KIRSTY BELL

Monika Sosnowska: Life through the Eye of Architecture

RAIMAR STANGE

John Smith: Urban Images with and against Sound

PAUL INGENDAAY

Hans Haacke: “The more human world of my dreams” The Conceptual Art of Hans Haacke Outlives the Remnants of the Spanish Real-Estate Boom: On the Installation “Castles in the sky”, 2012

Lots were allocated but never built on. Mesh-wire fencing bordered the carrées that some bureaucratic mind full of plans must have devised before the visions of the building contractor dissipated. Lines have been drawn on the asphalt, and even benches are there. But the houses are missing. Hardly anyone can be found meandering through this desert of construction, except perhaps someone walking their dog. Thousands of identical, orbed lanterns illuminate the scene.
The desolation of this investment ruin, the dimensions of which can hardly be imagined in northern Europe, could easily occasion a critical sociological article. Yet Haacke set out to decipher the language of the stones, the concrete, and the moulded public space. And he was rewarded with a minor epiphany. What the artist saw bathed the Spanish crisis in a surreal light. Spouting up in places where the building process had been interrupted, and the concrete mixers ceased production, are fresh street signs: Pop Art Street, Conceptual Art Street, Object Art Street, and so forth. Someone had a good idea, formulated an aspiration, and drafted a utopia. Ensanche de Vallecas was thus targeted to be a monument to humane living. Dreams of galleries and affordable studios, of workshops of kids, abounded. Signs of touching naivety on the part of the community? Malicious stings by a cynical building sector? We are left to puzzle over possible correlations between the words evoking future dreams of creativity and the bleak reality of this construction disaster.
These issues touch the heart of Haacke’s installation. Its title, “Castles in the sky”, not only seizes on an apt expression for pipe dreams and exaggerated hopes; it also subtly alludes to the most important figure of Spanish culture history, Don Quixote de la Mancha. The way the sad figure idealises knights truly was a castle in the sky. Instead of facing reality, Don Quijote dwells in a parallel world of castles, giants, noble ladies, and heroic feats of chivalry. Nonetheless: while the most notorious dreamer of Spanish literature is likeable, with his fanciful ideas having a contagious effect on those surrounding him, the escapist, profit-seeking manoeuvres of the unfettered building sector, in turn, have propelled an entire country to the brink of ruin.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 120/2012, pp. 33–44.

T. J. DEMOS

Renzo Martens in conversation with T. J. Demos: Institutional Critique Ultimately Is Beneficial to Only Some Areas of the World

RM: The Institute for Human Activities aims to build an art centre, a museum, a residency programme, and a school to provide master classes. We will offer training for plantation workers in art practice. And the participants will be drawn from all kinds of people, such as those who live in the forest, who maybe don’t see themselves as artists, but who have all kinds of powerful creative skills. And there will be artists from Kinshasa and from other African cities that we will invite. We will also include people from the West. In the end, hopefully, we can help these plantation workers, who now, truth be told, already work for us indirectly in a very old-fashioned type of economy, via physical labour paid per day or per hour. They don’t make much money. We will try and help them enter into the new immaterial and affective economy.
TJD: So the institute will act as a kind of education centre and later a site of exhibition for the emerging artists. If so, how will the sales happen? As we know this was a limitation exposed in your film Episode III: Enjoy Poverty (2009), in which the Congolese photographers you “trained” couldn’t ultimately get press passes or sell their photographs to international media organisations.
RM: Yeah, yeah. The sales will happen under the umbrella of this institute. Not that the profits will go to the institute, they will go to the artists. But the project will comprise something like a branding scheme, because one won’t just exhibit or buy this or that particular drawing, but will invest in this bigger endeavour, this larger social sculpture and artistic experiment. This system will constitute the mandate of the art and the value of its criticality.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 120/2012, pp. 45–52.

JAN VERWOERT

Image as Witness 4/4 Picture Makers vs Body Snatchers

Are you happy now?
I really couldn’t say.
Why?
Because I have no idea how to show happiness.
How come?
Because it seems to me that pictures of happiness are deceptive. They show you something unreal. Something that will never come to pass. Even when they capture memories of already fulfilled dreams. For especially these pictures are telling you: this was the moment of your happiness. With an emphasis on “was” since it is now in the past. Forget about it. The moment won’t return. It just makes you sad. Get it out of your head.
And pictures of the future? Ones that show how you envision your life’s happiness? One prime example of visions of the future are the photos found in the displays windows of real-estate agencies. Dreaming this dream of living happily in your own home the way it is meant to be dreamt means learning how to deal with display windows. This is an art in and of itself.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 120/2012, pp. 67–68.