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Craig Martin, Thomas Hirschhorn and
Rainer Ganahl, Summer 2001
Conversation for Perche? - done in London
during the presentation of our books for BOOKWORKS. this interveiw is
aboiut to appear in Perche - an italian art magazine but has run financially
a bit too dry to appear.. so lets see and hope.. as of today, there still
is som hope. 41//04 (soiunds like a joke of hte day)
Conversation for Perche?
The following conversation between Rainer
Ganahl, Thomas Hirschhorn and Craig Martin occurred at the launch of Warm
Seas, a series of four books edited by Craig Martin for Book Works. The
four titles by Ganahl, Hirschhorn, Christian Nold and Daniel Jewesbury
were published in July 2001.
CM: One of the things that was of influence
to Warm Seas was derived from Michel Tournier’s book Friday: the
idea of the individual in relation to the Other person. I feel that your
project Thomas, with the bridge which linked the Freedom Press Anarchist
bookshop to the Whitechapel Gallery café as part of Protest &
Survive and your project Rainer, with the construction of reading seminars
on Marx, was of interest to me with regard to this idea of the Other.
Perhaps we could discuss this first of all?
TH: I believe that a book is a real tool for prolonging an experience.
It provides the possibility of collecting the experience or the time spent
together. It also gives the opportunity to bring to other geographical
spaces an experience that was initially on a very local level.
CM: So you obviously consider that the book can achieve this more so than
the nature of the fixed artwork?
TH: I believe that even today when we are living in the age of the internet
a book is a primary tool for allowing time to slow down: inertia. Which
is perhaps quite anachronistic and paradoxical, but I believe this is
the power that books will always have.
CM: Do you think that’s partially about the nature of study in its
own right – the act of taking ones time? A coming to terms with the
material in the book?
TH: No, it’s about the people or the audience who have the book and
make the decision to open the book, so it’s about extracting the
information.
CM: Rainer, do you think this process of extracting information from books
relates to the act of discussion in your own work – particularly
with Reading Karl Marx?
RG: Actually, first of all I’m still completely outraged at the way
the Italian Police killed this demonstrator yesterday (July 20, 2001),
the way they helplessly shot this guy down. There is the image of the
body lying on the floor and the Land Rover drives over the body. They
crushed TV cameras and beat-up 60 year-old people.
CM: How people act together is of the utmost importance. So, for example,
are the police aware of the other person, the protestor as another individual,
or do they just see them as the enemy? One of the other books in the series
by Christian Nold is about this idea of whether the confrontational nature
of recent protest culture, between the state police and the protestors,
is in fact just a game. So the book concerns itself with the idea of the
protestors constructing their own riposte to the police violence.
What we discussed in your book Rainer was the idea of reading as a form
of activism in its own right, i.e., learning, taking on board the knowledge
and moving with it.
RG: I would also like to say that what’s interesting here is the
context within which people read. For example when you read in the context
of the university, it has a legitimate function - that is, when you read
for your profession. But when you read without a context you have the
possibility of ‘becoming suspicious’, simply through the process
of reading and reading and reading….
CM: Which do you think is the most powerful of the two; the ability to
choose; or that of being forced to learn, which is what would appear to
be a failure of university education, the need to learn facts. On the
flipside, ones own activity of reading allows one to move and think in
a much more heuristic way.
RG: I think there are millions of readings, but reading itself is a certain
kind of culture. I don’t mean it in a bourgeois sense, but something
that needs some kind of time on its own. It creates an attention span,
a certain kind of time capsule if you want. Fundamentally it affects,
influences and changes people and their way of seeing things and understanding
events.
CM: Do you think what Thomas mentioned about slowing down is pertinent?
RG: Sure, but some people have a very fast handling of books. Most books
are just bought and placed somewhere.
TH: That’s ok.
RG: Everybody has to come to terms with these questions by them selves.
I don’t want to tell them what to read or how to read.
TH: For me, a book is an object as well, but an object which has an energy
contained within it. Even when you don’t read it you have the opportunity
to take part in the energy contained in the book. So, I’m in favour
of this: the idea that the object is not one of appearance but one of
potentiality.
CM: So, the ability to read in the future?
TH: Yes.
RG: Or even just the identity they give.
TH: But not in a way where the book is exposed to other people, but simply
me with this object.
CM: Was that the idea behind your work in the exhibition Protest &
Survive at The Whitechapel Gallery, particularly your initial plan to
link the Freedom Press anarchist bookshop and the Whitechapel Library
together. Did you see it as a form of pure energy or intensity?
TH: That was true with the project in the beginning, the idea to bring
‘books’ together, not the content of the books, only the books
themselves. This is another way in which I like to work with philosophical
books, but with mainstream magazines as well, basically with printed material
in the most expansive way.
RG: I have a little bit of a different take on this. For the Reading Karl
Marx project, it’s not a matter of quantity or a matter of the book
as object. We mostly work with photocopies of some chosen text fragments.
So long as it generates some kind of thought, some kind of discussion,
some kind of community: This is what is important for me because a lot
of times, as you said, it is a concentrated experience that needs its
time, its interpretations, and talking through. For that experience –
or reflection - the physical artefact of a bound book is not essential.
For practical reasons we worked with loose papers of a text everybody
can take home. The act of reading, reflecting, discussing and speaking
is for me the ‘cultural’ aspect. I think when reading together
we experience not just the concatenation of words that are there, but
the layers of texts behind the text, the multitude of books on top of
books.
TH: I think that what is interesting in Rainer’s book is that it’s
not a documentation of what happened, but rather a reinterpretation or
an adaptation that gives me the spectator - because I am not just the
reader in this instance but the spectator of the photographs - an opening
or portal into the project via the book. The book generates these possibilities.
CM: One of things that I’m interested in relation to the group or
the discussion, the desire to open out a text to other people, is whether
the discursive aspect is another form of reading? The person or the collaborator
in the reading is a text in their own right – where ‘I read
you’. Rainer, when you read Marx, for example, you obtain something
from a paragraph but you get more from what the other protagonists in
the discussion group have to say, so I wonder whether the Other person
is almost a form of reading in itself?
RG: It’s dialogical, it’s polyphonic, there are many voices
going through a text, whether it is at the stage of writing and producing
it or at the stage of reading and transmitting it. We almost could say
– in reference to the Greek philosopher Thales (“We can’t
step into the same river twice”) - that we cannot read the same text
twice. It’s not about establishing a particular kind of authoritarian
reading, or looking for some kind of final truth, it’s about offering
a set of conflicting readings that people can try to adapt, to use, to
fertilize. When I read with people I’m really interested in how people
respond to certain kinds of texts. We shouldn’t be intimidated by
the often liberating, but also repressive history of reception of these
kinds of texts, particularly when it comes to Marx.
CM: Do you see the books then, not just artists’ books, but texts
per se as an interface then for something else?
RG: Definitely, it’s an interface, it’s a screen for a different
way to see the world and to act and interact in the world. It’s a
tool and not a marker for some kind of shelved flirtation with a hard
cover life style …
I also try to take the texts quite literally. I take a sentence and ask
‘Is this still true today?’ What does that phrase or statement
mean in today’s context of globalisation, of total communication,
total commodification?’ I think we can still learn a lot even on
these contemporary issues from Marx. Another reason why I chose Marx was
because the text is so difficult to approach due this history it has:
A history of prejudices, of violence associated with it, of state terrorism,
but also a history of hopes, of social justice as well.
For me, Marx offers a very interesting account and understanding of how
politics, economics and history making are interrelated. With an unprecedented
vocabulary he tries to think about social processes, technological innovations,
power, resistance, (class) struggle and revolution in response to oppression,
exploitation and institutionalised injustice in the world. It is definitely
worth revisiting.
CM: Thomas, in relation to this with your own work, your use of text,
for example the piece at MACBA in Barcelona you worked with a writer,
where the text was available to the audience. How do you consider the
encounter the reader has with the text – particularly for example,
where you employ certain paradigmatic texts by Deleuze or Spinoza?
TH: There are two things; firstly, there is my frustration with ‘art’
texts, where I found that 99% of these texts are just so boring and only
written to give value to an artists work. I’m not interested to read
why somebody finds a piece of work good. There are some writers whom I
find interesting, not just their writing, but also their will to be confronted
with the world, with the times we live in. Also I feel they have a similar
concept of the Real as I do. They try to express it with their writing
and I try to express it with my visual work. So I thought that it would
be an idea to ask them to collaborate with me and to expose them within
my work, or in parallel to it. It gives the audience the possibility to
take a text which is not actually about my work but which is related to
the experience of the world. So ultimately it is an attempt to make an
experience with Friendship, Information and Knowledge, Confrontation and
Dialogue.
The second point is that I feel when you are in an exhibition and you
leave it, there is often a will in having a text which can be taken away
– a banal catalogue or a free paper, this can be legitimate, and
it gives you the chance to suggest possibilities.
I like this because it allows another possibility of slowing down, which
at same time provides the link back to the exhibition. Basically, something
driven by content.
CM: The idea of ‘friendship’ is something I felt strongly about
when I asked you both to take part in the project – the nature of
production as an act of friendship.
RG: I can subscribe to that. It’s not just friendship, it’s
more like getting to know someone a little better.
CM: Which is somewhat akin to the act of passing a stranger in the street
and the act of contact.
TH: You must remember that ‘friend’ is quite a big word. What
I like about working together is that you can only do it when you are
friends.
RG: If I may speak of books as friends. I have a history of working with
books and their authors in my function as an artist.: More then a decade
ago I started it by quoting books and authors, footnotes and indexes,
painting them directly on the wall. Around 1993 I continued reading books
with interested people whilst I photographing and video taping. In 1995
I initiated a series entitled Seminars/Lectures which consists of photographs
of people whose books I read. I then moved on to the process of actually
interviewing directly some of the people who wrote books. I came to a
point where I actually also started making and writing books myself. This
is not a chronological account in which one’s involvement replaces
the next. This movement parallels my interest in psychoanalysis in which
I see also a tendency running from the abstract, general, non-personal
to the particular, specific, biographical investment. Or to bring it back
to our subject: one discovers a comprehensive friend in oneself, as one
finds a friend in books in order to make friends, understand friends and
maintain friendships.
CM: Thomas, where you talk about giving someone something to take away
with them, reminds me of a statement you said: “I super-inform in
order not to inform at all.” Do you see the work itself as blank,
which is quite interesting in relation to the immense visuality of your
work at the same time? In that sense, given your collaboration with the
writer, is one the carrier for the other?
TH: For me, to collaborate with writers - who aren’t art critics
– is like adding another dimension to the work, because I have only
three dimensions and this gives the fourth dimension. Above all, this
is a way to give another entrance to the work. Even when people don’t
like my work they can at least read something they’re interested
in – about fishing or about war, whatever. That is for me always
the idea – to include people, so this is why I think books or printed
matter are inclusive. This is an important point about my work: that I
want to include people, not to exclude anybody. I want to work for a non-exclusive
audience.
CM: There is the World Airport piece at Venice in 1999 where you talk
about the nature of the micro and the macro. You state that there is almost
nothing in between, and thinking about your practice as well Rainer, you
move to these local spaces and work within them. I wondered what your
feelings were about the idea of the momentary encounter and what is the
zone within which you can act these days? With your work Thomas the materials
are not localised in that sense, you bring these materials to the place….
TH: I’m not about globalism or localism.
CM: There seems to be this dialectic at work in your practice. When you
produced World Corners at Chisenhale Gallery in 1998, you used images
of the global media, with images from magazines, but then there’s
something interesting about using the local material such as cardboard
boxes picked up in the local area.
RG: Boxes are not always local. They end up in an area as local trash,
but they most likely come from Spain, South America, Korea, China or some
banana plantations overseas.
TH: The ‘local’: that’s why I always believe in producing
exhibitions. The ‘local’ is that space where people are within
a place. At this moment, this is the local. Here and now. So as an artist
I try to put the density and the charge into the moment, so that when
these people are in this local situation they feel they are there, really
there. That’s important to me.
RG: Many of the texts we discuss in the reading groups address the aspect
of nation building, of religious and cultural identity formations and
of construction. I am especially interested in the history, formation
and transformation of the public sphere. And I think today, it is crucial
for our proper physical and political survival to revisit many types of
completely anachronistic, false and exclusive, even racist and biased
concepts of national identities. By revisiting, analysing and criticising
the origins (an not just the origins but also its present mutations) of
European nation building and its aggressive colonialism we have to look
into the various types of practices and ideologies. We need to revisit
our books too, our curricula, our education systems, that not just inform
our prejudices but also our politics. Books, their contents and ideologies
have – unfortunately – had a big share in this. We shouldn’t
fetishize books as such. We need to really question them.
CM: What do you see as the best vehicle for doing that? There’s something
enriching about using the much more dilettante methods, this misreading:
is there a potential in that?
RG: We have to distinguish what we are talking about. When it comes to
large scale political and ideological interventions they are best addressed
through political means. For example, ministries of education in every
country could come together and investigate their history books and their
political representations of themselves. When we are talking about racism,
religious and cultural discriminations, as an example, as they surface
all over Europe, it is not just a question of policing. It’s a question
of understanding how and why these biased notions came into place, how
they are created, on what false assumptions they are built, what policies
they inform, what negative consequences they will have and how to change
them. I’m really interested in interacting with people who are in
educational programmes.
CM: How does that elicit itself within art production in its own right?
Do you see that as having any capacity to carry out those things you’re
talking about?
RG: Well, it’s a rather fragile, vain and symbolic (im)position that
can be treated with respect, attention, ignorance or rejection. It might
create troubles and embarrassment and hopefully raise questions. If we
compare my type of cultural practice with those during the more authoritarian
periods of the 20thC we may speak of tolerance and see it as an indicator.
One of the first interventions by Hitler was against the cultural apparatus
of the Weimar Republic.
CM: Do you see that as operative at the moment?
RG: It depends: certain kinds of cultural productions, critical ways of
thinking, writing, publishing and speaking out publicly could easily be
curbed, curtailed, denounced and even criminalized.
CM: You rightly brought up before the death of the man in Genoa, which
is exactly where we are at, where we have to be. Can cultural production
act along with that as a form which allows these questions to be made
manifest? There seems to be a shift in certain modes of production at
the moment towards this idea of being active through necessity.
RG: There is a lot of activity. We’ve had Demonstrations of power
and global corporate capitalism for a long time, but now they are accompanied
by large / broad public criticism and activism. I think that is a very
positive sign, even if I’m outraged about how monopolised police
power is handling it. But these demonstrations as we have seen in various
places lately are a new kind of old politics, the politics of the streets,
the politics of mobilized masses. For this kind of direct politics I don’t
want to privilege art as such, it’s just one kind of process which
speaks for a specific interest group, a class, an educational and cultural
strata that is still based on knowledge productions dependent on books
and the temporality and privilege of reading.
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