—A short statement on the predicament of experimental art
Published in “Borderline,” Pact Zollverein, Essen, 2006
Art is what artists do. It develops from what other artists have done before. Contemporary artists are specialized in reading such genealogies. One of the things artists have been doing for a while is to systematically test the boundaries of what can be considered art. The resulting artwork may look a lot like social work, activism, architecture, design etc., but this does not make the artists designers, social workers, or architects. Their art is significant neither as amateur sociology, nor as grassroots politics, nor as dilettante science, but as professional art, which experiments with disciplinary categories. In this sense, bad social science can be good art. The historical purpose of such experimentation has been to escape the constraints of academism and salon art and, in doing so, to render art meaningful. (In other words, it was an expression of the simultaneous desires for freedom and relevance.)
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—Principles of Negative Art
Published under the Title "Proclamation" in Frieze Magazine, Nr. 122, April 2009
Negative Art defines itself negatively. It can only be described by a catalog of what it is not.
Negative Art does not entertain, educate, illustrate, or criticize. It does not inform or amuse either.
It produces neither sublime nor spiritual experiences.
Negative Art avoids being put to use. It refuses to provide what other existing practices or areas can deliver.
Negative Art cannot follow any program or manifesto.
In order to assure its existence, Negative Art may mimic other forms of art. It may raise expectations associated with such practices. It will, however, not fulfill these expectations.
As everything is being traded, Negative Art will be traded too. Yet no matter what exchange value it is assigned, Negative Art always carries within itself the knowledge of its profound worthlessness.
Negative Art compromises what it touches. It’s the rotten apple in a bowl of fresh fruit, the steel bolt in an aluminum thread.
Whenever it is recognized as a positive entity, it transforms itself and becomes unrecognizable again.
At its core it is pure resistance.
Negative Art is true art while all other types of art are eccentrically veiled forms of employment.
—So nervous
Published in "Sensitivity Training—Art and Humor in Nervous Times", Textem Verlag, Hamburg, 2022
Themed exhibitions on art and humour can be tricky. You know before entering the gallery that the art is supposed to be funny, but comedy feeds on surprise. In a jokey context, joking is what’s expected. If someone farts loudly in church, it can be pretty funny. If everybody in church were to fart all the time, praying would be hilarious. Context is crucial.
Popular attitudes towards comedy are changing. Much of what used to amuse mainstream audiences only a few years ago is now found to be problematic and offensive, both in content and form. As someone who has frequently worked with aggressive forms of humour, I am annoyed by this. But the erstwhile convenient defence that “it’s just a joke” no longer convinces me, either. Comedy is having to learn accountability, and it should. It is not easy, though, to nav- igate this paradigm shift. There is tremendous nervousness around all things funny, and this leads to largely predictable, pointless, highly polarised debates. This text argues tentatively and extremely subjectively for a less binary, more fine-tuned engagement. It suggests the cultivation of sensitivities and comedic acu- ities that would allow for a different kind of dialogue about comedy’s operations and transgressions. In most discus- sions, comedy is treated as if it were just a tool, like a chisel or a shovel, that serves a purpose which we may or may not approve of. But humour is more complex than that: in comedy, a shovel can be a tool, but can also be the theme, content, and meaning of the shovel. Humour is not just a rhetorical method. It is a way of facing the world, a posture, a philosophical attitude.
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—Tools for Fools
Published in "Dysfunctional Comedy", Sternberg Press, 2016
Art history repeats itself. First as comedy, second as academy. If contemporary art were to have a creation myth, it would be Western avantgarde experimentation. Its every move is studied and revered like sacred scripture. Any genealogical link to the avantgarde ancestors bestows a glow, an instant nobility and gravity, to whatever work of art. Yet many of the most consequential acts of the avantgarde could be read as comical maneuvers, even jokes, with established art serving as the setup and each subsequent avantgarde move as the latest punch line. You’re in a sculpture show? Send a urinal. Give a piano concert, but don’t make a sound! Take your audience to a garbage dump instead of the gallery! More often than not, these operations were carried out with an attitude of utter seriousness. What little of the artists’ wit still shone through has been subsequently sanctified, sanitized, academized. There is a history of comedy in art, and it is buried under a mountain of portentousness. There is a related history of busy trade between art and comedic entertainment, with entertainers providing the ideas for high-art innovations.
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—Welcome to the Palliative Turn
Published in "The Palliative Turn," Nr. 1, Biercke, Berlin 2022
You will die and so will I.
So much we know.
What’s new is that there may be nobody around to pick up where we left off.
The steam engine was invented barely 300 years ago. If humans stopped burning coal, gas, oil today and no cow ever farted again, it would still take between 100.000 and 400.000 years for the earth’s climate to cool down to pre-industrial levels. This calculation brings home the scope and time frame of our problems. More than half of the greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere have been added since the year 2000.
For about a decade, I have been facilitating a dialogue between artists and climate scientists working at the Swedish Polar Research Station. With increasing urgency, the scientists have been asking the artists how they can communicate their knowledge of the imminent catastrophe we are facing in ways that have an impact. Might there be another narrative, different from the ones we have been using, something beyond skinny polar bears, collapsing ice shelves, and the frail, blue marble, something that could mobilize populations and politicians to finally act? Art, the scientists are hoping, may be able to create the necessary effect that factual information, clearly doesn’t achieve.
A recent cancer treatment forced me to consider death in concrete and personal terms. Along the way, I met health care professionals and fellow patients whose pragmatism and kindness under extreme conditions were incredible. Against this backdrop, much of contemporary art felt somewhat irrelevant. In a coincidental development, the cartoonist Marcus Weimer and I were commissioned by the German Association for Palliative Medicine to provide a ‘humor concept’ for the international convention they were organizing for September 2020. They had been considering how humor could benefit palliative medicine and care; not just in the form of hospital clowns, but rather as an overall shift in attitude toward death, which is not only tragic but also grotesque, and therefore potentially funny. The convention, whose title translates as ‘Controversies at Life’s End,’ focused primarily on the contrasting strategies of assisted suicide, on the one hand, and palliative care for the dying, on the other. It was a nuanced debate well above our cartoonists’ heads. What struck me most was how much of palliative thinking is about the value of life, the pleasure of being alive even on the last lap. There were stories of ingenious hospital staff deep-freezing liquor to put tiny bits of ice into a patient's mouth, allowing her to taste her favorite whisky when she was no longer able to swallow, and the Mother Superior at a Catholic hospice who, against all her beliefs, hired a prostitute to spend time with a seventeen-year-old who didn’t want to die without having had sex. Palliative care is not only about mitigating suffering; it is at least as much about affirming the value of life in general, and specifically of the individual life that is about to end. It honors the richness of sensory experience until the very end.
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