as unoccupied land, garden paths, courtyard entrances and gaps bet­ween buildings. Because the old village has witnessed centuries of inheritance and subdivision

of properties, it is a highly compact settlement cha­racterised by numerous intertwined rights of way using these spaces. As a result, the map took on the look of a labyrinthine “potential village square”. Sieverts labelled this map “Labyrinth 1”. The adjacent, more recent, parts of the village consisted of clearer plots of land, but this too featured a labyrinthine structure of through-ways and connections. These, however, came across as less malleable than the highly dynamic spatial structure of the old part of the village with its narrow passages and surprising open spaces: As the later part of the village had mainly been built and settled by younger members of the long-established families, their familiarity with each other went back generations. With the help of their children and their dogs, this familiarity led to large numbers of short-cuts being created between the plots of land. Boris Sieverts called this structural network in the later part of the village “Labyrinth 2”. Between the malleable and the structural labyrinths stood the premises of a commercial enterprise domi­ciled in the village, as well as a bus parking bay and a training ground for horse-driving trials. Sieverts called this area the “Prairie” and put it to one side of the Labyrinths. In doing so, he was not seeing the Prairie as a gap, but as a complement to the Labyrinths. The fourth and last map was called “Prairie 2” – it represented the interior and exterior of the village and visualised the relationship between the outlying farms and the heart of the village. Boris Sieverts thus created four maps that shed light on the permeability of borders within the area. Looking at his findings, he posited that the village square already existed through the way the villagers used the labyrinthine network of paths, even though no such square actually existed. His research was based on a great deal of walking, photography and questionnaires. By describing certain zones as a labyrinth, as a prairie and as “stars in the night sky” (the outlying farms), he was also working with language. His project resulted in altered perceptions of these zones. Sievert‘s maps were used by the villagers to debate the idea of a collective village square that exhibited an informal rather than representative character. Sieverts wrote: “The interpretation of private land as a ‚village square‘ should be seen as a stimulus; it does not aim to deprive anyone of their land. Quite the opposite: it is precisely the multitude of different uses, variety of individual notions of privacy, plethora of neighbourly relationships and other individual differences that invigorates this valuable village asset – this permeable zone, which has been shaped to such an extent by the process of inheritance-related partition and sub-division.”6 The dialogue with the residents took place both orally and through joint examination of Sieverts’ maps. By means of various village strolls one day using “rights of way” e.g. through private gardens,

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barns and official buildings created especially for the occasion, Boris Sieverts made the residents conscious of their valuable assets. This led to, for instance, proposals for renaming thoroughfares: names such as “First Kiss Way”, “Good Neighbour’s Path” and “Behind My Garden” emerged, as well as ideas for documenting the partial spaces based on their specific qualities. The labyrinth structure offered the possibility of establishing public, open-air places of encounter. To give one example: someone could set up a temporary bar in their garden.

1

2 Boris Sieverts – project: Labyrinth and Prairie – a Village Square for Ödenwaldstetten, 2003 ff. Plans by Boris Sieverts. 1 Labyrinth 1 – Plastisches Labyrinth (malleable labyrinth). 2 Labyrinth 2 – Strukturelles Labyrinth (structural labyrinth).

By way of interim highpoint, an evening party was organised during which all the nooks, crannies, passages, alleys and small gaps of the labyrinth were marked with candles, while the larger plots of fallow land dotted around (Boris Sieverts called them “halls”) each hosted a bonfire. The resulting reversal of the perception of space had far less to do with the contours of buildings and the layout of streets and much more to do with the meshing of the “in-between” and the intensive documentation of these spaces by specially invited artists and small-scale business ideas coming from the residents. As a result, that (very lively) evening turned the potential village square into a real one. All this piqued people’s enthusiasm for the idea of a common village square existing between all the houses – including those villagers who, until that point, felt slightly uncomfortable about overstepping the mark and entering space that, although not being used, felt private. In 2008, on their own initiative, the residents organised a second iteration of the candle party. In 2004, by way of a follow-up mandate of sorts, Boris Sieverts joined forces with the urban planners hired by the municipality to develop a village development plan informed by the main findings of his spatial survey. More research, less art

The work conducted by Boris Sieverts illustrates how the theoretical references of the performative approach propounded by John L. Austin, and the perceptive model of the tour suggested by Michel de Certeau, can find application in tangible, artistic research processes examining the urban context. In this regard it is important that the urban researcher does not see him or herself primarily as an artist leaving a work of art behind, but as a researcher initiating processes and transformations through his or her specific approaches. Projects of this nature are part of a line of development describing the treatment of art in public space. These days many art projects involving the public realm tend to be interventionist and temporary. Alongside the theme of territoriality and the addressing of current urban themes, this temporal specificity of art projects represents an important aspect. The art historian Miwon Kwon7 uses the example of three paradigm shifts to show the extent to which

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Observing

public art has changed in the last 30 years. Firstly, public art as “art in the public realm” relying on figurative or abstract figures as a way to enhance or enrich outdoor spaces (known in some circles as “drop sculptures”). Secondly, “art as public realm” is less object-related but more location-related and tries to provide better integration between archi­ tecture, art and the setting. Art of this nature is often found in urban development projects. Thirdly, “art in the public interest” focuses on social themes and participatory approaches. Kwon identifies five qualitative shifts in all of this. The projects focus on the social more than the aesthetic dimension; the art practices tend to be more than object-oriented; the installations tend to be more temporary than permanent in nature; the reception is more important than the production; lastly, the autonomy of the authorship is watered down in favour of multiple participation-oriented practices. Seen from an artistic perspective, Boris Sieverts’ pro­ject is in line with these developments – it exhibits these shifts to a greater or lesser extent. The last point in particular appears key: “The transformation of the permeable land into a labyrinthine village square is a process that involves everyone. It would be desirable if the process could become autonomous in the long term.”8 At this point it would be interesting to ask how work of this nature could be seen more explicitly as research. What exactly is research? The Research Assessment Exercise in the UK defines research as “original investigative work performed with the aim of acquiring knowledge and insights.”9 The following criteria are key: the investigation should be intentional and make an original contribution; knowledge and understanding should be expanded and a clearly formulated re­search question should be embedded in the research context. Methods must be made transparent and the research should be documented and disseminated. Although Boris Sieverts’ project did not take the form of academic research, in many ways it re­ sembles it at the interface with art. Extensions have to be formulated in relation to the methods, because Sieverts introduces walking as an artistic and academic process from which the material for his maps emerged. The core finding is that the village square already exists amongst the residents, even though they have not defined it as such. The research experts in his project were not professional academics, but the resident population of the village. Here, it is the exploration of the maps with the residents that is the performative act and gives rise to a series of social and communicative activities. In the ideal scenario, performative research not only offers abstract understanding, but also produces practical relationships or acts as a stimulus for cultural activities. Transdisciplinarity, here, means not only working between disciplines or with industry partners (such as architects, urban planners, engineers, etc.), but more importantly with the

3

4

5 Boris Sieverts – project: Labyrinth and Prairie – a Village Square for Ödenwaldstetten, 2003 ff. Photos by Boris Sieverts. 3 Walking around the village. 4 Public places of encounter. 5 Candle party.

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people on the ground. A classic urban planning approach would have been to design and build a village square. It would have involved asking where it should be located, what it would look like structurally and aesthetically, and how it would be funded. The artistic/research method shows how alternative perceptions can be gained and, in the project discussed here, identifies an informal use of existing space as a “village square”. The strengthening of social activities in the village pushed the idea of a construction as a solution into the background. Performative research, although a somewhat immaterial discipline, can easily be combined with more permanent material. Temporary projects can act as probes for permanent interventions and should above all be seen as research concepts.10 How that could happen is something that urban planners, architects and engineers have to answer. That said, the project has already posed specific questions: Could trees and hedges be planted in different ways? Where could benches be sited? What kind of paving could designate public space? These are questions that villagers and towndwellers ask themselves if they are interested in the permeable and open structure of their neighbourhood.

Gesa Ziemer is a professor of Cultural Theory and Practice at Hamburg’s

HafenCity Universität and a dean in the field of metropolitan culture. As a freelance curator she carries out projects at the interfaces between academia, art and business. She also teaches at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK).

1 John L. Austin. Zur Theorie der Sprechakte (How to do things with

Words). Stuttgart 1979. p. 35.

2 Martina Löw. Soziologie der Städte. Frankfurt/Main 2008. p. 24. 3 Michel de Certeau. Praktiken im Raum. In: Jörg Dünne und Stephan

Günzel (ed.) Raumtheorie. Grundlagentexte aus Philosophie und Kulturwissenschaften. Frankfurt/Main 2006, pp. 343–353, here p. 347. English text also drew on the English version of the book at Google Books. 4 ibid., p. 347. 5 Refer to: www.neueraeume.de/projekte/Labyrinth_und_Praerie.pdf 6 ibid. 7 Kwon, Miwon: Public Art und städtische Identitäten. Hamburg 1997, p. 1, at: http://eipcp.net/transversal/0102/kwon/de 8 Refer to: www.neueraeume.de/projekte/Labyrinth_und_Praerie.pdf 9 Henk Borgdorff. “Die Debatte über Forschung und Kunst”. In: Künstlerische Forschung. Positionen und Perpektiven. subTexte 03. Zurich 2009. pp. 23–51, here p. 33. 10 Refer to: Carmine, Giovanni et al.: “Art Taking Place. A Debate.” In: Beyes, Timon/Deuflhard, Amelie/Krempl, Sophie-Thèrèse: Parcitypate: Art and Urban Space. Zurich 2009, p. 96.

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Telescope in an urban setting — a portable festival and spectators on wheels

By Stefan Kaegi on to the forwarding hall of a furnishings company. Should art – theatre in particular – respond to the There a worker surrounded by boxes delivered specificities of a setting, or is it more rewarding for from Indonesia and being stored there temporarily it to concentrate on the urban setting in some ex­plained to the audience how the goods were way or other, where the focus is not on local unique being transshipped – low-cost bedside tables bearing characteristics or location factors? Is it possible to ran­dom American names and destined for the elaborate the phenomena of the urban setting in French market. The theatre truck also stopped at the such a general yet precise fashion that their ubiquity customs facility of the border crossing, where trucks becomes apparent? Art professionals presumably queue every morning in a line sometimes up to find projects that can be realised in any urban setting twelve kilometres long. The evening we were there, more rewarding and interesting for their work than we saw the drivers from Turkey and Eastern Europe those that are specific to a certain place. sleeping in their cabs or making tea surrounded by wheels. In a strange kind of way, the drivers parked I would like to start by discussing a project that there became a kind of backdrop to the action on moved about on wheels: “Cargo Sofia” was created the stage. Reality and fiction entered into a direct in Bulgaria. I started off wanting to turn the life dialogue. stories of Bulgarian truck drivers into a stage play. I soon realised that their stories involving motorway Cargo Sofia has now performed in more than twenty service areas and warehouses were better told in European towns and cities and, in an Asian variaa truck than on a stage. We converted an old truck tion by Jörg Karrenbauer, in Tokyo, Singapore and into a mobile auditorium by replacing the leftShanghai. Each performance requires two weeks of hand side-wall of the cargo area with a large sheet preparations, which include identifying the routes of glazing and incorporated fifty seats arranged side­the play can take through the city. The dramatic ways to allow the audience to sit where the goods action is primarily determined by the route taken. used to be carried and enjoy “goods-eye” views Google Maps works best for this, because we can of the urban environment. For the premiere in Basel, spot trucks and see where they drive and congregate. the audience clambered aboard this truck parked The interesting thing is that almost everything that behind the theatre and listened to the two Bulgarians the drivers tell us about their lives can be applied talking. Slavtscho spent his life transporting Turkto any town. These special places with their standish fish to Spain, trucking flat-screen displays from ardised container formats, loading ramps and height there to Sweden and so forth. His colleague, Vento, dimensions are perforce all virtually identical. carried a host of melons, mainly from Bulgaria to Germany. Both had a lot to say. As Bulgarian truck One major theme confronting the people that we en­ drivers, they were on Bulgarian pay rates even countered on the road was the opening of the Euro­though the employer was a German haulage compean market: they all talked about it, and it affected pany. So to save money on the road, they ate out of them all. In Warsaw, for example, our truck stopped tin cans. So that was how it started. No matter at a wholesale fruit and vegetable market and our where we showed the play, it always began with the spectators watched as Polish farmers sat in their projection of film images of Bulgaria onto the cargo cars stuffed full of tomatoes waiting for someone to area, departure point of the play’s fictional jour­buy them, while Dutch and Belgian 40-tonners ney, while Slavtscho and Vento could be observed via a live camera link in the driver’s cabin shouting drove past them laden with standardised tomatoes. at cyclists or regaling the audience with stories about Unplanned incidents like this were clear for all the Serbian motorway police. Then, when the to see, as if our mobile auditorium were a kind of screen was stowed out of the way, the real city gra­du­telescope pointing at the town. ally came into view – such as at the Swiss premiere in Basel. Throughout all of this, the audience The next project is in association with the Argentine could hear the two Bulgarian truck drivers telling author and director Lola Arias. It stems from the about their life on the road. In a very special way, desire not to intervene as an artist, for once, but to this allowed the audience to share their reality consider, at a more basic level, what a festival or, to put it another way, the audience was treated in an urban setting could be like – and to curate it to a parti­cular view of the public realm. ourselves. As research and documentary-oriented theatre professionals, we have both been on the The converted truck took the spectators out of the road for a number of years and keep receiving invita­city to places that the average citizen knows little tions to produce location-specific pieces. Producers about, but which are very familiar to the truck-­ in the various towns take us to visit minority groups driving fraternity. For the Basel performance, we or a special church or particular phenomena, such first drove to the container docks and then, to the as how a bridge is situated next to a given building sound of Balkan music courtesy of our on-board DJ, and so forth. It would certainly be possible to do

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something with the material presented, and the premiere would, of course, then take place at that specific site. They do not care about the “trans­fer­ability” of the intervention to other places or audiences. In terms of our artistic process, we found these kinds of stop-start productions difficult, in­volving as they did hectic bursts of work that gradu­ally sapped our strength; perhaps they also over­ estimated the local limitations of social problems. As curators we found ourselves reflecting on whether we should perhaps try to conceive of a festival that did not try to see each town as a unique venue, but also that did not fly its guesting artists in, that did not put on artists whose interaction with the local context was zero and that did not spend all its money on flights for entire ensembles and scenery transport. And so we developed the “Cidades Paralelas” (parallel cities) project. We invited inter­esting directors and artists to develop concepts for the kind of situation you find in every urban setting around the world: a supermarket, a church, an underpass, a park, a street, a tall tower ... People could simply say to us: “We need the roof of a block of flats, and up there we want a male voice choir and three guinea pigs; that would enable us to develop the play there in two weeks.” We asked the applicants to define a space capable of accommo­dat­ing an audience and to submit a list of their tech­ni­cal requirements. We knew from the outset which would be the host cities for the project: Berlin, Buenos Aires and Zurich; Warsaw came later. These cities had nothing much to do with each other. From the submissions we picked eight projects destined to be presented within the space of eight days last September in Berlin and November in Buenos Aires. Warsaw and Zurich are yet to host the project. The artists arrive with nothing but their concepts and work for two to four weeks with local people, until such a time as the global concept has absorbed enough of the local context. Dominic Huber’s piece, for instance, is presented in residential blocks whose residents are watched and listened to by the audience on the other side of the street. In Berlin-Kreuzberg, this was a building full of Muslims from an array of countries, in Buenos Aires a building housing a Thai bandoneon player, a Peruvian geriatric nurse, a very Argentine psychoanalyst, a bodyguard from the twilight world of the casinos and the concierge’s entire family packed into a tiny space. Gerardo Naumann’s workers lead spectators on a subjective journey along a production line in their factory. In Berlin it was a meticulously run Mercedes car factory; in Argentina, the rather sloppily managed Suiza (“Switzerland”!) floor polish factory; in Zurich, it will probably be the Zweifel crisps factory. Christian Garcia attempts to turn amateur singers into a renaissance choir in the pillared hall of a court house – a place laden with the burden of fate.

1–4 Rimini Protokoll, Cargo Sofia-X – a European heavy goods vehicle journey, 2006 ff. 1–4  Cargo Sofia, pictures of scenes in Basel, Ljubliana, Riga, Paris, 2006 ff. http://www.rimini-protokoll.de/website/de/project_108. html

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9–12 Lola Arias and Stefan Kaegi, Ciudades Paralelas, a co-production of HAU Berlin and Schauspielhaus Zürich, 2010 ff. 5-8  Building, roof. Berlin, September 2010. 9–12  Building, roof. Buenos Aires, November/ December 2010. Press images of Ciudades Paralelas, 2010. http://www.ciudadesparalelas.com/fotosprensaale.html

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In Buenos Aires it was the federal court, and with the politically charged subject matter of some of his lyrics he courted controversy even before the premiere. Other projects took place in a library, a shopping mall, a railway station and on a roof. The projects make theatre out of public spaces, which are used every day, seducing the viewers into staying long enough for their perception to change. We quite often encounter local biographies, such as the cleaning service of IBIS Hotels in Lola Arias’s installation, which exhibits the biographies of its workers in the identical hotel rooms around the world. The projects act as observation posts for urban situa­tions. Some use wireless communications or head­phones, others use employees at the workplace or an entire choir ... The Ciudades Paralelas wanders from country to country as a mobile research laboratory, building up an archive of guerilla tactics for appropriating the city. Right now I am excited about how the June series will go in Zurich, where our partner is the Schauspielhaus – an institution that cannot normally venture out into urban spaces because it has its own stages to keep busy. In June we will see whether the Schauspielhaus’s audience will follow it, as it steps bravely out and, for once, directs the picture frame stage at the city.

Stefan Kaegi works in theatre and is a founding member of the

Rimini Protokoll theatre label. The above text is based on a statement submitted during the Public Art Task Force workshop titled “The urban development axis and art in the public realm dated 30 October 2009”. www.ciudadesparalelas.com and www.rimini-protokoll.de

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“Fuck Olympia” or the permanent surprise — on the avant-garde’s critique of urbanism

By Juri Steiner The hope of modernism lay in architecture: that was first – made their way from the canvas, via action, where its utopia was intended to crystallise, far to criticism and a redefinition of urbanism. The more than in literature or the visual arts. After the Lettrists’ attacks were focused on language as a tool Second World War, modernist urban planners of political and social manipulation and forcible had a chance to realise their functional concepts for coordination, whereas when a third dimension was the first time in the large-scale reconstruction of opened up to criticism this enabled there to be direct bombed-out cities. As an incarnation of the morally access to concrete reality. After all, in architecture engaged blueprint of modernists, Le Corbusier’s issues of aesthetic design directly overlap with Modulor became an international standard for the reality of life. What would later be reducible to human-oriented construction. Its theoretical basis the common denominator of the situationist critique already established back in the 1920s, “Neues of urbanism is by and large the amalgam of three Bauen”, rose from the bomb sites. Under the someindividual approaches: spontaneous, group-dynamic construction of fantasy spaces (Jorn), the search what outdated motto “Light, Air, Sun”, new towns were designed and built, their housing units for architectural solutions for non-sedentary people (Constant) and the urbanist design against intended to ensure the frictionless intermeshing boredom (Chtcheglov). of the modern individual and modern society. The problem arose that neither society nor most of the In Asger Jorn’s critique, the habitat embedded in architects met the modernist requirements. Society areas earmarked as green was unmasked as a mani­had not emerged from the Second World War festation of life cast in concrete and bound to the socially reformed. It was not the lofty aims of social prescribed paths of the bureaucratic mindset. Jorn utopias that defined the urbanism of the post-war was decidedly opposed to the Puritanical rigour of years, but the urgent need to ease the acute shortage classical Modernism and to what he called its of housing. The bomb sites were not cartes blanches “moral rationalism”. His unconditional dedication for the design of a new coexistence: instead, in to spontaneity and irregularity as substitutes for the pragmatic atmosphere of the economic upturn, order brought him into conflict in 1954 with the they were found to be profitable niches to be filled in the market. In addition, the flood of architec­Zurich Constructivist Max Bill. Commissioned to ture led to a dilution of the conceptual quality that set up a school of design in Ulm, Max Bill turned to had distinguished the pioneering architects’ the Danish artist. Jorn was initially enthusiastic main designs, particularly amongst the disciples about the project and of being involved in creating and followers of the International Style.1 a “new Bauhaus” but Bill’s subjugation of creativity to technology and functionality soon chafed him. The failure of Modernism was typified by the Pruitt He refused to be party to the standardisation and 2 Igoe housing complex , where utopia turned into its automation of society under the primacy of functio­ polar opposite. Instead of the healthy lifestyles of nality and order. What he envisioned was akin to happy people, the housing units erected there soon a Bauhaus, which joined artists in a collective, still in became repositories of criminality and dilapidation. keeping with COBRA.5 In his “Appeal for Form” The concrete-built results of Modernist urbanism in 1958, Jorn wrote 6 that the old Bauhaus may have proved to be social trouble spots in Europe as well. incorporated the artistic results of Der Blaue Reiter Alienation and uniformity began to define life in and de Stijl but it did so “by exploiting them and the cities. The functional division of the human offering the artists nothing in exchange”.7 In Piemont, Jorn joined Pinot Gallizio, an independent left-wing habitat into individually separated segments such city councillor from Alba, to set up a workshop as sleeping silos, shopping centres, recreational laboratory as a prototype for MIBI (International parks and leisure sectors, and into residential, Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus).8 This laboraservice and industrial districts, came to characterise tory was intended to be libertarian, to be run daily existence, a change denounced in the slogan: without teachers and pupils only with cooperating metro-boulot-dodo (subway-work-sleep). “Due to individuals, to unite artists of various genres and be the need for the rapid construction of entire towns, we are erecting reinforced concrete cemeteries in devoted to an anti-productive aesthetic. which large sections of the population are destined Constant’s theory revolved around restless nomads. to bore themselves to death.”3 His “Design for a Gypsy Camp” (1956) is an initial At the heart of situational societal analysis is the attempt to bring dynamic lifestyles into harmony exploration of Modernist architecture and of with urban concepts. “In Alba [...] Constant lived in new urbanism. In 1953 Ivan Chtcheglov published 1956 for a while with Pinot Gallizio. Gallizio liked his manifesto “Formulary for a New Urbanism”4, spending time with the gypsies who passed through and from 1954 visual artists such as Asger Jorn and Alba every year [...] They had been pushed off Constant joined the Lettrists, who – together at into a barren patch of land, where they [...] set up

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their provisional settlement. Constant designed a small model for this spot. The architectural sketch is based on light-weight transportable structural elements found in circus tents.”9 As mentioned above, Chtcheglov had already presented a “New Urbanism” in 1953 under the pen name of Gilles Ivain. Its purpose was “to modulate reality ... and invent new movable backdrops”. His vision of permanent surprise in the ideal urban setting showed he was still a follower of Baudelaire’s flâneur and the Surrealist concept of the miraculous. He contrasted real existing urbanism with the intoxicating confusion in his “intellectual capital city of the world”: “There will be spaces that let you dream better than drugs and buildings where you can do nothing but love.”10 He derived the need for a New Urbanism from the “mental illness” that had befallen the world: “Banality rules [...] Youth in all countries had a choice of love and the automatic garbage disposal and they picked the garbage disposal.”11 After the World Congress of Free Artists in Alba in 1956 laid the groundwork for founding the Situa­tionist International, the approaches described com­bined to create a critique of urbanism most succinctly expressed in connection with Debord’s analysis of society in the magazine of the S.I.: “Newly built neighbourhoods have only two themes, which govern everything: car traffic and house­hold comfort. They are the pathetic ex­pressions of bourgeois happiness and have no interest in playing.”12 Being part of the spectacle and a space dictated by the logic of authority, the city thus enabled its inhabitants to be conditioned into weak-willed extras for urban functionality. The existing city plans of metropolises were documents of human beings being controlled from without. Modern architecture was interpreted as meaning domi­ nation of space through power, an approach that forced a certain structure on the individual’s everyday life and rendered personal development impossible: “The development of the urban setting is akin to capitalist dressage of urban space. It stands for the selection of a certain materialisation of the possible and excludes others.”13 Thus, this space was already occupied and tamed by the enemy, everyday life was colonized. It was not the modern theories which first formed the theoretical lie of urbanism the Situationists wished to revise but rather the large boulevards of Haussmann before that. “In reality, one lives not in a neighbourhood but rather in power. One lives somewhere in the hierarchy. At the top of this hierarchy, the relative order can be measured by traffic intensity.”14

Analogue to its treatment of time, bourgeois capi­tal­ism for Debord was distinguished by space that had been rendered homogeneous and banal. Just as this situation levelled out geographic distances in modern traffic it also reintroduced barriers in urban space. For the Situationists, urbanism was one of the most effective resources of late capitalist authority. The street died as a place to live and meet as a result of the atomisation and isolation of inhabitants in residential and work ghettos, as a result of the “dictatorship of the automobile, the hegemony of the motorway”. The critique of the status-quo was followed by an analysis of revolutionary action from an urban planning perspective: “The proletarian revolution is the critique of human geography, through which individuals and communities must construct landscapes and events corresponding to the appropriation of no longer just their labour but their entire history. In this moving space for play and of freely selected variations of rules of play, the autonomy of the place can be found again without introducing a newly excluding connection to the ground, thus bringing back the reality of the journey and life understood as a journey, a journey which has inherent meaning in and of itself.”15 No man’s land and terrain vague

Terrain vague is a concept at the start of Constant’s social-utopian “New Babylon” architecture. It is, as T.J. Clark so impressively said, a preferred subject already at the onset of painting of modern life.16 Was the 19th century capital actually “advanced with the sharpened axe of reason and without looking right or left so as not to fall victim to the horror beckoning from the depths of the jungle” (Walter Benjamin)17? Or was the advance not more akin to an expedition into a swamp of fantasies with correspondingly feverish results? The Impressionists packed terrain vague, the sad, grey and desolate zone of les banlieues, on canvas and themselves settled around the high-tech archi­tecture of the Gare Saint Lazare between the churches Notre Dame de Lorette, Saint Augustin and northward toward the Boulevards des Bati­gnolles and des Clichy. On 19 July 1834, the banker’s son Hilaire Germain Edgar De Gas first saw the light of day in this artist neighbourhood known as La Nouvelle Athènes. It was home to artists as well as bankers and had ambiguities that were even more piquant. Here, one could not only admire steam power and the art of engineering along the railway but this corner of the city was also infamous for its prostitutes. They were known as Lorettes because they plied their trade in the shadows of the church Notre Dame de Lorette. Géricault, Chopin, George Sand or Delacroix all appreciated the spicier side of Nouvelles Athènes in their days: In 1844 Delacroix wrote the following in a letter to George Sand: “This new quarter is designed to entrance a young man as passionate as I. The first thing to draw my virtuous attention on arrival was a magnificent specimen of ‘lorette’ (prostitute), clothed entirely in satin and black velvet: descending from a carriage, with all

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the insouciance of a goddess she let me see her leg all the way to her navel.”18 Edouard Manet painted the molusk-like nakedness of Olympia into the part-iron, part-flesh reality of this train station neighbourhood. The salon was shocked: “The least beautiful of all women has bones, muscles, skin, shape and some kind of colour whereas Olympia possesses nothing of all that, she is neither genuine nor lively nor beautiful.” One thing had to be clear even to Emile Zola, erstwhile defender of the odalisque with her lascivious gaze: This amorphous Olympia was a pseudonym, a metaphor for the great whore Babylon – for the new Paris, the first ruins of modern Paris. In his own version of Olympia19 in 1957, Cy Twombly, the American with the Eurocult in his holster, scrawled two words over the chrome-white surface of the canvas, like a grammar-school boy effusing his sexual drive on a WC wall: “Fuck Olympia.” Twombly called a spade a spade without having to resort to any kind of form!

Juri Steiner wrote his doctoral dissertation on Paris as the New Babylon

and its rise and fall between 1870 and 1968: “New Babylon. Auf­stieg und Fall der Stadt Paris zwischen 1870 und 1968”. He was director of Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern from 2007 to 2010 and carried out various art projects that explored the creation of public and publicness.

1 In the spring of 1961 a symposium with the following title was held at

2 3 4 5

Olympia was the untouchable venereal terror; her surrender, a cruel fiction. With his amorphous painting, Manet pushed society to their very limits of acceptance. Even the most progressive minds were struck speech­less by the anatomical transgressions, the “informal” nature of the figure. With Olympia, Manet had delved deeply into those “Mystères de Paris” which the writer Eugène Sue had invited his esteemed readership to explore in the preface of his scandalous report of the same name published in 1842: “Witness grim scenes (...) in terrible, unknown places; hideous, frightening characters swarm in these impure sewers like reptiles in a marsh...”20 When reading the report by Sue, the contemporary reader had the impression he was finding out the hidden truth about the world he inhabited, the truth also about the dangerous classes of labourers, the demimonde and the artists who were up to con­spi­ratorial no-good in the midst of the cité.

6 7

8

9 10 11 12 13

14 15 16 17 18

19 20

the Metropolitan Museum in New York: “Modern Architecture, Death or Metamorphosis?”. One dared even from the official side to con­sider discarding modern architecture like obsolete fashion in an old clothing drive, albeit the title was formulated diplomatically and hypothetically in question form. Sigfried Giedion, class representative of CIAM (Congrès International de l’Architecture Moderne) founded in 1923 in La Sarraz (VD), ranted angrily about the shameless and undisguised departure from the right angles of the International Style. Then he inveighed against the results of that architecture – later known by the term Postmodern – likening it to designs by modistes: “Playboy architecture. Architecture is treated the way a playboy treats life – quickly wearying of everything and rushing from one sensation to the next. [...] It merely flirts with the past, playfully taking a few details here and there – pointed arches, Renaissance porticos, domed roofs – , spices them with a little surrealism to achieve a ‘poetic’ form of expression.” Robert Venturi, Learning from Las Vegas, Cambridge 1972. Asger Jorn in: L’Internationale Situationniste, in: Der Beginn einer Epoche, p. 84. Reprinted in: Internationale Situationniste, No. 1, 1958, in: Der Beginn einer Epoche, p. 87. The dispute between Jorn and Bill is recorded in the form of a brief correspondence between the two, which is intended to be presented here in abbreviated form: “Bauhaus is the name of an artistic inspiration.” (Asger Jorn in a letter dated 16 January 1954 to the architect Max Bill, director of Neues Bauhaus in Ulm) “Bauhaus is not the name of an artistic inspiration but rather the designation of a movement representing a doctrine which is indeed defined.” (Max Bill in a letter to Asger Jorn dated 23 January 1954) “If Bauhaus is not the name of an artistic inspiration, then it is the designation of a doctrine without inspiration, that is, of dead inspiration.” (Asger Jorn in a letter to Max Bill dated 12 February 1954) (The letters are translations of the texts quoted in: Roberto Ohrt, Phantom Avantgarde, p. 140). Asger Jorn: Pour la Forme, Paris 1958. Asger Jorn, “Plädoyer für die Form”, in: Nilpferd des höllischen Urwalds. Situationisten. Gruppe Spur, Kommune I, WerkbundArchiv Berlin (editors), Giessen 1991, p. 56. The neologism “Bauhaus imaginiste” was originally meant to disparage Max Bill, whom Jorn called “imaginiste” (in the sense of “conceited” or “puffed up”) in a letter. Roberto Ohrt, Phantom Avantgarde, p. 118. Ivan Chtcheglov (Gilles Ivain) in: L’Internationale Situationniste, No. 1, in: Der Beginn einer Epoche, p. 55. Ivan Chtcheglov (Gilles Ivain) in L’Internationale Situationniste, No. 1, in: Der Beginn einer Epoche, p. 54. Constant: in L’Internationale Situationniste, No. 3, in Der Beginn einer Epoche, p. 80. Attila Kotany, Raoul Vaneigem, ‚Elementarprogramm für einen unitären Urbanismus‘ in: L‘Internationale Situationniste, No. 6, translation of the texts that appeared in: Roberto Ohrt, Der Beginn einer Epoche, p. 96. ibid., p. 96. Guy Debord, Die Gesellschaft des Spektakels, p. 96. Timothy J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life. Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers, Princeton, 1984. Walter Benjamin, Das Passagen-Werk, 1. & 2. Band, Frankfurt a. M., 1982, cover. Eugène Delacroix in a letter to George Sand, 1844, translation of the texts that appeared in: Bernard Marchand, Paris, histoire d’une ville. XIXe–XXe siècle, p. 44. Picture in “L’informe”, p. 149. Eugène Sue in preface to “Les Mystères de Paris”, quoted as it appeared in: Bararosso, Jean-Marc. Le feuilleton du socialisme, in: Le Monde. Dossiers & documents littéraires. No. 23, April 1999. p. 3.

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Insight and intensification — musings about artistic research By Christoph Schenker

“Art creates its own set of requirements.” 1 Peter Fischli

In this article, I will outline in basic terms an aspect which is rarely touched upon in the current discussion about artistic research, but one which I think is relevant and significant to artistic work in practice. The following considerations were inspired in part by Michael Hampe’s initial lecture in 2004 at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETHZ). In it he discussed philosophy “as a specific way of being active, as the practice of conceptual and argumentative experimentation.”2 Harun Farocki and Lawrence Weiner each created an artwork for a public space in Zurich in 2007.3 Harun Farocki shot the video film “Transmission” (“Übertragung”) showing people attempting to comprehend the incomprehensible with touching gestures. In their ritual touching of monuments and memorials, sculptures and objects, they try to take spiritual part in the past, in fate and suffering, in ideas and happiness. In BALL BEARINGS OR ROUND STONES / MADE TO ROLL / OUTSIDE OF WHAT THERE IS by Lawrence Weiner the artist also points beyond the limits set by our thoughts and actions in the material present. Unlike film, which, as Lawrence Weiner said, “deals with the relationships people have with people,” art is “the explo­ ration of the relationships people have with objects and objects have with objects with respect to people.”4 The execution of the work consists of imagining a situation differently, grasping it con­ceptually in a fresh way and re-crafting it within that context. The works of both artists can serve as instruments for investigating new connections in thought and behaviour in the actual environment and in the way they apply to our own existence. As part of the experimental system, we play a crucial part in determining the consequences with which these mental experiments are conducted and implemented in life. Artistic work consists of introducing other types of differentiation into areas of perception, emotion or intellect. It consists of experimenting with the new types and forms of differentiation and thereby creating new aesthetic, emotional or intellectual constellations and reflecting on their consequences. Work of this nature is what I understand artistic research to be. What I refer to here as artistic work

is of course a version of art, just as exploratory experimentation is a version of what one can under­stand artistic research to be. Art can also be understood not as an object of research, such as art history, but rather as a medium or itself as a research discipline. This approach does not seem so unusual if one keeps in mind the results of art and its development. Nonetheless, when one considers the aspect of research, one seldom considers its specific achievements. Generally, research is a term only used in comments on contemporary art if activities are involved that test the use of new techniques or that cultivate some kind of connection to science and when that activity is linked with some kind of theory – usually in a non-specific sense – or that are, quite pragmatically, part of a multidisciplinary project of application-oriented research. Art then often functions as a means of serving other disciplines and in most cases assumes the role of illustrating or conveying epistemic findings to which it did not originally contribute or to supplement these findings as a sensual equivalent of reason-based insights. What then are the distinguishing features of artistic research? Can one speak of a tradition of artistic problems? One has the tendency to look for singula­ rities when researching art. One asks oneself how artistic research differs from scientific research and philosophical work but also how it is comparable or similar to those two endeavours. In terms of the pragmatism of research the two systems, art and science, are not fundamentally different.5 Also in both areas it is often difficult to distinguish which aspects absolutely belong to the internal condi­tions and rules of the research process and which ones to the external business of research. One can ask whether artistic research has special kinds of methods at its disposal or whether it employs a specific set of instruments, whether it has a typical object of research and finally whether it produces knowledge that is characteristic of art. All artists probably prefer certain procedures in their investigations. Yet artists basically do not have a set number of standardised, collectively acceptable and generally practised methods comparable in function and status to the methods of the scientific system – artists and philosophers are similar in this

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respect. Nor is there a certain methodology exclusively suitable to art. The experiment is often cited as a characteristic feature of artistic research yet it is also a standard process for experiencing and for gaining knowledge in the natural sciences and technical sciences. In its experimental character, artistic work also ultimately resembles exploration of conceptual parts of the imagination found in literature and philosophy. In contemporary art, we are familiar with the prac­tice that defines an individual work of art not as a reflection of experience or a depiction of knowledge but rather as an instrument for executing experience and insight. Attention is paid less to the result: to the work as object or its presentation, than to the process of its creation: to the “work” as tool and to participation. This attitude – it is likewise the initial condition of an experimental set-up – does not have an underlying method but it does have an underlying tactic. It is the central to the procedure of an art that it does not consider itself part of an explanatory project such as science and theory but rather it aligns itself with non-explanatory projects such as philosophy, literature and music. For Art experiments are not a means of illustration or proof but a means of exploration. If it is not a special method, does artistic research have a specific set of instruments at its disposal that make it singularly unique? This set of instruments can include the totality of all resources, the appa­r­ atuses and the things, the supplies and the material used for experimentation – as tools but also processed as objects. In art as in science, it is this ma­terial culture of research, this empirical structure of the experiment, which opens the way to new things.6 Of course even today the arts that involve traditional media use sets of instruments that form the specific set of instruments for research exclusively in the field of art. However, for about the last 100 years contemporary art has increasingly used means that are drawn from other contexts in life including those from the set of research instruments used in science. Furthermore, one can consider whether artistic re­search can be defined by specific objects or categories of objects. I know of no one who expressed this point as clearly as Robert Musil. In his “Sketch of a Poet’s Knowledge” he wrote of the “certain attitude toward and experience of knowledge” of the poet (the artist) that relate to “the corresponding object world”.7 This world is in contrast to the object world of the natural sciences, which can be systema­ tised and measured, the “non-ratioïd” realm of “imponderable” facts, “the realm of values and judgements, of ethical and aesthetic relationships, the realm of the idea.” In secondary literature on Musil, one therefore talks of poetry as a “laboratory of feelings” and of “ethical experiments”.8 In ap­proach­ing the “other state”, as Musil writes else­­where,9 the artist uses the same type and capability of cognition that the scientist does, namely reason.

There is a reason this area can be called a core aspect of the arts if not one exclusively reserved for the arts. And yet there is hardly a subject area the arts do not deal with – and this has always been the case. Art cannot be understood as to be a discipline devoted to a certain subject area. Art is not just self-referencing nor does it draw exclusively on itself. Its scope of activity is outside and inside its own realm. As researcher the artist weighs which skills of differentiation are relevant not just to the context of art but also beyond that to other contexts of knowledge and life. He is called on to possess knowledge also about matters known outside the art realm. He operates with precise knowledge about special areas, not just in art but depending on his interests, also in science, techno­ logy, politics, ethics, economics, philosophy and about ways of life. Does artistic research ultimately produce a specific knowledge? It appears problematic to me to use terms like knowledge and knowledge production, which are so usual in the context of the sciences, and apply them to art without making a distinction. For John Dewey, the aspect of research performance related to actual practice played a central role.10 Dewey distinguished research aimed at obtaining scientific knowledge from common sense research that occurs to solve a problem in situations in­ volving use and enjoyment. With respect to practical intelligence, the latter deals with the ordinary affairs of life in the broadest sense, with life in a setting in which people are directly involved. In a comparable way, Jean-François Lyotard juxtaposed scientific knowledge with “knowledge as educa­tion and culture.”11 Knowledge is not identical with science and cannot be reduced to perception. “Knowledge as education” is knowledge characterised by a dense network of different types of competencies. These competencies mean thinking, doing and acting geared not just to the criterion of truth but also to the criteria of justice and happiness, correctness (beauty or interestingness) and efficiency. These ways of knowing, these competencies, are “not […] bound to a book” as Lyotard said in an interview.12 I think, research in art is situated in this network of various competencies. Art can be understood as a type and generator of “dense knowledge” pieced together13. With that trait, also it simulta­ neously engages us with the different competencies we possess – it grabs us as whole human beings. So it is neither methods nor specific sets of instruments that distinguish artistic research as a special kind of research. Nor does it restrict itself to a certain subject area. This form of dense, “narrative knowledge”14 may ultimately be characteristic of the arts but not just for them alone. The same mixture and network of competencies is also embodied in myths, legends and fairy-tales and in their contemporary transformations and substitutes. Even film can be seen as the industrial folk art of our time.

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At the start of this essay, I postulated that artistic work consists of making new differentiations in certain fields and experimenting with them. A painter introduces new nuances in painting; a musician, a new timbre. In doing so, they explore visual and auditory constellations not yet perceived. A film-maker or a poet works out new emotional distinctions, puts them into concrete form and tests them in previously inconceivable plots. A poet or a philosopher invents a new concept, thereby triggering the collapse of an entire system of convictions. An artist omits certain differentiation criteria, which are concerned with defining whether work is deemed to be art or not. In doing so he establishes new criteria for determining what constitutes an artwork and what defines art. Artistic work entails creating and exploring a differ­ent and new differentiation of behaviour. Prag­ matism understands customary differentiations as concepts.15 Wherever we encounter distinctions, we have a certain concept explaining what distinguishes us from each other. This power to different­ iate is not necessarily linked to language; the concept does not have to be cloaked in the language of words. The decisive factor is that it is anchored in perception and action and because this has consequences it should have significance. In other words, one can say that artistic work consists of generating new concepts and experimenting with them. In conceptual experimentation, new and different types of constellations are established and explored. A new form or act of differentiation is tested out in relation to conventional conceptual contexts: the artist plays through the new “structures of order”, “tests” them and assesses their consequences. In the process, artistic work explores which changes occur in the narrower scope of the conceptual system and the art system when old customary differentiations are abandoned or a new form or act of diffe­ren­tiation is established. It also goes beyond that to assess the consequences these changes could have for our system of convictions and our lives. This type of artistic experimentation is exploratory in the actual sense. Exploratory experimentation differs from experimentation guided by theory or speculation in that its purpose is not to justify or verify theories but rather to create or invent a new field.16 Theory-guided experimentation is argumentative experimentation, virtually a continuation of theorising by other means, whereas non-theorydriven experimentation opens up and explores heretofore inconceivable and unimaginable con­ stellations and their effects. Of course, exploratory endeavours are not without concepts either, but rather are guided by considerations and by a knowledge goal. They too have typical rules of action when they work out their initial orientation or expand a structure of order and assess the con­ sequences of it.

1

2 1 Harun Farocki, “Übertragung” (“Transmission”), 2007, video film, colour, sound, 43 minutes, Zurich: Limmatplatz. Funded by Schwyzer-Winiker Stiftung. Photography: Stefan Altenburger. 2 Lawrence Weiner, BALL BEARINGS OR ROUND STONES, 2007, three-part work. Zurich: Bellevueplatz, Helvetiaplatz, and Limmatplatz. Privately owned. Photography: Stefan Altenburger.

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It is not this exploratory character of experimen­­ta­tion that distinguishes artistic work from scientific research, however. The natural sciences recognize confirmatory experimentation alongside exploratory experimentation. The trait that distinguishes artistic work is its experimentation with concepts, whether these are sensual or intellectual in nature. This specific type of activity, which art shares with philo­sophy and literature, seems to me to be pivotal for differentiating artistic work from research in scientific disciplines. Is this specific type of activity also research? And does it generate new competencies or new insights? There may be criteria that would preclude categorising exploratory behaviour in art, philosophy and literature as research in the usual, namely scien­tific, sense. Yet the history of science has also cast doubt on such criteria itself in relation to the sciences, as for instance in the criterion of progress, the continuity of problems and in the idea of problem-solving strategies. In connection with art, I think the concept of re­search in its everyday meaning is fruitful: as exploration of a new field, as working out a new perspective and as an effort fuelled by the desire to understand something. And beyond epistemic competency, knowledge comprises “good performances” also in the realms of ethics, aesthetics, economics or, as Lyotard wrote: It also comprises the ability to make, to live, to say, to hear, etc.17 In the confrontation of the video film “Transmission” with the specific context of the public in Zurich, which is shaped by reformed capitalism, Harun Farocki abandoned a form of differentiation that dis­tinguished between religious, spiritually charged rituals on the one hand (film) and everyday consu­ merist rituals on the other hand (urban context). The significant fetishism in this respect is equally visible in religious, political and economic behaviours – one need think only of the fetish with goods and money in a global city such as Zurich. Using stan­d­ardised physical gestures and their variations, the film also abandons customary differentiations itself within religious conviction, cultural behaviour and ethnic origin. In the implicit, exploratory dis­cussion of ritual and anti-ritual, the film allows us to gain new insights into our own differentiation behaviour and life and into that of “others”. Lawrence Weiner introduced a new concept into con­temporary art with his artistic work, the concept of use. The significance of a work is its use exclusively and radically in connection with individual human existence. The establishment of this concept has far-reaching consequences for the entire conceptual system of which it is part. The individual elements of the system are subject to new differentiations: work as a concept, its ontological status in the world of life and things, its manners of manifestation, its language game, its function, its effects, the relationship between author, work, user and owner, the

reference the work makes to its conditions and contexts, the relationship of production and reception and so forth. This concept of existential use, of the work being used by those who need it,18 forms the backdrop for Weiner’s three-part work BALL BEARINGS OR ROUND STONES, which is set in three languages in the asphalt on three public squares in Zurich. What use do we make of this work? Its use is as varied and diverse as attaining the effect is rare, it invents new ways in which the world lets itself live. Artistic research is research based on practical life, the exploration of life and life’s worlds and their close connections, and it is probably at least as tedious as its counterpart in the natural sciences. If I say that Lawrence Weiner’s work opens our senses and spirit for that which does not exist – does not yet exist – that sounds a bit naive and trite but it is true. A next step would be to develop this space for imagination into a space of real, material events. Artistic research here means an intensification of life.

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Christoph Schenker has been head of the Institute for Contemporary Art Research (IFCAR) at Zurich University of the Arts since 2005. There he leads transdisciplinary research projects in the field of contemporary art, in particular in the context of art and the public sphere. This text appeared for the first time in: Elke Bippus (ed.): Kunst des Forschens. Praxis eines ästhetischen Denkens. Berlin/Zurich 2009. 1 Peter Fischli in 2006 in a discussion with the author about research

and art in public spaces.

2 Michael Hampe: Denken, Dichten, Machen und Handeln. Anmer­

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kungen zum Verhältnis von Philosophie, Wissenschaft und Technik, 2004, http://www.phil.ethz.ch/people/Antrittsvorlesung_Hampe.pdf (opened on 20 September 2008). Cf Christoph Schenker; Michael Hiltbrunner (ed.): Kunst und Öffentlichkeit. Kritische Praxis der Kunst im Stadtraum Zürich, Zurich 2007, pp. 85–104 and 121–139. Refer also to the website below: http://www.stadtkunst.ch. Lawrence Weiner 1994 in a conversation with the author. Cf Gerti Fietzek; Gregor Stemmrich (ed.): Having Been Said. Writings & Interviews of Lawrence Weiner 1968–2003, Ostfildern-Ruit 2004, p. 105, 262 and many others. Refer to Christoph Schenker: “Künstlerische Forschung”, in: Hans-Peter Schwarz (ed.): Zeichen nach vorn. 125 Jahre Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst Zürich, Zurich 2003, pp. 176–181. Refer to Hans-Jörg Rheinberger: Über die Kunst, das Unbekannte zu erforschen, 2006, http://www.cogitofoundation.ch/ pdf/2006/061025DieKunst_dasUnbekannte.pdf (called up on 20 September 2008). Robert Musil: “Skizze der Erkenntnis des Dichters” [1918], in: Prosa und Stücke, Kleine Prosa, Aphorismen, Autobiographisches, Essays und Reden, Kritik, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1978, pp. 1025–1030. Sabine A. Döring: Ästhetische Erfahrung als Erkenntnis des Ethischen. Die Kunsttheorie Robert Musils und die analytische Philosophie, Paderborn 1999, p. 192. Robert Musil: “Ansätze zu neuer Ästhetik. Bemerkungen über eine Dramaturgie des Films” [1925], in: Prosa und Stücke, Kleine Prosa, Aphorismen, Autobiographisches, Essays und Reden, Kritik, loc. cit., p. 1137–1154, particularly pp. 1145ff. John Dewey: Logik. Die Theorie der Forschung, Frankfurt am Main 2002 (English version: 1938), p. 80ff. Jean-François Lyotard: Das postmoderne Wissen. Ein Bericht, Vienna 1986 (French version: 1979), pp. 63ff. “Kunst heute? Gespräch zwischen J.-F. Lyotard und Bernard Blistène” (French version: 1984), in: Jean-François Lyotard et al: Immaterialität und Postmoderne, Berlin 1985, pp. 55–74, particularly 62ff. Cf Lyotard: Das postmoderne Wissen, loc. cit, p. 71. ibid., p. 63ff. Refer to Arno Ros: Was ist Philosophie?, 1997, http://www.unimagdeburg.de/iphi/ar/content/t97a.htm (called up on 20.9.2008); Michael Hampe: Eine kleine Geschichte des Naturgesetzbegriffs, Frankfurt am Main 2007, p. 14ff. and 158–164. Refer to Friedrich Steinle: Explorative Experimente. Ampère, Faraday und die Ursprünge der Elektrodynamik, Wiesbaden 2005, in particular pp. 313–320. Lyotard: Das Postmoderne Wissen, loc. cit., p. 64f. and 71. Lawrence Weiner: “When the work is finished, people will have all these associations […] until they realize that there is also an existential connection they can build up. But this only happens if they need it […].” In: Schenker: Kunst und Öffentlichkeit, loc. cit., p. 138.

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BaBeL in Lucerne — a curricular project in an underground neighbourhood Silvia Henke And Nika Spalinger

The area around Baselstrasse and Bernstrasse has a special status in the city of Lucerne. The neighbourhood is damp and cramped, full of shadows. It is wedged in between the steep slope of the Gütschberg and the Reuss River. It is traversed diagonally by a heavily travelled cantonal road and longitudinally by a railway embankment and the motorway. Many properties are poorly maintained. The neighbourhood has one of the highest percentages of underprivileged migrants and of children and young people in the city of Lucerne. It is home to many students and artists and offers special niches for trade people. All this makes life in the neigh­bourhood quite lively and multi­cultural. The Lucerne School of Art and Design participated from 2002 to 2007 in the Baselstrasse/Bernstrasse Lucerne Project (BaBeL Project) in collabo­ ration with the city of Lucerne. The project was initiated in 2001 by Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts (HSLU). By getting the various population groups and decision-makers involved in a neigh­bourhood development process, the BaBeL Project set the goal of im­proving the neighbourhood in lasting ways and sustainably raising the quality of life in this part of the city. After a holistic analysis of the neighbourhood, the project started with a participatory discussion of possible directions neighbourhood development could take. In a sub­sequent public event, the parti­cipants developed a joint goal from these ideas (consensus scenario) and finally devised an implementation strategy involving sixteen building blocks. The project culminated in a neighbourhood organisation, which has continued to cultivate good contacts and a lively exchange with HSLU since 2007. This entity is jointly organised by neighbourhood forces for change and the city (refer to www.babelquartier.ch). As part of the BaBeL Project, HSLU students at Lucerne School of Art and Design developed visions and project ideas for the BaBel or Under­ground Neighbourhood1 (Basel­strasse and Bernstrasse) from 2005 to 2007. There were curricular contri­ butions at bachelor’s level (interdisciplinary project modules, “CitySpace-Intervention – Alternative Art Systems”, workshops and courses) and an in-depth analysis in continuing education (Master of Art in Public Spheres – MAPS – workshop with visiting students “Art as/and staging in public space”).

From initial idea to project implementation

One aim of these curricular contributions on art and the public sphere was to convey to budding artists and designers fundamental and contextual knowledge for working in the public sphere. Another aim was to have them tackle the issue of art in public space in a practical way with this neighbourhood as an example. Students approached the subject initially from a subjective perspective, merely based on their own per­ception and creative imagination. They received an assignment to devise and outline four to five project ideas in a short amount of time. Initially, neither practical nor finan­cial feasibility was an issue. Afterwards, the participants discussed and analysed the many ideas that had been outlined. The various aspects of public space were differentiated: physical aspects (architecture, nature) as well as the social, cultural, media, mental, and symbolic aspects. Parti­cipants then discussed the various possibilities for intervention: archi­tectural intervention, sculpture, installation, performance, action, event, happening, festival, and shortterm/long-term interventions. These efforts gave rise to the development of criteria to serve as the basis for the further processing of a selected project idea. The students learned how to prepare an idea for implementation by means of contextual research, plans, and analyses of practical and financial feasibility as well as by obtaining permits. An exhibition in the neighbourhood centre featured outlines of the ideas, visualisations and models of possible artistic interventions and enabled discussions to take place between students and local residents. Several ideas were ultimately imple­mented, for instance, a rail underpass was decorated with a relief painted with colourful animals. Through a concerted effort, a class managed to implement the student team’s idea that had won an internal contest and did so at a modest cost of CHF 8,000.

1/2/5 Martina Baldinger, “we are clean” and “i am clean”. Awarded 1st prize in the competition.

The illustrations shown here bring to life select moments of the process and show results as well as indivi­ dual ideas implemented in the BaBeL neighbourhood.

6–15 Various Baselstrasse and Baselstrasse projects/round­ about on Kreuzstutz – Jessica Powers, Melanie Wendland, Andreas Wiegand and others

3 Dominik Lipp: Hoping the dam will break..., mural on a wall 4  Boris Chouvellon, sculpture in the Reuss.

16–19 Wall sculpture for a pedes­t rian-friendly rail underpass on Baselstrasse, 2005. Collabo­r ation of students, lecturers from Lucerne School of Art and Design at HSLU jury members and children from the neighbourhood (BaBeL Kids), together with Pia Lanzinger (guest lecturer, Munich).

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Mapping the public sphere — artistic mapping as a strategy for representing social and political processes By Peter Spillmann

Draw an imaginary map. Put a goal mark on the map where you want to go. Go walking to an actual street according to your map. If there is no street where it should be according to the map, make one by putting the obstacles aside. When you reach the goal ask the name of the city and give flowers to the first person you meet. The map must be followed exactly or the event has to be dropped altogether. Ask your friends to write maps. Give your friends maps. Yoko Ono 1

In advance of the various 1968 movements, the Situ­ationists called for people to commit to everyday life as a strategy for countering the dominant order imposed by capitalism. Purposeless forays through the streets and neighbourhoods of Paris were their preferred means of sabotaging the smoothly function­ ing spectacle that was the urban machine and of undermining routines of perception. In these aimless ramblings, what is happening in a given space con­ti­nuously takes surprising turns, creates fragments of everyday life – perhaps comparable to montage in film – constantly creates new meanings. On the maps created by Guy Debord, the city becomes a collage of freely combinable snippets from different planes, set in relationship to each other and in motion with red arrows full of indications 2. Another co-founder of the Situationist International, the artist and architect Constant [Nieuwenhuis], took city maps from the 1960s of Paris, Brussels and Amsterdam to depict his vision of the city of the future. His maps feature branching rhizome-like structures along certain traffic arteries or structured terrains where the city becomes denser and is covered by multiplelayers of uses while the homogeneous areas between lose their significance. Constant’s New Babylon is laid out along the lines of relationships, contacts, and flows of information. Seemingly objective struc­tures such as periphery and centre lose all meaning. The territorial integrity through which countries, districts and cities have quasi naturalised their territories disintegrates into subjective and sectional interests. Completely contrary individual realities coexist side by side, daily actions and decisions by millions of people are ultimately uncontrollable and unknown. Michel de Certeau’s thoughts on what he calls the “art of action” revolve around these very phenomena.3 The daily action of individuals as part of the masses is shaped by countless secret tactics of using, repur­posing, and reinterpretation and ultimately casts doubt on any master plan.

The increasing interest in maps and mapping stra­­te­­gies in art since the 1960s therefore also expresses a radically changing view of the city, of urban spaces and landscapes where social and political dimensions and processes become of pivotal interest. Bureau d’études is a French group of artists who have been trying since 2002 to depict in maps the systems and processes of globalisation so pervasive in society and the public sphere. The individual maps can depict, for example, networks of large corporations, trace the global complex of the financial, media or bio industry or show the complex interconnections between groups and initiatives that became active in the antiglobalisation movements.4 Bureau d’études does not intend its mappings to be primarily orientation aids in networks of real social relationships or topographies of power. The strength of its mappings lies in their ability to present new discursive contexts and to set topics and render them negotiable. Complex of the self, for instance, is a map from 2008 that presents the interconnections between various doubles of us who exist and lead their own separate lives in widely differing spheres ranging from government administration and health care to consumption and telecommunications.5 Maps cannot only be looked at as an image or read as a text. They possess the visually creative quality of images and the semiotic narrative structure of texts. Maps have to be interpreted. Reading maps requires knowledge of the social and political grammars underlying the characters and symbols that are used. Christine Buci-Glucksmann describes maps as models for seeing knowledge. “Printed, drawn, or painted, as an artwork or as a strategic object, maps are at the same time multi-functional and multi-temporal, a non-hierarchical branching structure, where the local coexists with the central, the art of memory with sequences of action.” 6 Owing to their ambivalent nature in appearance and in practice, between information and use, maps are especially suitable as an artistic strategy for representing complex social spheres. Protest maps play a central part in the many artistic and activist mappings created in recent years. With the entry of additional information and depiction of otherwise hidden interconnections, the maps are intended to convey new insights and knowledge and to alter behaviour. In 2004, Big Brother Awards of Switzerland produced a map of surveillance cameras in Zurich with an emphasis on the Aussersihl district in Zurich and the main train station

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in Zurich. The maps can be viewed online or downloaded and printed out so they can be folded up and are easy to take with you.7 Gruppo de Arte Callejero from Argentina is a group of activist artists who adopted a militant mapping practice with their city maps by marking on them the addresses of mass murderers from the days of the dictatorship who had never been held accountable. The aim was to mobilise the inhabitants of indivi­ dual parts of the city to participate in political actions. “Creating maps is an action based on know­ledge; it can be an expansion of knowledge, a tool of acquisition and dominance, a denunciation, a plan for sabotage, a type of concealment and other things.”8 Even in Sans Papiers Cartographes, the strategic potential of maps can be successfully coupled with the aspiration of rendering visible the specific knowledge of a network of actors. The central axis of power entered on the map of Paris is depicted schematically as an arrow lined with the monuments of the French Empire, from Notre Dame and the Pyramide du Louvre to the Arc de Triomphe and Palace of Versailles. The demonstrations of the Sans Papier movement symbolically traverse this arrow and the churches that the movement occupies surround it. They can be optionally displayed on the interactive map.9 The maps created by artists in the 1960s and 1970s sought to obliterate the reality that appeared rational and understandable in the course of time with individual entries and overwrites whereas mapping strategies often used in recent years in artistic and activist projects revolve around the process of collectively organising and strategically depicting information. Both approaches are based on a criti­cally reflected relationship toward cartography and its representational techniques. Artistic mapping is thus a method, a technique of analysis and strategic representation. The continuous work of arranging information, instructions and stories by putting them into sequences, layers, networks, categories, weight classes and in relation to other things allows other ways of visualising events and contexts. Mappings are processes of knowledge production where actors from different fields cooperate. As such, they enable the joint negotiation of concepts and images, designations and meanings. This process gives rise to a system of coordinates toward which future actions can be orientated. Results from mappings are strategic representations, contextualisations of knowledge in which the depicted interconnections are also put up for negotiation and rendered negotiable even beyond the circle of experts involved. Many of these mappings develop and regenerate virtually of their own accord in a collaborative, communicative milieu of research and development that can be created and expanded within and outside the new media.

MigMap – Governing Migration was a project deve­loped and implemented from 2004 to 2006 in an interdisciplinary collaboration of cultural pro­ ducers from Labor k3000 and a team of sociologists, political scientists and scholars in cultural studies at the University of Frankfurt. The aim was to render visible and negotiable the increasingly Europeanised migration policy and its, until then, hardly graspable structures and modes of operation. Mapping was used at one and the same time as a method for work and as a strategy for visualisation and communication.10 The attempt to depict individual aspects of the new regime is what gave rise to the definitive research questions and research criteria. The maps that were created ultimately had more the status of theses, which have since been picked up, further discussed and further developed in the widest variety of academic and activist contexts. The boom in mappings in the realms of activism, culture and cultural studies also has to be viewed in parallel to the development of electronic mapping systems and navigation tools. The new power of maps on the Internet is likewise due to simplified technical means for combining, for example, electronic geographic data (GIS – geographic infor­mation system) with any desired information and statistical data. The projection of statistical data such as population trends and relative income levels on given territories (e.g. districts, municipa­ lities or city neighbourhoods) has always had the uncanny effect of transforming ephemeral and selective surveys into factual relationships through the act of depiction. The new technologies supported by databases and networks now have the additional capability of following, say, changes in GDP in a certain neighbourhood live, as it were. Basically, the electronic city map can perform every­thing simultaneously. It shows the route, provides shopping tips, informs users about the customs and traditions of the inhabitants, and warns users if they enter an area with above-average crime rates. EveryBlock Chicago is a website that enables users to see at any time where a crime was committed over the previous 24 hours. Small flags mark the place where a theft, a mugging, a murder or a rape happened. At maximum zoom resolution, Internet users can watch the empty streets of Chicago fill up slowly but surely with the colourful flags of crime.11 A much more reflective approach is taken by another mapping project. The project was implemented by the artist and musician Michaela Melián as part of an art competition in 2008 by the city of Munich on The victims of National Socialism – New Forms of Remembering and Remembrance. Memory Loops is a virtual memorial for the victims of National Socialism. Users can go to a website and access authentic accounts from those times on hundreds of addresses and places in the city of Munich in the form of short audio loops. Quotations from news­ paper articles and radio reports, passages from

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1 Bureau d’études, Financial industrial complex. Paris 2002. Overview and detail. http://bureaudetudes.org/files/2010/01/SelfEconomy2008. pdf

2 Labor k3000 in collaboration with TRANSIT MIGRATION, MigMap – Governing Migration, Mapping European Politics on Migration. Map 4: Places and Practices. 2005. Overview and detail. http://www.transitmigration.org/migmap

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letters and notices read by the voices of children and young people put the listeners right in the middle of nightmarishly normal everyday city life of National Socialist ideology.12

Peter Spillmann is an artist, a curator, and a co-founder of collabo­

Participatory mapping approaches supported by databases, such as the use of Participatory GIS (PPGIS) and Internet, for example, open up whole new perspectives for artistic and activist strategies with a definite interest in a multi-actor perspec­tive. In the Internet project “This was Tomorrow” by Labor k3000, the mapping of cities in Europe and North Africa occurs by assembling videos, which inhabitants of large development projects in the 1960s and 1970s have posted online. In the videos they report on their everyday lives in parts of cities denigrated and deemed problematic by politi­cians and the media.13 With their diverse tactics of appropriation and use, the inhabitants had long ago found their own responses to appeals involving technocratic planning. A no longer comprehensible diversity of cultures and forms of expression has lodged itself in the rational grid of the master plan of modernism and redefined what the term “urban” means from the inside out. It is sort of as if the Situationists in their digressions had tried to paint a picture of the city of tomorrow.

1 Yoko Ono, Map Piece. 1962 2 G.-E. Debord, Naked City – Illustration de l’hypothése des plaques

rative platforms such as Labor k3000 Zürich and the Centre for PostColonial Knowledge and Culture (CPKC) Berlin and a lecturer at the Lucerne School of Art and Design, which is part of Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts. He has done research projects in the areas of tourism studies, globalisation and art.

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tournantes en psychogéographique, 1957. Michel De Certeau, Kunst des Handelns. Merve Berlin, 1988. http://bureaudetudes.org http://bureaudetudes.org/files/2010/01/SelfEconomy2008.pdf Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Der kartographische Blick der Kunst. Merve Berlin 1997, p. 30. http://www.bigbrotherawards.ch/doc/cctv/html/index.html www.exargentina.org/Kongress/Kartographie. Grupo de Arte Callejero: Kartographische Überlegungen I, 21.09.2004. http://www.moneynations.ch/cartographes/dossier/ http://www.transitmigration.org/migmap http://chicago.everyblock.com http://www.memoryloops.net http://www.this-was-tomorrow.net

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Cooperative building and spatial productions — The article from Lucerne School of Art and Design on the interdisciplinary research programme “Buildings as Systems” of Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts By Elena Wilhelm

Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts conducts research not just within single disciplines but also on an interdisciplinary basis. This approach comes naturally only because the individual dis­­ciplines are so close together geographically. The closeness also allows spontaneous and surprising encounters. Physical contacts of these kinds are crucial for conducting a common analysis of reality beyond all available technical means of commu­ni­cation. This becomes evident time and again. “Buildings as Systems” is a research programme that provides an institutionalised context for inter­disciplinary work at Lucerne University of Ap­plied Sciences and Arts. The programme takes up the issues of public space, art in public space and “Urban Art Marks”. This article presents the research programme and outlines six selected projects being carried out under the guiding hand of the Lucerne School of Art and Design at Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts. From leading professions to cooperative networks

Until now, architecture was always seen as a leading profession in construction. In the world of occu­ pations, a leading profession assumes a function of control and delegation within a certain work area and therefore has powers to define it.1 There is a thesis that the age of leading professions is drawing to an end and that they will be repla­ced with cooperative networks of specialised players. This thesis is made plausible by studies in work

areas similar in their complexity and in their bearing on values to architecture and urban planning (e.g. medicine).2 “The advance of internal differentiation and professional pluralisation in functional systems is disintegrating factually and normatively suppor­ted control by just one leading profession across entire functional systems.”3 This trend means a more integrative approach is needed in these fields, not just to the professional practice of architecture and urban development but also to research and education. Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts is responding to this need with an interdisciplinary research programme called “Buildings as Systems”. Its intention is to create a new relationship between the professions and disciplines involved in construction and urban development.4 Art and design become even more central and important in the process, which opens up significant fields of work, research and development. As an interdisciplinary leitmotif, “Buildings as Systems” focuses on the interactions of a building, its ability to adapt and its social and cultural significance. Research is conducted on the inter­ actions between the inside and outside of a building, between the building (its materials, structures, components and operations) and its users (how they perceive the building and make it their own, how they use and repurpose it, interpret and change it). Research is conducted on the interactions bet­ween the building and the natural and man-made environment. Efforts are made to determine ways in which buildings can be made more adaptable in

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terms of structure, expressive design, materiality and use. The social and cultural significance of buildings and types of buildings is analysed with regard to their potential to produce social inter­actions, social and cultural participation, as well as cultural identities and social meaning. The emphasis is thus on the building in its totality, its connection to its inner and outer (urban) milieu. Interdisciplinary demands on buildings as systems and on public space 5

Two focus areas support this perspective: adaptive and interactive buildings (“how buildings adapt and interact”) and buildings in a social and cultural context (“what buildings mean and do”). The two focus areas of this programme perceive buildings in terms of practice in that “Buildings as Systems” consist not only of elements and components but also of operational processes. Buildings themselves conceive and create the differentiated and substantial spaces within which we live. They are “actors”, in Bruno Latour’s definition of the term, because like all technical artefacts, they are capable of enabling or preventing certain types of behaviour.6 “How buildings adapt and interact”

Owing to the processes of urbanization and the grow­ing attention given to social, cultural, demographic, ecological and economic aspects, buildings are ex­pected to be increasingly adaptable, dynamic, pe­r­­ceptive and supportive. Known attempts made thus far to adapt buildings to changing requirements usually failed because the planner tried to work with flexible systems using a previously categorised repertoire of change capabilities that were unable to satisfy the new requirements.7 The lack of character of (allegedly) flexible buildings is an additional problem in this context. The participation models with users and planners in the 1970s and 1980s were also unsuccessful in many cases because they employed traditional planning processes. This flexibility, based on deterministic principles was not expedient.8 That is why the term “adaptability” is used instead of “flexibility”. Adaptability is understood to mean the capability of a system to change and organise itself and thus to respond to modified internal and external circumstances. Given the, ever faster, pace of change and the need to prudently handle various resources and types of capital (social, cultural, ecological, and economic), new strategies must be found to enable buildings to have the necessary adaptability in different respects. This way of viewing buildings raises a number of questions: What kinds of planning methods are required to design adaptable buildings to be viable for the future? How can needs and requirements be evaluated? How can future viability be predicted and how can one work with the help of future scenarios? How can cultural coherency and identi­ fication be fostered despite adaptability? How much technology with differing service lives can a

building withstand and what are the consequences for society, users or operators, for the building and the space? “What buildings mean and do”

As mentioned above, buildings also have symbolic, affective and social dimensions. What a building means is reflected visually on the one hand: in the form it takes, in its colours, in the difference between light and shadow. On the other hand, our own movement is also required to understand a building. We not only see buildings, we also pass through them and touch them. In addition to the visual, the three-dimensional nature of a building is crucial to understanding it.9 Buildings trigger certain types of physical posture and perceptions, institutionalised affects and make each individual a different socialised being with specific needs and desires. The affective aspects and aesthetics of buildings also have social effects. Buildings are a “medium of social life.”10 They serve society as stabilisers and mediators. They can integrate the individual into socio-cultural contexts in different ways or they can exclude the individual from the social fabric. From this perspective, buildings can be seen as a special form of technology whose function is to lend society a certain identity and to create or prevent social interactions. With this focus, the form and manner of expression that buildings have are inte­resting not just because of their artistic value but also because they enable, encourage or discourage certain interactions and identities. This perspective on buildings raises a number of questions: What expressive qualities and what sym­bolic meanings do buildings have? How are buildings and interactions linked with each other? What relationship do buildings have to everyday culture and location? How does form shape use and vice versa? Under what circumstances do buildings stabilise certain interactions and vice versa? What role do specific building types play in this regard? How do buildings support or prevent certain activities? What social significance do individual buildings and building types have? How do indivi­ dual buildings and their layout change interaction and communication, social coherence and the social fabric? Finally, the questions arise how can one conceptualise the transformation and the changes in buildings, the ability of adaptable buil­d­­ings to allow diverse interpretations and different patterns of use? And what are the possibilities, aspirations and potential of an adaptable social building and its space? What are the innovative building types and spatial approaches, innovative design strategies and planning instruments for qualifying buildings in urban areas? How can one define options for action more precisely against a backdrop of life styles that are increasingly less formal and of dynamic settlement processes?

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Six projects on buildings as the media of social life

In the first two calls for submissions on the inter­ disciplinary focal point “Buildings as Systems”, twenty-one projects were submitted. Fourteen of them subsequently received funding.11 Lucerne School of Art and Design is involved in a variety of ways. Several examples are presented below.

is to find approaches that do not stop at merely trans­posing a familiar construction sign to a new medium but go beyond this and to use innovative spatial and media concepts to explain complex interconnec­tions within a construction project. Artistic strategies are intentionally and substantially integrated in the process.

“Dialogue-based planning and development of complex construction projects” is the name of an initiative for devising a tool for interdisciplinary planning and development that enables parti­ci­pa­ tory and interdisciplinary approaches to be anchored in an optimum way in construction pro­cesses. This tool of dialogue-based and interdis­ ciplinary planning and development of complex construction projects is to be developed and tested using an actual urban area development project where the focus of urban planning is on the interaction of buildings and public space. This planning project is entitled “Slow Road Axis Lucerne South.” The project takes into account not only the axis as a public space but also the buildings along it, their orientation and interaction with the space and the various actors involved.

“Dynamic Building Orientation Systems and Buil­ding Information Systems” is a project that explores the potential of these systems for innovation. Interest revolves around the issue of how digital and net­worked visitor information and signalisation systems can be used for complex information situations in buildings. An interdisciplinary project team is evaluating if these orientation systems can be used for building applications in ways that are relevant to the design, to the shaping of space and to techno­logy. Digital and networked systems represent a substantial innovation factor in building systems. At the same time, there is a great need to clarify their use. This is mainly because, although the traditionally separate disciplines of design, architec­ture and technology are beginning to mix with each other in room installations, no interdisciplinary investigations have yet been conducted on this subject.

“BuildingBuilding” is a project that explores the poetic potential of a building. The project team be­lieves that poetic moments are crucial for our existence and that buildings are important places for poetic moments in our lives. The decisive question is how this poetic quality comes into being in a cooperative network. If design is not to be re­duced to a technocratic resolution of problems, the responsibility for it must be newly defined within a cooperative network. The project shows where areas of poetic potential are to be found in cooperative networks and tests the methods and formats whose poetic potential enable them to initiate new innovation processes in the disciplines involved.

“Corporeal House” is a project with one basic pre­mise: despite the architectural wish to design spaces and buildings capable of adapting to our life styles, most people are forced to live in relative static and rigid homes. To the same degree that architecture protects us from outside influences, it also reduces our social contacts. Most people are more closely networked with far-off friends than with their immediate neighbours. This project generates concepts intended to create new possi­­bi­lities for interaction in very simple, creative and inexpensive ways despite the closed nature of rooms and buildings. Converging in a complex task

“Art, Architecture, Society” this project focuses on the role of art as a communicating instance between the inside and outside of a building and among the people who inhabit and use the building and make it their own. The project investigates the design and planning processes in architecture and art and the forms of cooperation between these disciplines from different perspectives. The goal is to develop suitable approaches to promote a discourse on art and architecture in the design and planning process that depart from conventional planning. In “On-Site–Visualisation of Design and Building Processes Where They Occur” a team is developing innovative concepts for visual construction information at large construction sites. The relevant communication needs of the public, the builder and the architects are bundled together and new approaches are shown for laying the groundwork for communication that is more comprehensive, more comprehensible and more integrated. The object

The examples clearly show that the methods of drafting and designing, construction and operation, management and demolition of buildings and urban spaces require demanding ways of thinking and acting. They must allow us to come to grips with a host of aspects ranging from the aesthetic and technical to the economic and social, from the ecological and political to the ethical and cultural. Action in this field is extremely risky because it touches on and deals with the central values of society and has to find answers to normative questions. Alongside components of production and form, this action also presupposes reflexive, analytical and affective skills – the consequences of a “total” social phenomenon, as Marcel Mauss would put it.12 “Architect as Author” and “Architect as Service Provider” are still valid conceptions of the self for architects. They are evoked in training but do not sufficiently capture the complexity of this social task.

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Both the “Architect as Author” and the “Service-­ Provider Architect” lack awareness of the societal and cultural function of architecture and urban planning – not individually, of course, but structurally. The only way of responsibly handling the complexity of this activity academically and practically is by joining the different actors together in close and trusting collaborations.

Elena Wilhelm completed a study programme in social sciences and cultural studies. Her dissertation was on the history of the new forms of social control in the early 20th century based on Michel Foucault’s concept of “governmentality”. She currently runs the interdisciplinary priority research programme “Buildings as Systems” at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts. Its object is to examine buildings to determine, inter alia, their cultural and social form of expression. 1 Cf Bohn, Ursula/Kühl, Stefan (2004): Beratung, Organisation und

Profession. In: Schützeichel, Rainer/Brüsemeister, Thomas (ed.): Die beratene Gesellschaft. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, pp. 57–78. 2 Cf Kurtz, Thomas (2005): Die Berufsform der Gesellschaft. Weilerswist: Verlag Velbrück. 3 Stichweh, Rudolf (2005): Die Soziologie der Professionen. At: www.unilu.ch/deu/prof._dr._rudolf_stichwehpublikationen_38043. aspx. Downloaded on 5 January 2010, p. 7. 4 The three further interdisciplinary priorities of Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts are “Tourism and Sustainable Development”, “Creative Living Lab” and “Societal Security and Social Insurances.” 5 On spatial theory, compare Dünne, Jörg/Günzel, Stephan (ed.) (2006): Raumtheorie. Grundlagentexte aus Philosophie und Kulturwissenschaften. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag. 6 Cf Latour, Bruno (2007): Eine neue Soziologie für eine neue Gesellschaft. Einführung in die Akteur-Netzwerk-Theorie. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag; Latour, Bruno/Yaneva, Albena (2008): “Die Analyse der Architektur nach der Actor-Network-Theorie” (ANT). In: Swiss Federal Office of Culture (ed.): Explorations in Architecture. Teaching, Design, Research. Basel/Boston/Berlin: Verlag Birkhäuser, pp. 80–89. 7 Cf Königs, Ulrich (2005): “Adaptive und selbstorganisierende Systeme in der Architektur.” In: Design Science in Architecture published by the Faculty of Architecture of Graz University of Technology. Series: Graz Architektur Magazin. Volume 2. Graz. 8 Cf ibid. 9 Cf Delitz, Heike (2009): Architektursoziologie. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, p. 87. 10 Compare ibid. 11 Compare on this subject also the project documentation (in German) for 2010 for the interdisciplinary priority “Buildings as Systems” at www.hslu.ch/isgas. 12 Cf Mauss, Marcel (1990): Die Gabe. Form und Funktion des Austauschs in archaischen Gesellschaften. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag.

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The inexhaustible need for dialogue: art, politics, communication By Christoph Doswald

The American artist Rita McBride won a competition for designing Effnerplatz in Munich-Bogenhausen in 2003. The object of the contest was to lend the faceless junction an identity visible far and wide. McBride’s design called “Tower” was judged by a competent panel of experts and won despite a renowned competition including Dennis Oppenheim, Thomas Schütte, Gelitin, Jorge Pardo, and others. Tower is a 52-meter hyperbolic construction made of 32 plastic tubes reinforced with carbon fibre. Following the panel’s decision, there was great opposition to the work of art. A number of processes were required to help shape political, technical and media opinion. So this project was always touch and go. It took an exceptionally long time before the monumental sculpture finally became a reality. The official unveiling of the work to the public on 30 January 2011 marked the end of an arduous process, whose positive outcome had been uncertain for a long time. In retrospect, the decisive factor for the success of the project was ultimately a simple communication measure. The name of the artwork was changed from the objective term “Tower” to the more emotionally evocative designation “Mae West”. This modification shifted the name substantially from the objective to the feminine, from the indifferent to the suspiciously story-like. The artist herself called the re-branding a “diversionary tactic” intended to push the technical, financial and political issues into the background. However, McBride went beyond merely changing the name. She initiated a host of flanking measures that managed to add even more content and especially imagery to “Mae West”, already an emotionally evocative concept from film history. Galerie Klüser presented an exhibition with works by the US painter Glen Rubsamen. He incorporated McBride’s sculpture in his ultra-kitschy palm-filled Californian landscapes, thus giving the project a postcard biography before its time. In addition, the artist had a number of fictional advertising billboards put up throughout the city, which coquetted with the erotic component of Mae West’s figure, thus associat­­ing the silhouette of the sex symbol directly with the artwork. McBride herself made an artist video, which she called a “propaganda film.” In it, the silhouette of the sculpture was made to fade skilfully to that of the Hollywood star. Dancing Bavarian girls clad in traditional costumes with swooshing dirndls made an appearance, as did dancers around a May pole. Suddenly, the cool artwork had gained a

big portion of glamour and sexiness, but also exuded the trait of being down-to-earth and attached to the local culture. All these artistic communication measures helped to resolve the technical, financial and political problems that had been under discussion for years and lent the sculpture a likeable, even glamorous dimension. The brilliant stroke of feminising the artwork on the one hand and incorporating it into this primeval Bavarian mythology on the other managed to free it from the accusation of imposed internationalism levelled by conservative critics. Finally, the artist employed a communication strategy commonly found in the mass media and put her own person to the fore. Rita McBride played herself as a seductive Mae West double showing lots of skin and wearing sexy clothes in a photo disseminated in the media. The photo helped her to build up a self-deprecating and unruffled image for the creator of the sculpture. These efforts completely changed the public’s origi­nal perception of the sculpture as cold and distant. The media initially apostrophised the “Tower” as the “Nuclear Power Plant Cooling Tower”, “Knitting Jenny” or “Egg Cup” whereas as “Mae West” a few years later, the same structure won the hearts of the people of Munich. In the end, the headline in the Süddeutsche Zeitung before the unveiling read “A Sex Goddess for Munich”. The article went on to explain the transformation from scathingly criticized sculpture to predominantly accepted one. “The public prefers having something with which they are already familiar” the article read, even if it was just the name of a familiar Hollywood diva. It went on to say that “the language of contemporary art” was ostensibly “still more difficult to understand than new music.” “There are well-versed experts but instead of communicating their expertise, many often seem to prefer basking in it and guarding it jealously so the fewest possible other people can understand this language.” How can the public identify with an artwork? What communication and facilitating efforts are necessary? The task is easier said than done especially for art, which often makes the case for heightened complexity; and especially if an artwork is still in the project phase, is still an hypothesis yet to be tested in reality. A planned contemporary artwork has a right to exist based, inter alia, on its claim to

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newness and its innovative content. We repeatedly face the dilemma of having to communicate that an artwork of this kind must be fully evaluated prior to becoming a reality. If experts do not always reach consensus on these decisions, then it is all the more difficult for the lay public to form an opinion. That is why knowledge has to be conveyed and flanking measures and emotional campaigns have to be conducted, as Rita McBride’s multi-step procedure showed in such an exemplary way. At the same time, McBride’s process does not offer a set formula, as it is based on a specific project situation. That means every art project in public space must be examined individually to determine possible flanking communication measures that can be taken. It is important in this context that the initiators of projects in public space keep any risks in mind from the outset. A serious risk analysis has to be conduc­ted early on. Otherwise, criticisms that may come up cannot be addressed in adequate ways. There is rarely as much time as in Munich to adapt and revise a public project over a number of years and to promote it with a communication strategy developed in stages. The usual case is more brutal and was observable recently in Zurich. A compe­ tition was conducted there in 2009 for revamping Escher Wyss Platz. It was won by the Berlin artist Thomas Demand in collaboration with Caruso St Johns Architects, a London architectural firm. The project called for two buildings to be erected under a viaduct with elevated highway already spanning the square. The intent was to create the impression that the artwork was a remnant that had managed to prevail over the brutal traffic planning practices of the 1970s. In China, a buil­ding of this kind is called a “nail house”, or “Nagelhaus” in German, so Nagelhaus is the name the authors gave to their project in Zurich. This was logical and also crucial for the competition panel deciding in favour of the project. After all, the situation at Escher Wyss Platz revolved around just these types of issues, around gentrification, real estate speculation, failed traffic planning, etc. When it came time to make the project palatable to the entire population of Zurich in a popular vote, the name Nagelhaus quickly proved to be a burden. As a process, a popular vote of this kind has to be completed in a matter of months, so there was also no time for credible re-branding of the kind demonstrated in Munich. The name Nagelhaus certainly triggered subliminal withdrawal reflexes among some Zurich voters already made uncertain by the globalised economy. The biggest weakness of the project from a communicative standpoint was its multi-functionality. The two buildings were intended not only to function as artworks but also to house a restaurant, a kiosk, an ATM and a public toilet. Nagelhaus opponents from the rightconservative Swiss People’s Party (SVP), for their part, devised an effective communication campaign. They managed to bring tradespeople,

globalisation losers and, paradoxically, ultra leftwingers critical of the government in line with each other using a catchy slogan: “5.9 million for a golden toilet”. With such a hard-hitting phrase, there was no room for differentiated discourses on art and the backers lacked an emotionally evocative subject for an effective pro-campaign. An example from Vienna shows what a decisive role an early risk analysis can play in the realisation of large-scale artworks. The German artist Olaf Metzel planned to install a sculpture in the centre of Karlsplatz in 2007 depicting a naked female body wearing a chador. Entitled “Turkish Delight”, it focused on issues of Muslim femininity in a western society, which are virulent particularly in Austria with its high percentage of citizens and immigrants from the Balkans. Given the controversial theme, the sculpture was expected to unleash strong reactions. That is why the Kunsthalle Wien as event organiser of a programme on art in public space devised a number of flanking measures. On the one hand, those in charge sought out representatives of the Muslim faith community for a discussion. On the other hand, the Kunsthalle initiated a discussion programme and organised two exhibitions that delved more deeply into these issues. With these multi-faceted communication efforts, the debate was able to be detached to a degree from the preca­ rious and fruitless dichotomy between Orient and Occident. However, one could not prevent Olaf Metzel re­ceiving a series of malicious threatening letters and the sculpture being pushed off its base twice by radical vandals and being badly damaged in the process. Christoph Doswald is a curator and publicist and has carried out

various projects exploring the interactions of mass media and art. A recent example is the exhibition Press Art shown in 2010 at Kunst­ museum St. Gallen and at Museum der Moderne in Salzburg. In addition, Christoph Doswald is the chairman of the Public Art Task Force (Arbeitsgruppe Kunst im öffentlichen Raum) of the city of Zurich.

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The city as a dubious system — interviews as a means of correcting society through participation Transcript of the interview Manfred Seiler conducted with Till Velten on 5 February 2011 in Velten’s studio in Freiburg im Breisgau.

“We start something; we add our thread to a network of relationships. We never know what will come of that. It is a risk.” Hannah Arendt/Günther Gaus

1

Till, you invited me to interview you on the subject “The city as a dubious system” or to put it better “The city as an opaque system”. On my flight to you, I read an article in the Süddeutsche Zeitung and I think “mainstream” is the ever-present subject right now. Sixty per cent of the world’s population lives in cities and that figure is on the rise. When I think of the subject of cities or urbanism, I think of megacities. I know you. You are working with students right now to prepare the Master Talk to be held in Lucerne in May, where the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei will speak. I just read about China in this newspaper article and about the huge city of Beijing and its 20 million people. The traditional courtyard houses there – where people live next door to each other – are becoming less and less common. In this article, there was a bricklayer with one cigarette behind his ear and another in his mouth smoking away, repairing a roof with gooey tar. The reporter said to him: “That doesn’t look so good.” The bricklayer replied: “But it will hold for two years, because I will also need work in that third year in order to come back and patch it back up again .” And I thought to myself this person would be a person for Till Velten. It is a Till Velten scene. Tell me about your invitation to art projects in urban space, in city space. Tell me about your invitation to the event Art Public Zurich (Kunst und Öffentlichkeit). Who exactly invited you? Till Velten That’s true. I am sceptical of this idea of grand master plans, of producing the city as a piece. I look in these already imple­mented master plans – you can become interwoven into them too – I always look for this dubious human system, precisely the kind that cannot or does not want to fulfil these master plans. And you are right, this bricklayer would really be a person through whom I would explore the entire mega-city of Beijing. That is always the starting point. Manfred Seiler “In other words, an individual is your departure point for researching a place, for a place-based project?” Manfred Seiler

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“The individuals living there are always my departure points for major urban explorations of the world.” Manfred Seiler “When you stroll around, knock on house doors, ask people questions, you call it “live Googling”. Tell me, you didn’t answer the question, Christoph Schenker was the one who invited you to the exhibition Art Public Zurich (Kunst und Öffentlichkeit). Tell me about your project in the area of the city known as Hardau. Who was your first contact there?” Till Velten “That was five years ago now and is part of this large project Art Public Zurich (Kunst und Öffentlichkeit in Zurich) launched by Christoph Schenker. I was asked to do a piece in this strange part of the city known as Hardau. Then I went there without having known it before, walked around and the first things I ran into were these three big high-rises, I think the first high-rises in Switzerland. And the area around these high-rises has such strange obscure carbuncle-like sculptures. They remind you of carbuncles immediately, but in an entirely positive sense, not a negative one. They struck me as extremely strange, placed in this highly rational, architec­ turally conceived world. You could sense right away that these sculptures had their spiritual home in the 1970s. That was the first thing that interested me because I noticed a strong artistic accent in what was indeed a highly brutal setting. They are works by Carl Bucher.” Manfred Seiler “In other words, art in construction in the best sense of the term (Note: inclusion of public art as part of major construction projects)?” Till Velten “No, it is art in urban territory, not in construction projects. You have the im­ pression he put some thought into it. He did some powerful artistic interventions, defini­tely in the spirit of the 1970s, but powerful all the same. He was one of the partners I conducted a long interview with. Another person I interviewed was the owner of a café in Hardau, which was once intended to be something else. It was a re-purposing process, in which he somehow got involved. That interested me. And the third part of this project was an interview with a primary school teacher who runs a school with a heavily migrant population.” Till Velten

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“Explain to me again more precisely how you find these people when you are straying around searching.” Till Velten “It is and always remains a searching movement. I found this sculptor by wandering around in the city and noticing his powerful artistic presence. It was a strong message he conveyed regardless of whether I like it or not. Then the café owner. We are back to the bricklayer again. At some point you get an urge in this coldness to drink a cup of coffee. Then you walk into a café and notice from the interior and the orientation of the café that something is not quite right. You ask the waitress and find out it was intended to be something entirely different in the master plan of this neighbourhood. The café owner’s big dream was to have a musical café and then these human aspects enter into a building like this. That is how I came into contact with the café owner. And at one point I noticed there were a lot of children around. Of course then I asked myself about education and from the questions I asked the café owner I happened upon this primary school teacher who was highly regarded in the neighbourhood. That is what I call live Googling. Once when I visited you in Hamburg, I wanted to find a tailor’s dummy for children’s clothes but was opposed to this digital Googling. I thought, well, I have four hours now. I told myself I would walk down the street in Hamburg and in four hours I would have a tailor’s dummy, cheap, in other words not new. And in actual fact, I did end up with one after getting recommendations and inquiring on the street. I ended up at the university of applied arts which had a large stock of old tailor’s dummies they had bought up. That is what I call live Googling. Today if you have a problem and if you tackle it socially and are not too shy to go up and talk to people directly, you will find a solution. It may be ruinous and exhausting but it works.”

Manfred Seiler

“What a nice example of live Googling. In the Hardau project you did something that I also found interesting, you described how you established initial contacts for the interviews naturally. Then you conduct the interviews. There may be second and third interviews. In the course of them, you work on questions or your questions in a way similar to working on a sculpture, initially applying a chisel for roughing out and then rendering the form more precise with finer chisels, then ultimately finding out what the desires and ideas are. You mentioned the dream the café owner has of running a musical café. What other aspects of social import come out when you enter into these human soul systems? What does the teacher say about the children she’s involved with or what things work in this neighbourhood? Or if you also see art in public space as a critical research project, what dislocations occur that you have to explore with your interviews?” Till Velten “I have noticed that I always conduct these interviews as very noble curative attempts and keep looking for individuals who try with the pictures in their head to somehow structure society or have it under control. But in the interviews or also in the interview with the teacher and with the café owner you always end up in the abyss of the human soul. It is the same every time. You end up at the dislocations in life and that these dislocations actually give rise to the life plan of the individual people or the way they live their lives, that these dislocations often also trigger corrections in the course a life is taking.” Manfred Seiler “So, those are dislocations, now you’re talking almost like a therapist or pastor. Do you stick with the sensitivities of individuals or do these interviews also capture the community, let’s call it the urban fabric for now, the network of individuals with whom these people are interwoven, especially this teacher who lives right there in Hardau, who teaches?” Till Velten “I think every huge city no matter how many millions of people it has ultimately pulsates and lives through the lives of the people inhabiting it. Anything else is nonsense. I absolutely believe that these human sensitivities are what actually constitute city life, urban life for millions of people. And that is what interests me.” Manfred Seiler “The staging of your work is also im­por­tant then. In the Hardau project, the internal topography of a life in the city was linked to indi­viduals, to the café owner, to the sculptor, to the teacher. That was shown on billboards. The interviews were staged in the public sphere. The interviews were exhibited on billboards right on site. What reactions were connected to that in the project? How was it received?” Manfred Seiler

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“In very different ways. What happened is that the billboard on the teacher was attacked the most, probably by pupils. It was scrawled on, had to be glued back up twice. The sculptor was accepted, as was the c afé owner. Those were the usual reactions. The teacher was hugely upset.” Manfred Seiler “An experimental set-up like this, at least the way I understand it, also has energy in the best sense...” Till Velten “To change society.” Manfred Seiler “... or at least that conversations take place and that the individuals presented or publicized, the statements by the people affect the viewers and inhabitants and possibly fuel discussions, as it were, or promote discourse.”3 Till Velten “Exactly.” Manfred Seiler “Let’s go to the next subject. A second project you call Hach14. Where is it located?” Till Velten “It was actually a huge project I was involved in for a long time. It was an investigation of a small urban development in Hach in southern Germany, which a gallery owner had gotten me onto. I landed there. It was my first investigation of an urban fabric on a small scale. It was then shown at Art Unlimited in Basel, where I tried to weave an urban village-like fabric of this kind into this large global context. It featured re-staged interviews again in small booths, which people could listen to.” Manfred Seiler “Who was the first person you contacted there and how did you happen upon that person?” Till Velten “I happened upon that first person, Fritz Schmidlin, through a tip from a gallery owner, Robert Keller, who noticed I was looking for someone distinctive in this area. Robert Keller told me Fritz Schmidlin had collected gemstones since his childhood. I sought him out and we talked about the fact that when he looks in a field he knows exactly where pieces of jasper are located in that field. Then I tried to find out why that was. How does this person sense or know that there is a piece of jasper in the ground at a certain place? He was the first person and I ultimately really enter into the urban fabric of a small town or also a large city through such strange – what would you call them – mysterious talents. That is always the starting point. Manfred Seiler Because of course that fabric cannot be conceived of independently? Correct? People live in communities. So, this “strahler”, I think that is what you call these amateur geologists who are able to locate or find crystals, you ask him questions. From what I recall from Art Unlimited, you then have further interviews with him in which you find out that Mr Schmidlin draws up genealogical lists of the village as a way of putting the village in order. Tell me about that.” Till Velten

“These gemstones, pieces of jasper, look like dirty tubers. You cannot see anything there and this aspect interested me. How can this guy manage to locate this dirty tuber that looks as if it is nothing. He then started to build, set up a small museum in his village. We had long talks about classification systems, how he took stones you and I cannot distinguish at all from each other and assigned them to different categories. I did not understand anything more but in his mind, he had the whole concept of precisely how this works. The first series of interviews were about classification systems. At some point I noticed we would also have to talk about the people in the village. Unfortunately, these classification systems then spilled over onto the people in the village. At that point it became very difficult because he had a proud opinion of a villager who had lived there for generations. Then he shifted the focus to who had lived there the longest and who had lived there a shorter time and the fact that he was actually the king of the village. So it was through these classification systems for stones that we came upon the classification systems in society. Then things became difficult, speci­fically in the German context because the whole Nazi chapter of history spilled over into it.” Manfred Seiler “And confiscation of Jewish property...” Till Velten “...and all those types of things. But it also seemed quite interesting, you have to remember and it is something for me again, I do not believe in grand master plans. You enter the master plan through these tiny details and then have it on a human level. Manfred Seiler Sociology would call it the collection of authentic data. In Hach1 it is such a vertical spiral staircase on which you and another indi­vi­dual drill into the temporal substructure of this communal urban network. You said it was not easy working with the gentleman. A lot of bitterness came to the fore. Quite some time ago you once told me that these lists of people also included the classification of people into good villagers and bad villagers. That led you to venture a stratagem of setting up a fictional village community around Mr Schmidlin.” Till Velten

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“In other words, these interviews with Mr Schmidlin took a lot of energy. The first stratagem was I noticed I could only present this narrow-minded Mr Schmidlin by generalising him, by creating an artificial village. That was the first stratagem. I said this has to go to the Art. Then it did go to the Art through my Gallery Stampa from Basel. Then I noticed that there were no figures living in the village who could inhabit an artificial village. Then I looked through my years of interviews for figures who could form a fictional global village with this Mr Schmidlin. There was the gemstone collector Schmidlin. Then a rental car agent joined him. Then a monk who had left the church and become a goldsmith was added. In the end, there were six people around this Mr Schmidlin, who occupied this fictional village of Hach4.” Manfred Seiler “Healing individuals around Mr Schmidlin?” Till Velten “No, not the rental car agent. He also injected a lot of humour. They are not all healing types.” Manfred Seiler “Humour can also be salubrious.” Till Velten “Humour was in any case extremely salubrious. Mr Schmidlin, Norbert May and the car rental agent, and I would have to check again with regard to the fourth person.” Manfred Seiler “Let’s return to the present and to the Master Talk, a further interview formation to be held in Lucerne in May as an event of the University of Applied Sciences and Arts – Lucerne School of Art and Design. I myself am involved in the planning of this event. Through our joint collaboration, I noticed something biographi­cally interesting in my research of the artist Ai Weiwei. He will be a guest in this talk appearing together with his collector Uli Sigg. As a child he was kidnapped or exiled to Mongolia with his father and mother, humiliated because his father, a famous poet under Mao, had fallen out of grace. The father was prohibited from writing and as a coercive measure, was given the job of cleaning public toilets in this city that were used by 200 people a day. It was the first sentence, it was pure gold to me, Ai Weiwei said about his father that he had cleaned these toilets with dignity. That may have been a long preamble. Here is what I wanted to ask: What does your sculpting-like interview work have to do with the way you formulate questions? How easy do the questions have to be or how complex are your questions? Till Velten

Of course, that is a bunch of topics all at once. We invited Ai Weiwei as an artist through the intercession of Uli Sigg. In my research on him, I also discovered these personal biographical injuries or fractures in the life of Ai Weiwei. They interested me much more than all the big global projects he stages. Then I noticed that the interview with this Ai Weiwei at the Master Talk would be about his friendship with his friend and collector Uli Sigg. I talked with him a lot about how this friendship was able to be maintained even though the two of them carried out projects of this kind worldwide. But I believe in fact that this friendship is the motor powering these huge projects. On stage, that is what interests me now and what interests me much more on the students’ behalf than this debate about architecture, that is how a human friendship like this can be a trigger for such big architectural projects. That is also what the interview on stage is about. It is also about material, what is a tree to Ai Weiwei? What is a desert to him? What is concrete to him? What classification system does he apply to the world around him? I think you can approach a person by asking simple questions arising from his biographical origins.” Manfred Seiler “And one unifying aspect will certainly be that an exhibition called ‘Shanshui’ is being held at the same time as the Master Talk. It is on contemporary Chinese painting and is curated by Ai Weiwi. In other words, with concepts you had: mountain, water and tree. Shanshui means mountain and water. It also has much to do with what the elements mean to a person and what they accomplish in developing or enlivening a city or architectural design.” Till Velten “Yes, exactly.” Manfred Seiler “Well then, thank you very much for this interview.” Till Velten

Till Velten is an artist and lecturer at the Lucerne School of Art

and Design. He was born in Wuppertal, Germany, in 1961, studied as a master pupil in Düsseldorf with Gerhard Richter and Fritz Schwegler.

Manfred Seiler is a project manager and a lecturer at the Institute of

Social Work and Law at the Lucerne University of Applied Arts and Sciences. His main areas of expertise are social welfare (methods, processes, organisation, control, management), social welfare law and inter-institutional cooperation. Manfred Seiler is in charge of the Competence Centre for Social Security. 1 Hannah Arendt/Günter Gaus: What remains? One’s native

language. In: Günter Gaus 1964. Zur Person. Porträts in Frage und Antwort. Volume I. Munich: Feder Verlag, p. 31 f. 2 Marcel Grzanna, Hinter chinesischen Mauern, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 3 February 2011 3 Kunst und Öffentlichkeit, JRP/Ringier, Zurich 2007 ISBN 978-3-905770-01-8 4 Till Velten, HACH 1/Der Polygraph, edition fink, Zurich 2005 ISBN 3-906086-83-6

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Art needs the urban realm — and vice versa? By Ruth Genner

Cities have always been the melting pots of different worlds. These worlds smash into each other and mutually enliven each other. Cities live from that. Density, difference and the resulting frictions are what make urban life what it is. It is appealing as well as demanding, always pulsating in the varying rhythms of different neighbourhoods. What distinguishes art is that it triggers aesthetic feelings and emotions in people, whether positive or negative. It can be beautiful or ugly, humorous or shocking. An artist is skilful if she manages to touch people with her work – emotionally or sensually – and gives them cause to think. Art needs cities to leave its mark on people, as it were. It needs an audience. It does not become art until it is perceived by those to whom it is addressed. It becomes a topic if it is experienced and discussed in diverging ways. Cities provide the people in the corresponding density and diversity needed for an engaging discussion. One can ask the question of whether cities need art. And to be more concrete: Do cities need art in public space? Is it sensible and necessary to confront city dwellers with art in public space? After all, this means they encounter art that they cannot avoid. No one is forced to visit a gallery or a museum or otherwise approach artworks. In public space, art goes to the people. If they do not like the artwork, they have to circumvent it. Can we reasonably expect city dwellers to put up with an additional set of impressions and controversy on top of their demanding daily lives and the hectic pace of city life? Art opens up the possibility of seeing what is already familiar with new eyes. Art in public space creates ways of gaining a new understanding of familiar urban spaces. The execution of art projects brings to light different and contrary attitudes that inhabitants have toward their city, thereby promoting critical dialogue among artists, the general population and city administrators. Urban spaces therefore put tough demands on artists if this dialogue is to succeed. Art projects in public space let inhabitants experience their own immediate environment in new ways. If the interplay between art and people succeeds, the viewers of the pieces become aware of the role urban space plays in their lives. And when people grapple with their environment, these efforts foster identity and a greater willingness to become involved on behalf of this environment. We want to promote this attitude in city neighbourhoods. The city council wants to enable inhabitants to become more involved. To that end, in the autumn of 2010 it set a legislative priority for people to join together to shape the city and its neighbourhoods. The big changes occurring in Zurich are opportunities. Construction in the city has been intensive and highly dynamic in recent years and there is no end to this trend in sight. Entire sections of the city

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have been newly created while the concentration of buildings in other neighbourhoods has noticeably increased. The ongoing growth pressures influence the composition of the population but not always to everyone’s satisfaction. Along with the new jobs being created, there is mounting pressure particularly on traditional business struc­tures. The identities of certain neighbourhoods that have evolved over time are changing. One goal of this legislative priority is to strengthen social coherence by having members of the widest variety of social groups become actively involved and participate in some way or another. Informal neighbourhood networks play a part in this context, as do civil society organisations and city neighbourhood institutions. Art in public space is accompanying the change that is happening in the city. Its presence can help to achieve the goal of public involvement by different groups. Art in public space thus supports people in their commitment. Art makes it possible to reach people in a way different from usual rational communication through its formal appeal. Art stimulates senses and emotions and not simply the kind of rational thought that predominates in our everyday work routines. Art in public space is able to show the playful, carefree sides of the city or on the contrary, point to problematic aspects. The city of Zurich supports artists so they can carry out projects in the neighbourhoods outside of their regular territory and thereby draw people’s attention to urban space. The amount of city funding that is to be devoted to art in public space is one issue that has to be clarified and the Public Art Task Force (Arbeitsgruppe Kunst im öffentlichen Raum) is grappling with that issue. From today’s perspective, it is by no means mandatory that the city alone will fund art in public space. Quite the opposite. If Zurich succeeds in winning over patrons and sponsors, their involvement would add yet another layer of meaning. Private individuals, companies or foundations are also becoming involved on behalf of the city and are forging even closer ties to it. With this approach, art in public space would ideally become a catalyst for the general populace to gain a sense of identification and for businesses and institutions to help with funding. The second legislative priority pertained to Zurich as a city of culture and creativity. In it, the city council championed art in public space at yet another level. What Zurich offers in terms of culture is a major factor in the city’s appeal and a crucial advantage for the city as a place to live and work. Despite these favourable conditions, Zurich is still not well known as a city of culture and creativity, especially not internationally. Art in public space can also support this goal and help Zurich to be perceived internationally to an increasing extent as an exciting and innovative city of culture and creativity. Topquality art projects are crucial for reaching this goal. An artwork has to be of good quality to have a broad effect. I am convinced the city needs art in public space. It supports the widest variety of efforts to create a vibrant city. Art in public space ideally supplements the strategies already established for public space; the mobility strategy, the strategy of urban spaces and the strategy of value maintenance are three I would like to mention by

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name. Art in public space is like the spice in the everyday dish of public space due to the diversity with which the Public Art Task Force (Arbeitsgruppe Kunst im öffentlichen Raum) pursues this objective. That is why this statement is true: Art needs space, urban space needs art. Ruth Genner has been a member of the Zurich City Council since August 2008 and presides over the Civil

Engineering and Waste Management Department. Before that she served from 1998 onward as a member of the Swiss National Council and from 2001 as leader of the Green Party of Switzerland. After studying food engineering at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETHZ), she took over as head of “Food Sensors” at ETHZ and had various responsibilities as lecturer.

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Pamela Rosenkranz

Research and Speculation On Schwamendingen

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Remarks about the photo gallery

In 2010, the Public Art Task Force (Arbeitsgruppe Kunst im öffentlichen Raum) for the city of Zurich started a project series where artists are commissioned to conduct an urban observation of Schwamendingen. An anti-noise enclosure is to be built over a section of the motorway in this district of Zurich in the coming years and an art project called “Schwamending” will accompany this work. Instead of being added subsequently after the enclosure is completed, the project is meant to accompany the development of this new area of the city and support processes of social appropriation and identification with the structure. As an art project, it will extend above and beyond the perimeter of the enclosure into the neighbourhoods. The art observers are picked according to their varying approaches to the issue starting with their artistic practices. The first observer was Pamela Rosenkranz, an artist born in 1979 and working in Zurich: She explained her approach as follows: “For my research, I repeatedly stayed in Schwamendingen at irregular intervals. I took a number of psychogeographic walks. My objective was to experience the situation of the place spontaneously and randomly. In particular, I wanted to find out what kind of impression the social, architectural and geographic environ­ ment would have on me and my be­haviour, how I moved, what struck me as new and where I already seemed to be familiar with something. In other words, I wanted to take a closer look at what could be called Schwa­men­dingen from a purely subjectively predisposed viewpoint in order to work toward a new, un­expected conception of Schwamendingen. “In the media Schwamendingen is usually described as being a problematic peripheral district: as a conflict zone where migrants collide with an established Swiss mentality. The catchwords associated with Schwamendingen are well-known: foreigners, children, unemployment, violence, etc. Yet if you visit the district, Schwamendingen itself turns out to be the best corrective of adverse media coverage. You are confronted with constant heterogeneity as you move through the district. The place has a myriad of contrasts and contra­dictions. On the one hand, this district seems more urban than is average for Swiss conditions; there is a Metro, different ethnic groups, young people, sprayed graffiti. On the other hand, you can almost imagine being in a Swiss village again with a local inn and lovely patterns. On the one hand, there are single-family homes lined up one after another with neat

front gardens; on the other are faceless blocks of flats covered in graffiti. To exaggerate somewhat, the place conveys a sleepy no-future quality even though it has more children than anywhere else in the city of Zurich. How can that be changed, how can Schwamendingen generate a future for itself? “My proposal revolves around three concepts: future, speculation and contingency. These three concepts are also decisive for the way I practice art and connect Schwamen­ dingen to the vagueness necessary in this context. Speculation refers to what will happen, to what lies in the future, to an event that will occur – not to an already existing reality, but to the future of a fictional reality, which causes the existing reality to collapse or at least become redundant. For me, the key factor in speculation is that it always coincides with whatever it predicts. The thing being speculated about is realized in the act of speculation. “To my mind, it is precisely this aspect that is important in relationship to art: If an artwork presents a speculation on the future, then this speculation has already occurred and exists. It is manifested in the ma­te­rial that makes up art. A tech­­nique that could serve as a formal example because it unifies the speculative, future and contingent moments would be ‘lead-pouring’, a New Year’s practice of divination mostly found in the German-­speaking world. Tin or lead is heated till molten and then poured into cold water. Random shapes emerge as a result and are sub­sequently interpreted using a speci­fied set of meanings. Where possible these interpretations, in turn, might shape the behaviour of the interpreter. “If artworks affirming the speculation and the randomness of the future are created, they refer not to a utopia, to a dreamt-of or fictional non-place but on the contrary, they are the realisation of this utopian, fictional element in the present, in the here and now.”

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Axes as integral urban spaces in the city of Zurich — two enhancement strategies and three ideas on art By Jacqueline Parish

At the end of October 2009, the Public Art Task Force (Arbeitsgruppe Kunst im öffentlichen Raum) for the city of Zurich sent out invitations to a work­shop. That is how this article came into being. To begin with, I will explain two strategies for the development of public space in the city of Zurich, delving in particular into the potential of axes as integral urban spaces. I will then proceed to suggest initial considerations for art in public space. The internal logic of the city of Zurich is based on axes. In approaching this, the Civil Engineering Office of the city of Zurich (TAZ) seeks to put individual building projects, which are on public property into a larger context sequentially and in terms of urban planning. Public space along the axes is part of this internal logic. This space is a mirror of the society that arose from the specific developmental history of the city. As such, it is a structure that has evolved and the challenge is to understand it as fully as possible. On the development of axes as public spaces in the city

As in most European cities, public space in the city of Zurich developed outwards from the historical centre. In the case of Zurich, the city developed from the effluence of the Limmat River, which flows from Lake Zurich, to the Limmattal and to the Furttal. The oldest axis in the city is Niederdorfstrasse, parallel to the Limmat, which still dominates the historical centre. Then there are axes running radially into the surrounding area. The street names indicate the places to which they link Zurich economically, e.g. Badenerstrasse, Winterthurer­ strasse or Schaffhauserstrasse. Urban redevelopment and expansions in the mid-19th century are interesting for the development of public space and major traffic axes. Baron Georges Eugène Haussmann’s “renovation of Paris” is the best-known example of this. It involved widening and straightening streets that had followed a topographical logic and had evolved historically. This process is also important in Zurich as a pheno­ menon through which we can understand the major traffic axes as they exist today. However, urban re­development was much gentler in Zurich than in Paris and the structures as they originally evolved are still recognisable today. There is a further phenomenon crucial for our understanding of public space in this city; we use the term representational space of the middle classes to describe it. It is public space as a place for representational activities, self-representation of society as practised in the 19th century. The development of the lakeside pro­menade along Lake Zurich falls into this category

as do, for example, Bürkliplatz as the termination of Bahnhofstrasse, in the direction of the lake and Bahnhofstrasse itself. Both are still important public spaces today for the city of Zurich. Spatial Development Strategy 2025 and Urban Spaces 2010

The Zurich City Council commissioned a spatial development strategy to be drawn up for the period up to 2025. It showed the potential and the problems on which the next legislative priorities were to be based. As the city continues to grow, architectural concentration is emerging as an urban planning challenge. There is little land available for the erection of new buildings. We face the challenge of achieving a quality concentration of the building stock and the quality of public space plays a central part in that goal. The less space there is available, the greater are the demands placed on the existing open space. Another challenge is how to overcome conflicts in use arising from the shortage of land. More and more demands are also placed on public space, some of which are mutually exclusive and cannot be achieved concurrently. In these cases the task is to thrash out the matter and find a way of reasonably handling the various interests. It is precisely the axes that are shaped by the conflicts in use between living areas in the city and mobilityflows out into its environs. The intention of sub-strategy 6 in the spatial deve­ lopment strategy is to improve the attractiveness of public space even further. The intent is to enhance the city centre and the centres of the neighbourhoods through their public space to engender a sense of identity. Individual image-building public urban spaces are to be developed to top quality standards and public urban spaces in general are to be linked to the green space system. The area with railway tracks is to be altered so that people can ex­perience it and finally, traffic axes are to be up­graded as urban space. More attention is to be given to the axes as an interconnected network throughout the city and as links to the surroun­d­ing area. Efforts are to be made to promote solutions for the co­exis­­tence of diverse uses along the axes. In addi­­tion, internal studies have shown that the amount of value generated along axes increases with the degree to which good design promotes slow traffic. The second strategy regarding major traffic axes is Urban Spaces 2010, a strategy to design public spaces in Zurich. The fundamental conviction behind it is that public space is the business card of the city of Zurich and vital to how the city re­pre­sents itself. It must therefore be carefully deve­loped and designed to meet the needs of the future.

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1

2 1 Spatial Development Strategy for the City of Zurich, Sub-strategy 6: Increase the attractiveness of public space. City of Zurich, Office of Urban Planning, 2009. 2 Internal Logic, Public Space. Sketch by Matthias Wehrlin, Atelier Wehrlin, 2007. 3 Sabine Lang / Daniel Baumann, Streetpainting #3. Project for the Ulmberg tunnel in Zurich. Photo Lang/ Baumann, 2008.

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In collaboration with the external expert Jan Gehl from Copenhagen1, three strategic goals were formu­lated on the basis of a strength-weakness analysis of urban spaces in Zurich. One constant goal is to ensure the amenity value of these spaces whenever possible. Another goal is coherent design. To get nearer to this goal, a collection of design standards were created that help us in everyday project work to design public urban spaces coherently in a way that is typical for Zurich. A third strategic goal is to create a clear hierarchy to classify space. A significance map was developed as a tool for this purpose. This map shows the network of the key spaces for public life from a pedestrian’s perspective and clarifies the hierarchy of public urban spaces. The significance map distinguishes four levels of significance: international significance, regional/city-wide significance, district-wide significance and neighbourhood-wide significance. That means no spaces are insignificant; they simply belong to different levels of significance. This classification helps us in our everyday work to determine processes and most importantly, as well to find out whether the given process for creating exceptional spaces is perhaps expensive to flesh out and subsequently also expensive to maintain. As regards axes, the Urban Spaces 2010 strategy seeks to increase the amenity value, to design public space in a coherent manner and to apply processes for designing and developing urban spaces based on significance level. Initial considerations on the role of art in public space

What role could art now play in public space along the axes? There are three initial considerations on this matter: Potential exists for art in public space firstly, wherever the issue of concentration arises along the axes typical for Zurich, i.e. not formed by new streets radically carved out as in Haussmann’s Paris but rather those formed by structures that have evolved and have formed along these streets and in the areas around them. The issue of concentration along these axes is a central point of discussion. The question arises whether art can clarify the pro­cesses of this concentration. This kind of art should be accompanied by a developmental process, which elucidates it. A second idea and possible opportunity for art in public space would be conceivable at places where two systems collide in a contradictory way with each other. On the one hand is the clear-cut traffic function of the street, i.e. the demand on traffic systems to ensure smooth mobility. On the other hand is overall urban development with its need for liveliness and the valuable amenities. Can art elucidate the contradictions between the systems and perhaps even put them in relationship to each other, stimulate new uses, enrich the social space of neighbourhoods? Where can art improve the value of the amenities in areas along the axes?

The third place is the underpass. The underpass is a phenomenon that resulted from a separation of functions. Fast traffic rushes by above ground and people walk through slowly below ground. These are places where the Civil Engineering Office is working on projects in collaboration with the Public Art Task Force. Basic information on this subject is available in a paper by Christoph Altermatt on the Internet2 in which he inventories all underpasses in the city of Zurich. There are photos of the indivi­ dual underpasses and they can also be experienced in other ways, in some cases acoustically. We are currently planning to carry out an art project by the artists Sabina Lang and Daniel Baumann as part of the total rehabilitation of the Ulmberg tunnel. Streetpainting #3 on the pavement plays with the language of signalisation and has aesthetics reminis­cent of a sport facility. The painting depicts four tracks that cross each other in the shape of curves and loops and become intertwined in each other. The four colours lend rhythm to the travel paths and turn a walk or ride through the tunnel into an aesthetic experience. Underpasses have an almost symbolic meaning for conflicts that take place in public space along axes. They are interesting places for positing today’s challenges in the form of art and express the potential that axes have as integral urban spaces. Jacqueline Parish is a landscape architect, spatial planner and

head of Design of Urban Spaces in the Civil Engineering Office of the city of Zurich.

1 http://www.gehlarchitects.com/?#/168483 2 http://www.raumgleiter.com/underground/Verzeichnis/

VERZEICHNIS_H.html

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Hyper-sculptures and non-spaces — twelve observations on public space rather than on art

By Marcel Meili least, I view the interruption of self-propelling, interconnected thought and activity and the quesI am speaking here not as an art expert. I am speaktioning of assumed interrelationships to be just ing as an architect. That does not mean that I am not as productive as the continuous translation of interested in art. The last twenty or so years have everything into everything else. Separating, dividseen architects and artists enter into a highly ing, isolating – these can be thoroughly subver­charged consenting relationship that has stirred up sive operations. Who is to say that discrete emotions – mistrust as well as euphoria – in this entities no longer exist in the global melting pot? reciprocal bind. The ominous revival of the Gesamt­Laurence Weiner encapsulated this suspicion in kunstwerk (overarching work of art) by Harald an un­beatable Duchampesque phrase: “Everything Szeemann in 1983 triggered a proliferation of dis­is related, nothing fits together”... ciplinary overlaps and crossovers, an inextricable linking of curiosity, shamelessness and adventurism. As a consequence I prefer to focus on what lies be­In the background, however, a surreptitious con­ hind public art than on public art itself. On this sensus appeared to be emerging on the matter, subject, then, here are twelve moderately related namely that this great move towards fusion was observations... both inevitable and highly promising. Preliminary remark

“Art in construction” and “Art in public space”, woolly and simplistic assemblages derived from the vocabulary of management regulations, naturally pre-date these latest movements. In principle, how­ever, they offer a particularly suitable platform for debating the capacity for potential convergence and conflict between the disciplines. I personally have never found the prospect of such syntheses all that fascinating. To misquote that wonderful line of Brecht, I have always had a feeling that too much art in architecture is injurious to art as well as to architecture... Crossover projects all too often appear to me to be ill-considered, naive promises. In the history of the development of ideas, this hyping of fusions does not stand in isolation. In an ever-shrinking world, things are being shoe-horned and crammed together ever more mercilessly. Pundits wishing to interpret this use of force posi­tively as a synthesis are in great demand. That is understandable, but in no way self-evident. One of these “crumple zones of diverging interests” you find the world over is what is known as “public space”, where functional, ecological, commercial and aesthetic needs come into increasingly bitter competition. This space witnesses the confluence of so many and such conflicting energies that one would inevitably like to think of them as pacified by a process of overlaying. Allow me for a moment to treat with distrust all these promises and programmes that interlink every­thing with everything – including that which concerns art and the town. Or, to put it succinctly and polemically: in an era like ours where networked thinking, integrated action and cross-disciplinary approaches promise, subliminally, a kind of mortal bliss in the solving of the global puzzle, let us turn things around for a moment. At the very

1 “Art”... “in”... “public”... “space”...

The fact that, under the formulations “art in public space” or “art in construction”, scores of exhibitions and events tackle questions of genre that are in no way self-explanatory, immediately raises the question as to who is ill: the patient or the doctor? Or would symposia on “art in vehicles” or “art in museums” as questions of genre ever be conceivable? Let us start by proposing two hypotheses: 1) Fine art these days has no place in space that calls itself “public”, because it cannot find there what it needs in the way of space – with the exception of monuments and memorials. 2) Despite this, what appears as art in public space barely manages to assert its autonomous status vis-à-vis architecture, ornamentation, marketing or communication, unless it is performance art or art as intervention. Let us leave aside the couple of dozen examples to the contrary that you are currently throwing my way under your breaths. For the slight feeling of embarrassment that one regularly feels when one, by way of exception, does not simply disregard outdoor art, is more than anecdotal: It does not deceive. I think that this is a significant fundamental experience that has nothing to do with the quality of the art. Where does it come from? I do not encounter similar feelings in a museum or gallery, not even in provincial institutions with com­paratively modest collections. I assume that this particular disavowal of art is intimately related with latter-day conditions of perception in the public space. 2 Re-presentation

“Art in public space” has inherited a historical, fairly ambiguous burden, which it cannot easily rid itself of even if it wanted to: that of representation.

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As there were no symposia on the theme at the time due to there being no uncertainties in its regard, in most cases art in squares, in parks and in cemeteries represents the aristocracy, the Church and the state in one form or another. What remains of it? If you immediately protest that representation of this nature no longer has a role to play these days, allow me to pose the question: Why does art then still continue to appear in public? Anyone doubt­ing whether the historical roots of representative art have survived to the present day should go online and download the concepts on public art in major urban centres. Most of these papers are carefully formulated and guided by illustrious advisory com­mittees, elaborate programmes of theses and proceedings. But their propositions all have the same subtext in common: The town is master of the collective space; it initiates the dramaturgical rules and the con­ceptual framework objectives for the public art programmes. Of course, they also all provide for the possibility of performances, installations and interventions. It remains clear, however, that art must serve, for instance, to strengthen the town-­ in-question’s claim to cultural significance or its quest for “urban identity”. The Vienna Burgtheater has that, of course – no question. The only thing is that, here, the artistic question has been settled fairly comprehensively. And every museum has a publicity mandate, although not every artwork in it. (...) And allow me, in anticipation, to make a brief addi­tional comment: If art really wants to keep the urban realm as its theatre of action, it would do well in my opinion to hang on to this “mandate of repre­sentation”. This alone is what makes art specific here as a fiercely contested formula and, ultimately, subjects it to political tension... 3 Beethoven in the public baths

Our debate here is ignited, in reality, more by the public and public spaces than by art itself. The question to be posed here is less about whether the art is “good enough” for the public realm, and more about whether the public realm is in any condi­tion not only to tolerate this art, but to support it. I think we first need to be radical and render harmless our idea of the “spatialised public”. We need a better idea of what really passes off as public life in the nooks, crannies and streets of the town, in the desolate squares or by shopping mall entrances. From art’s point of view it is not unproductive to suppose that when it finds its way outside, it is, in a way, entering enemy territory. It stands a good chance of misunderstanding the prevailing state of local occurrences. And an even greater chance of missing those that will have proliferated there in five years’ time. In no way should it be supposed that artists are insufficiently engaged in real life.

And “enemy” is in no way meant to suggest that the subjects encountering the work have no interest in art. After all, thanks to “sociocultural fusion”, most people have some kind of interest in it these days. “Enemy” means that what art potentially takes to be the “public’s perception” is, in reality, a complex, precarious and localised mish-mash of practices and communications. It develops the moments and stances of its aesthetic attentiveness in its surroundings so unpredictably and with such inconsistent patterns that, given the somewhat perplexing term “publicness”, there is very probably hardly any contact between works and observers – and thus no effect. At this point you could rightfully point out that art since Actionism or Fluxus has adapted accordingly. That is very true. We will, however, soon see that the success of “Beethoven in the public baths” or of “Nam June Paik in Harvard Square” will contri­bute to an understanding of the highly deceitful, concealed characteristics of today’s public realm. 4 Surface, occupation

The transformation from “public” to a resolution of the term may be determined sociologically or politically. In our context, however, we are dealing with the spacialisation of common sense. It would therefore be interesting to see the material state of the town and its spaces as a thermometer for the alteration of “publicness”. For our urban portraits at the ETH’s Studio Basel, we established two observation concepts that see the town not so much for its architectural qualities but as a form of ethnology of the social use made of the town. The two concepts are “occupation” and “surface”. “Occupation” describes the takeover of the physical reality of the town – its buildings, streets, installations and amenities – by realworld use. “Surface” describes, in the broadest sense, the material state of the town’s surface, skin and base. These two aspects describe, in terms of gesture and expression, the pattern adopted by urban culture when establishing itself within its walls. They describe the town not from the standpoint of its plan-­ ning, but as the platform of an “application of a town” in constant flux. To a certain extent, we are observing the impact of urban collective psychology. The “publicness” is that part of the impact in which the town as collective – or as collectives – leaves tracks and marks in the material space. It is therefore also the place of art. And art is both at the same time: It is like a tattoo on the skin of the town, where the community reveals its innermost spirit as a mark. But art is also “occupation”, the takeover of the collective space by artistic utilisation. It is therefore about this social and political space. It is the spacialisation of what was once the “space of the polis”. It is therefore worth singling out a

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few aspects of the transformation of the “public” by means of the altered urban realm, insofar as they are of a general nature in European towns. 5 Isotopy

One of the most far-reaching changes of the urban realm is its tendency towards isotopy. If we take the town of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts – or, if you prefer, that of the Charter of Athens – they both produce order by establishing difference. Almost all transformational forces in present-day towns tend, by contrast, towards isotopy, i.e. they have a propensity, potentially, for establishing equivalency at every turn. That also applies to what earlier was the “urban public”. This development has a number of consequences, one of which is paradox. The grammar of the public use of the town disintegrates into a host of utterly dissimilar, unstable and socially segmented forms of use. However, these can appear at any time and at any place. Seen in this light, the probability of a particular event occurring or not tends to be similar wherever you are in the town. Towns have thus forfeited the tranquillity of an urban foreground, middle ground and background, as has art. Towns respond nervously to this question. That is why “site-specificity” is required for almost any urban concept of public art. The trouble is, what is specific about a place other than its coordinates these days? And if we find its specificity, will it still be the same in three years’ time? Naturally, we can describe the architecture of a place as stable. But does the place still signify what it was originally intended to, or what it has become over recent decades, or in the last ten years? And does it still fulfil that role? Didn’t the street five blocks down recently become the urban hotspot? And will it remain that way? In a society that watches films in warehouses, turns town halls into hotels, puts cutting-edge nightclubs in 1950s office blocks and lives in its own office or emigrates to the Internet, it is hard to say what is really happening where and with whom. And it has become almost impossible to predict events, even for art that makes that its job. The spatial organisation of “publicness” has become like a film of oil. 6 Tattoo in asphalt

One of the most thrilling phenomena of a town is its skin, its surface – especially its base. In parallel to the isotopic transformation, the base has forfeited important properties as a platform for urban life, and acquired others. The topography of varying intensities and varying pressures leaves imprints in the public realm. The sum of a highly diverse range of uses as a consequence of the dissolution of the public contract of agreed objectives is leading to a kind of over-determination of the base: It is overloaded by an excess of objectives, roles, uses and meanings. Remarkably, the town’s base is not rendered indistinct as a result. Quite the opposite:

It is being subjected to sustained territorial clarifi­ cation, straightening, boundary correction and figurative loading. This pressure is turning the base into a medium – into a continuous, sensitive skin, as it were. Anyone who doubts this needs only visualise every­thing in the streets and parks that has been screwed together, painted, refurbished, bonded, delimited, designated and marked out. It is this overloaded, overwrought and endless skin that, possibly more than any physical changes, has shifted the conditions for art in this realm. Regardless of the form of “publicness” being presen­ted in it, this loading is robbing the urban realm of a great deal of what its traditional artworks were in need of: serenity, ambiguity, indeterminacy. It goes without saying that art is entirely capable of coping with this new scenario. But, first and foremost, the artwork is then threatened by the same redundancy as encountered by the fourth commuter newspaper dispenser to arrive at the tram stop alongside the other three already there. And that is no metaphor! This is a competition between media in an un­ certain venue. Our towns are all full of art­works, including new ones, that stand around pointlessly like half-empty free newspaper dispensers. 7 Demarcation lines

The surface of the urban realm has, then, become a mass media – untamed, panting. In order to work in this directness, this screen has a further clarifi­ cation by way of condition: a sharpening of the demarcation line between private and non-private space. “Non-private” in no way means “public”, but rather “not under private control”. Actually, the present-day town no longer has any half-public realm, no unaccounted for or transitional zones. What we call public space is what is not under private control. This space has actually even be­come hyper-public and is extremely clearly delineated. But, even in this realm, privateness asserts a key role. The field on which sovereignty over this realm is disputed is at the level of the media. Throughout society, aesthetic and other forms of communication have long since harmonised themselves and blurred their boundaries. However, nowhere do the various media strands wedge themselves together spatially more clearly and consistently than in the open town. When communication, marketing and corporate identity get hold of the hyper-public realm, essentially what emerges is a simple competition of representation between the state and private individuals. When that happens, it is not about the private control of space, but about the private occupation of the public realm with meaningfulness. A substantial part of this offensive is aesthetic in character. This development is not new, nor is it particularly surprising. What is remarkable is the size and speed

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of the change. Just imagine the public space-related marketing restrictions of the 2006 football world cup in the society of the 1960s, or the plastic cow installations of inner-city shop owners, whose inglo­rious origins lie in Zurich. Of course, art – a lot of art – is now permitted, but the art realm of the town finds itself to a certain extent under hegemonial threat. That is also due to change in the town’s archi­tecture itself.

communication, of representation and of art – means that it performs exceptionally successfully in this new exterior realm. I would go further: it is a sub­stantive part of it. Architectural works are becoming hyper-sculptures, their stage is perforce the nonspace or un-space that isolates and liberates the sculp­ture. The silence in between is not weakness, but a prerequisite of its effect. The logical consequence is the counter-attack: artists now create archi­tecture as sculptures.

8 “Lipstick on the face of a gorilla”

This transformation was completed the moment that architecture in the town was able to establish itself as a different, yet equal autonomous “artwork” in the public realm. This change of status is, in reality, an exceptionally multi-layered opera­tion. Parado­ xically, however, this aggressive attack on the structure of the urban realm by the new urban archi­tecture is not only intentional, but a prerequisite.

What does that mean? Although the physical spaces still exist – they are also “public” in the techni­cal sense – a lot of work is done to deprive them of mean­ing. The spaces are occupied by an unstable interplay of forces, of a whole array of interests, of purposes, aims, initiatives, movements and func­tions. That is the reason that they have become erratic, inconsistent and mobile. Boris Groys calls these “uncertain spaces”, and he sees in them a fundamental contradiction to the West’s understanding of art, which needs defined, safe space. In a certain sense, many of these former “public spaces” have now even become exceptionally political and vital, others “controlled areas” or “closed com­munities”. There is barely anything left in between. Open urban spaces are nowadays basically all platforms for pieces that change constantly, which occur or are manipulated, fail or explode. Either way, they are no longer places in which a “polis” is constituted or represented – politics without polis, as it were.

Traditionally, alongside function, the first and super­ordinate logic to which architecture must subject itself to is the interpretation of the so-called “urban development situation”. Linked with this is the idea that every town has its own distinct syntax and grammar. This, above all else, organises the public realm and public functions. In the last ten years numerous projects have been designed and built, their relationship to the existing town perhaps marginally related to these grammatical rules. Its two core messages are:

Architecture has responded to this. Its clients seek buildings with a grand entrance to this uncertain, endless space without characteristics. And instead of the uncontrollable space in front of the building, they seek the controllable inner stage with the interior “publicness” of the building, which is separated from the exterior space. These buildings have this profile to thank for their emergence. The marked disparity between controlled and open urban realms could become one of the constituting features of the town of the 21st century.

1) Its formal principle refers to a large extent to itself, i.e. it claims autonomy, and 2) It organises, in its core, a controlled “sub-publicness” that is clearly separate from the public realm.

11 Niki’s Michelin man

We are now finally approaching architecture. For around twenty years now, architecture and fine art have been developing new forms of interaction. Following important experiments that lasted until the 1990s, the development quickly lost its tentative character. Architecture relatively quickly moved to exploit art directly as a source of its own ecstasy. The hyper-ventilated building itself now confronts the artwork with a provocation similar to that of public space. Norman Foster called this “lipstick on the face of a gorilla”. (...) 9 Master and servant

In terms of what concerns the state or patrons of the arts and art itself, the art centre is naturally the prototype for this programme, ahead of the hotel and the shopping mall.

Why is this relevant to the issues we are discussing? 10 Hyper-sculptures and non-spaces

Architectures are an extremely precise indicator of the change in “publicness”. Or to put it more accurately: These new buildings are an expression that “publicness”no longer exists – at least not in the way that we recognise the term. And the new buildings themselves contribute actively to its disappearance. The very fact that architecture is not an art – rather, in its very genetic code, it incorporates multilayered, indeed blended, forms of convention, of

The fact that, despite this, many interventions, per­formances and actions in this now-feral open space have been highly successful in attracting interest in the last twenty years is, against this backdrop, not so much a surprise as a confirmation. The “uncertain spaces”, now political rather than public, are spaces in which art acts, even agitates. For uncer­tainty is what is so remarkable about this sphere of activity. From the relative haphazardness and unpredictability of what happens in public through localised and chronological delimitation, the action character of art brings that one – ultimately “political” – moment to fruition. Art manages to

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anticipate and, as it were, to bring this eruption in art form. Either that, or art flirts with it, such that it can barely be distinguished from other media occurrences. The opposite happens to the wonderfully light angel of Niki de Saint Phalle in Zurich railway station. In the 1980s the old train shed was unveiled as an immense public space. Since then it has served as a venue for Christmas markets, fashion shows for major labels, PR exhibitions and anniversary parties for banks. In these frequent moments, the angel acts like the tethered advertising balloon of whichever organiser is occupying the space – a kind of captured Michelin man from Dolce and Gabbana... 12 So what....?

My observations have simply been considerations of a hunch. They relate mainly to the state of “publicness”, and only to the public space of the town, which is certainly not all the collective space. It could be, goes the hunch, that nowadays most artworks erected or installed in this space refer to a state of matter, of social relations, communication forms or power and control relationships – refer, in short, to a “publicness” that has long since, as an amoeba-like plural, stolen away without looking back. So what...? It is evidently nevertheless possible to enter or engage with this space dynamically. Incidentally, the hunch will not lead to anything: The future will see appreciably more art installed in public spaces than before. Finally, these considerations leave just one question hanging in the air, and this question is in no way intended to be rhetorical: “Why, what is the reason we should install art in a space that has become so peculiar?”

Marcel Meili is a practising architect in Zurich and a Professor of Architecture and Design at the ETH Zurich. In 1999 he co-founded the ETH Basel Contemporary City Institute, where he teaches Urban Development. The above text formed the basis of a talk given by Marcel Meili in 2006 at a symposium on Art in Public Space in Graz. It appears in print here for the first time.

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No one knows how things will turn out — Marina Belobrovaja on the need to provoke conflict, the difference between the personal and the private, and the difficulty of repeating success Beat Schläpfer in conversation with Marina Belobrovaja

“Marina Belobrovaja, your action, “Öffentliche Abschiebung” (Public Deportation), which happened on Zurich’s Helvetiaplatz in 2007 and took as its theme Switzerland’s deportation practice, was the one that arguably attracted most attention to your work. Is there any difference between actions performed in an art venue, where the visitors more or less know the rules, and on the street, where people may not be familiar with the rules?” Marina Belobrovaja “The way I see things today, there’s no way I could perform an action in a neutral setting – a “white cube” – where I would have to accept the ground rules of a symbolic space. In a theatre or an art gallery, we all agree on the existing conventions. When I perform an action in an artistic context, the space it takes place in has to be treated as one that is public and social. As a consequence, I have performed my “Kunstwette” (Art Bet) exclusively in art venues, not least because the project explicitly targets those institutions as social constructs. In that respect, there’s no difference between the way I work in the street and the art venue.” Beat Schläpfer “For you, the art venue is a public place like any other?” Marina Belobrovaja “Exactly. At the same time, this stance of mine is probably linked with a certain wish to distance myself from the explicit art scene. The fact that I’ve increasingly resorted to working outside in the public realm in recent years has certainly contributed to this trend.” Beat Schläpfer “And yet, if you’ll allow me to come back to this point: You say that the setting is irrelevant and that it’s all about your attitude to it and what you do in it. ‘I have to take the setting as a theme so that I can perform my interventions’. Are there spaces that you find of particular interest? Zurich as a city has particular views on where art in public space makes sense and where it is less suitable: problematic trunk roads carrying heavy traffic, high-profile or as yet undefined places, underpasses, for instance. I don’t know if you’ve done anything in an underpass yet – probably not. You come from an entirely different direction.”

Beat Schläpfer

“You know, in actual fact, art interests me – (long pause) less and less – art, that is, that’s exhibited as a work and can be viewed. That said, I consciously use that format, those connections, that network to make things possible in that way. I’ve chosen the path of direct communication even though it’s clear to me that this concept appears corrupted. What I mean by that is the wish to achieve a certain immediacy in the exchange, in the exploration. Throughout this, I’m also aware that I myself always run the danger of being corrupted in all that I do.” Beat Schläpfer “Your aesthetic follows different rules from those that apply to working with conventional materials, sculptural objects or pictures.” Marina Belobrovaja “It’s more that the aesthetic of my work emerges from its function. In my Public Deportation project, for instance, the posters looked that way because they had to be able to resist rain. That’s why I fashio­ ned them out of a shower curtain. In a way it’s a kind of anti-aesthetic, but I didn’t deliberately produce them to be that. I simply don’t want to have to tackle these issues. Aesthetic considerations in my works are much more part of the dramaturgical issues, of the way people are brought to and engaged in an action, of the strategy that underlies the communication with them.” Beat Schläpfer “You think in terms of time axes, processes, possibilities – in fact like a scenario, although not from the point of view of achieving a final state, but of establishing a starting point that leaves the end open. You once said succinctly in an interview: ‘The state as things are now is my theme and my inspiration.’ I think that this is characteristic. There is a starting point and there is an inspiration, and the path – but where it leads is left open. Perhaps I can link this with a question about the opportunities art holds for political action. To what extent can artworks (however you want to define them) affect political processes? What are the possibilities here, the limitations?” Marina Belobrovaja

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1

4

2

5

3

6

1  KBZ – Karriere Beratung Zürich, Kunsthalle Zurich 2006.

4–6  Öffentliche Abschiebung, Helvetiaplatz Zurich, 2007. Video stills: Emma Nilsson http://marinabelobrovaja.ch/

2 Heissgetränkeautomat, in association with Johan Herak, Toniareal Zurich 2007. Photo: Valentin Altorfer. 3 Denkmal der Erwerbsarbeit, Theaterplatz Baden 2008. Photo: Valentin Altorfer.

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8

11

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12

7–8 Karussell – part of “Der längste Tag”, Kunsthof Zurich 2007/2008. 9 Gemüsebau – in association with passers-by, Helvetiaplatz Zurich 2009.

13 10 Kunstwette.ch, on the ship by Heinrich Gartentor, Thun 2010. Photo: Emma Nilsson. 11 Kunstwette.ch, at Agent Double, Geneva 2010. Photo: Emma Nilsson. 12–13  Numbers, Names & Love, in association with Laura Kalauz, Residents’ Office, Zurich, 2010. http://marinabelobrovaja.ch/

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“I think that art is capable of making things visible. If I think of my work, it’s clear to me that I try, in a way, to generate conflict, provoke a collision of out­looks or of views. It’s by seeing these conflicts through, I believe, that you can arrive at clarity in the political sense. The question is, okay – what tools and strategies do I use to achieve that? From my point of view, the use of authentic means is crucial. It means that if I involve the media in a project, I try to leverage them as a force for shaping political opinion in its original sense. Or that the people I involve in the actions must remain in the roles and functions they have in real life. The fact that the projects are real and don’t take place in the isolation of a symbolic space makes the conflicts, which I provoke artificially, real.” Beat Schläpfer “That means it’s about the construction of imaginary screenplays or scenarios that formulate these conflicts as precisely as possible and get to the heart of the matter?” Marina Belobrovaja “Yes, exactly. Earlier on, you asked how I arrive at the themes for my pro­jects. I think that a burning wish to explore and problematise a particular issue can, when all is said and done, only emerge from one’s own involvement. For instance, that’s how the series of projects on food arose. It was based on my own conflict with ethical and political aspects of consumer behaviour. In doing so, it’s never about me personally telling my story, but about me as a cipher for these controversies; I draw inspiration from my own involvement.” Beat Schläpfer “Are you saying that concern, in the sense of contemporaneity, is the only prerequisite for being able to make artistic statements that are fundamental, engrossed and engaging!? What role does personal experience play in this; to what extent are the projects based on you as a person?” Marina Belobrovaja “I would always expect art to be personal, otherwise it’s really boring. On the other hand, privateness is of no interest whatsoever. I don’t want to do any art that puts me centre stage in the work. My role in my projects is far more that of mediator, medium or example. My ‘Art Bet’ project last summer was about betting money – like on a horse race – on the outcome of the Swiss Art Awards, of which I was one of the artist nominees. If your nominee won, you received some money. In connection with this project, I’ve often been accused of criticising Switzerland’s art scene while being a participant in it. But that’s exactly how I mean it to be – I’m part of the system, and that encourages and entitles me to problematise it. There is no ‘being outside’ the system. Marina Belobrovaja

“I believe you – I’ve looked around the projects you’ve done in recent years. I’ve been struck by how often you can be seen performing two pirouettes – more often than not in a highly playful way.” Marina Belobrovaja “Really?!” Beat Schläpfer “But in differing directions. On the one hand, you’re part of, and participate in, the system, and on the other hand you make that system an object of discussion. If you’ll allow me to come back to one of the projects you’re often identified with, “Public Deportation”, something similar can be seen happening there. It’s clearly an artistic project, a public intervention, but it’s at the same time a presupposition in your personal experience that you put at our disposal by means of art.” Marina Belobrovaja “It goes without saying that in ‘Public Deportation’, I was caught in a sustained clinch between a real, existing private situation and an artistic abstraction; that said, I primarily saw myself assuming the role of mediator. Mediating, the teas­ing out of controversial considerations in chats with passers-by, that was my aim.” Beat Schläpfer “What’s exciting about your concept is that you involve people in something they, at first, know nothing about. I also assume that you, too, have no idea where it will lead – you are part of it.” Marina Belobrovaja “Exactly. I strive to develop a setting incorporating an impulse – or a double pirouette, as you call it. It’s not about confronting participants with statements, but about posing questions. I’m also subject to the situation that arises as a result, because when a setting has been established, my behaviour is then as situational as for everyone else.” Beat Schläpfer “Is one of the attractions of interventions in the public realm that you come across completely different people?” Marina Belobrovaja “Yes, sure. The people involved here are not assuming roles as in the theatre, but real roles within a real situation.” Beat Schläpfer “These focal points keep surfacing in your work: the precarious situation of a person without official ID, or the precarious situation in connection with food, or the precarious situation of an artist in the art market. These are key words that you use as starting points to reflect on them further and bring them to a point.” Beat Schläpfer

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“’Bring to a point’: I like that. I’ve been thinking and reading about the concept of politics quite a lot in recent months, including stuff by the political scientist, Chantal Muff. According to her, we’re living in a post-political state in which we’re always striving for consensual order. Muff argues forcefully against this, as she believes that the essence of politics consists of dealing in controversy and confrontation – that’s the only way that people can really identify with differing political outlooks and positions. This insight for me was a real eye-opener. She really gets to the heart of what I’ve been tackling for so long with the concept of conflict in my work.” Beat Schläpfer “Today’s political system is just a per­ver­ted reality of concordance and democracy. It wasn’t meant to be that way originally. These days in this consultation-oriented democracy we have in Switzerland, issues are worked on until they become unrecognisable, here and there positions are brushed under any old carpet, and we end up with laws that almost no one wanted apart from a few lobbyists. I think that is the difference between the ideal state of a democracy and the reality. I think, too, that people should be more distinctive here. One of the problems of virtually limitless freedom is that things become unim­ portant and everything remains stuck in a state of non-committal inertia. How do you stop this freedom from leading to the death of awareness and of attentiveness, to indifference in a quiet grey hiss, in which everything sinks?” Marina Belobrovaja

“In the former Communist countries, you could observe the effects of this kind of censorship at the beginning of the nineties. The second Russian avantgarde in the 1970s was an unbelievably huge movement that was known beyond the confines of the Iron Curtain. After Perestroika, it all suddenly went quiet. Jacques Rancière, whose work I’ve been studying a lot in recent months, operates in this connection with the concept of dissent. In his book The Emancipated Spectator, he discusses the end of a two-part world in which artists were much more able to draw a distinction between them and the regime in power, and thus adopt an oppositio­nal attitude through their creative output. But what do you do when this divided horizon disappears? When can we all swim free? In this connection, Rancière discusses a number of examples of today’s politically motivated art in the light of his concept of dissent; one of them is a photographic work by the American, Martha Rosler. The images show dreadful things about the existential conditions of our society, they are accusatory; however, all they do is confirm us as spectators of our own guilt – something we have known for a long time. There is thus no shift, no intentionally created discrepancy or, as Rancière would put it, no true rousing dissent between our expectations, our consciousness, and what the artist is presenting us.” Beat Schläpfer “Freedom is limitless, and provoca­tions produce no more than a tired smile. But how should we handle freedom – how do we find new ways? And how do we get around self-­censorship?“ Marina Belobrovaja “That’s a hellishly difficult question. What strategies does one deploy to get around this expectation, this general con­sensus – ‘Oh yes, of course globalisation has contributed to the fact that we consume so much!’ and so forth. I however think that the task and potentia­lities of art are not to express opinions, but to create situations in which people are confronted with questions and forced to make up their own minds. We keep needing a new reflection, every day and for each new project: How do I manage to keep taking into consideration the perspective of the opposite side? Because the moment you no longer find controversy and disagreement in a work of art, it becomes uninteresting and harmless. One shouldn’t get into that habit. If I do and I don’t try to do something about it, I’m dead.” Beat Schläpfer “As an artist.” Marina Belobrovaja

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“Yes. It’s a constant danger. I don’t wish to over-dramatise it, but I do carry that thought around with me all the time: Am I really always capable of calling myself into question? Am I really always capable of avoiding compromise? The reality is, of course, that I do compromise – two months ago, for example, I took part in an exhibi­tion that contained a documentation of my work – utterly pointless. I let myself be talked into it because I liked the curator. Why on earth did I do it – this kind of presentation of tinned goods reveals nothing about me whatsoever.” Beat Schläpfer “And the other side – where you mana­ ged to avoid compromises: what projects come to mind first?” Marina Belobrovaja “You know, it’s actually like this – when a project works really well, it’s terrible. Already the following day, you’re assailed by the fear that you’ll never be that successful again. I’m the artist known for the ‘Art Bet’ or the ‘Public Deportation’, but I want to move on. I’m currently trying a new way of working. I’ve recently got into art research, and now I want to devote myself fully to this idea; as part of my artistic endeavour, I want to adopt an explicitly research-oriented stance. Until now I’ve worked by developing a situation with a beginning and an end. The requisite re­search and thinking took place before, in the hidden run-up to the project. Now I’m keen to begin a project primarily because I’m interested in it and to let its progress be led by the research, without knowing exactly how the work will turn out in the end. However, I’m living with the ever-present fear that I may not be able to cope with the uncertainty.” Beat Schläpfer “Success is so hard to repeat.” Marina Belobrovaja “It certainly is.” Marina Belobrovaja

Marina Belobrovaja is an action artist. Her projects, which

primarily take place in the public realm, tackle sociopolitical phenomena in a provocative yet at the same time playful manner. She joined the Lucerne School of Art and Design in 2010 as a member of the research staff.

Beat Schläpfer , Germanist, dramaturge, organiser of cultural events and

journalist, is programme head of the MAS in Cultural Management at the Lucerne School of Art and Design; he also heads Kulturelle Konzepte in Zurich.

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Imprint

Lucerne school of art and Design No. 1 – April 2011 urban.art.marks Art explores the urban art space Publisher

Gabriela Christen Contributors

Marina Belobrovaja, Gabriela Christen, Christoph Doswald, Ruth Genner, Silvia Henke, Stefan Kaegi, Marcel Meili, Jacqueline Parish, Pamela Rosenkranz, Christoph Schenker, Beat Schläpfer, Manfred Seiler, Nika Spalinger, Peter Spillmann, Juri Steiner, Till Velten, Elena Wilhelm, Gesa Ziemer Editor

Beat Schläpfer Translation

Apostroph, Lucerne Proof Reading

Zoe Dowlen, Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts Graphic Concept and Design

C2F · Cybu Richli & Fabienne Burri, Luzern mit Dominique Fischer Cover pages feature photographs by the Lucerne School of Art and Design

1st cover page: Boris Chouvellon, Sculpture in the Reuss. 4th cover page: Andreas Wiegand, Baselstrasse project. © 2011 interact Luzern, Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, www.hslu.ch/interact © Texts and pictures: authors/ named sources © Design: C2F · Cybu Richli & Fabienne Burri, Lucerne Bibliographical information from the German Library: The German Library lists this publication in the German National Bibliography; detailed bibliographic information is available online at http://dnb. ddb.de. ISBN 978-3-906413-83-9 We are grateful to the Civil Engineering Office of the city of Zurich, Public Art Task Force, and the zeugindesign Foundation, Lucerne, which have supported this publication with sizeable financial contributions.

April 2011

Nº1

Hochschule Luzern Design & Kunst

Urban.Art.Marks Art explores the urban space

Introduction S. 1

Arts marks the development of urban centres By Gabriela Christen

Performative research

Observing

N° 1  —  LUCERNE SCHOOL OF ART AND DESIGN  —  URBAN.ART.MARKS

S. 5

By Gesa Ziemer

Telescope in an urban setting

S. 10

By Stefan Kaegi

“Fuck Olympia”

S. 14

By Juri Steiner

Researching S. 17

Insight and intensification By Christoph Schenker

S. 22

BaBeL in Lucerne

By Silvia Henke and Nika Spalinger S. 27

Mapping the public sphere By Peter Spillmann

S. 31

Cooperative building and spatial productions By Elena Wilhelm

Speaking S. 36

The inexhaustible need for dialogue By Christoph Doswald

S. 37

The city as a dubious system Manfred Seiler in conversation with Till Velten

Action S. 42

Art needs the urban realm — and vice versa? By Ruth Genner

S. 45

Pamela Rosenkranz

Research and Speculation on Schwamedingen S. 50

Axes as urban spaces in the city of Zurich By Jacqueline Parish

S. 53

Hyper-sculptures & non-spaces By Marcel Meili

S. 58

No one knows how things will turn out

Beat Schläpfer in conversation with Marina Belobrovaja