73 | 2001

PIERRE BOURDIEU

An interview by Cathren Müller

(…) CATHREN MÜLLER: Monsieur Bourdieu, on many occasions you have demonstrated that the efficacy of social order is based upon objective distances between positions in the social space. You have described culture producers, scientists and intellectuals as a controlled faction of the ruling class, which puts them at a far remove from positions marked by a lack of cultural and economic capital. There are certain interests and specific worldviews connected with the various positions. You once said that breaking down this correspondence of social and mental structures, or at least making people aware of them, would require the simultaneity of critical discourse and objective crisis. Does the neoliberal turn really constitute such a crisis that makes it probable that various social groups will join together?

PIERRE BOURDIEU: I am afraid not, unfortunately. The crisis that we may be experiencing now is not necessarily conducive to mobilisation. The big institutions, that otherwise serve the cause of mobilisation and commitment, for example trade unions, are themselves in a grave crisis – above all in France. And then we must ask whether this neoliberal reorganisation is truly a crisis or rather a structural fact producing visible, but also in some cases invisible effects. The effects are in any case concealed effects that, similar to time bombs, explode with some delay, effects that we cannot easily incorporate politically. It is probably wishful thinking to believe that what is happening at the moment would indeed lead to mobilisation. But there are also particular constellations of crises, moments that make union possible, for instance the December strikes in France in 1995. This was really a vast mobilisation of socially and politically committed groups, above all trade unions, but equally researchers and intellectuals. It was a take-off moment that is still virulent and which we still live on today. Ultimately, raisons d’agir is precisely about keeping this moment alive so that it does not simply evaporate. Perhaps there is such a constellation, such a moment in Austria today. I noticed at the conference in Vienna that there is great commitment among theorists and researchers who are trying to understand what is going on, as are the political groups. Many of them are in a state like a crisis but, as I said, that would be wishful thinking. Unfortunately, the intellectuals and the representatives of various instances of mobilisation are far too dopey and passive. We would have to wake them up so that they can get others moving. The intellectuals need to be shaken up themselves. There is, I feel, a real paradigmatic significance to the situation of 1995 in that it demonstrated the whole malaise, the tremendous frustration and discontent of the population, whose systematic origins I and others attempted to unearth in La Misère du Monde (The Weight of the World) with the aid of sociological tools. I think I owe my position in the social movement to a great extent to this work, this diagnosis of society, in which many people recognised themselves and realised that the book is about them and is not a scholastic self-reflection. Sociology serves a purpose by saying what moves people and what makes them suffer. The movement that emerged in 1995, then, has an important function for sociology, in that it has woken it up. Ultimately, sociology was depoliticized. Such a movement can help us transport sociology back to certain traditions that actually existed in the 19th century but which, all too often, we have come to forget in the academic glass bead game.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 73/2001, pp. 4–8.

MARTIN HERBERT

Marine Hugonnier

What does it mean to truly inhabit the moment? What does it mean to truly apprehend reality? Even if we could answer such vast questions, the conditions that underpin them are constantly changing. Adjusting and compensating in response to the increasing potential for instantaneity in Western technological culture, our very sense of temporality is in flux. We inhabit a wired world in which everything can be realistically demanded right here, right now, on the double, at the latest; a world that moves in step with Moore’s Law, which states that the computational capacity of silicon chips doubles every 18 months, while the price halves; a world in which “reality” is continually being subsumed within one-sided representations of the real.

There may, however, be several deep ironies lurking within this progressive, seemingly unstoppable acceleration and its side-effect of expanding imagistic capacity: not least the fact that, in accepting them as self-fulfilling prophecies, we are likely to forfeit our ability to appreciate not only our moments as they pass, but the emotional timbre and multipolar complexity of our world as it continues to exist. In an inverted Faustian pact, we seem to be selecting the notional idea of a short journey between two points over the deep pleasures and productive regrets of living that journey to its fullest and most vital extent. As a species we apparently prefer a value system based on economic imperatives and the purported rightness of scientific progress to one of engagement and, at best, of deep integration with the world in which we live. In truth we do not wish to inhabit the moment; we want to possess it and make it serve us. Time, we are told, is money: a symbiotic relationship and a direct exchange.

Marine Hugonnier makes artworks that, contrary to this inexorable movement, posit, theorise and, in many cases, generate a heightened relationship to the exterior world. To this end she often interlaces an everyday object with a secondary aspect of its presence and existence to create a multivalent experience of reality; in doing so she reorganises the symbolic order of the real. A paradigmatic example of this in her work is “Candle”, a wax candle that has been impregnated with a particular scent: when lit, it gently exhales the odour of an extinguished candle. In concept and effect this engages with so much of Hugonnier’s philosophic attitude that it is worth exploring in detail. What does it mean to experience something, and simultaneously to experience – in an intuitive manner – the immediate future of both that object, and, by association, of yourself, the viewer? In theoretical terms, the answer would be that it engenders a paradoxical state: in practice, one is left with a broadened sense of the moment through which one is living, leavened by the awareness of its passing.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 73/2001, pp. 9–20.

ANDREAS REITER RAABE

An Interview with Sol LeWitt

ANDREAS REITER-RAABE: Do you see your books as a continuation, or explanation, of your structural work, or do you see them as works in their own right, as objects, as books?

SOL LEWITT: My books have been done, more or less, parallel to my other work – at the same time. I use books usually to explore an idea in a sequential way because of the bound form of the book. It is often a better way to explore the idea of a sequence of time than on a wall. The wall work can be experienced at once on a wall but gradually in bookform. Both ways are valid.

ANDREAS REITER-RAABE: Did books play an important role in your childhood, at home, in your education?

SOL LEWITT: I came from a home which valued books and reading. It wasn’t till later that I came to value the pictorial and graphic quality.

ANDREAS REITER-RAABE: You have used the book as a medium for almost your entire career. Was this initially a form to promote your work and ideas, or has it always been a separate concern? Do you see the book as a medium that is more democratic?

SOL LEWITT: I began to make books when I became interested in the idea of art as a narrative and a way to make logical serial art in a fixed sequence. Also the idea that art can be done in a form that anyone could buy.

ANDREAS REITER-RAABE: You are one of the founders of Printed Matter, what was the idea behind this, do you still find it as important as you did then?

SOL LEWITT: Certain kinds of art, particulary art dealing with concept, made better books, and many artists began doing books. The problem was that there was no good way of distributing them. Many were published by galleries as part of shows. But they stayed there, stored away, after the show. “Printed Matter” was founded as a way of distributing books by mail and at the store in New York.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 73/2001, pp. 21–32.

KOBENA MERCER

Postkolonialer Flaneur. Ein Interview mit Iké Udé

KOBENA MERCER: Since it’s inception in 1994, the “Cover Girl”–series has made pointed insights into magazine culture by way of witty, ironic or unexpected substitutions in image and text that propose a unique kind of photographic fiction. What was your starting point and what are some of the ideas, around gender identity for example, that inform the series as a whole?

IKÉ UDÉ: By 1994 painting was completely out of fashion. I was primarily a painter until that point, then came the shift to Conceptual Art. I was very fluent with conceptual art ideas, so it was an easy conversion to make. The whole gender discussion, however, and the framework of intellectual / artistic discourse around it, was a bit too tedious for me. I personally couldn’t believe that gender identity or the lack thereof was such a big deal. In the club-world, where I spent a considerable amount of time – at least 10 years – gender and sexual identity didn’t matter. What mattered was the hip or cool quotient. After all, the club arena, particularly in the Eighties, was the hothouse, where trends in thought, attitude, art, language, fashion, mostly originated from. Perhaps the only difference between me and the average club-kid is my intellectual rigor. The nightclub was my lab, theater, and studio, long before I entered the formal art arena. In short, I merely reframed or recontextualized the laissez-faire attitude of the club into a critical framework to engender an intellectual discourse on gender / sexuality.

KOBENA MERCER: For your exhibition at MAK in Vienna, some new additions to the “Cover Girl”-series were commissioned. Can you take us through the process whereby choices in image, title and headlines are arrived at?

IKÉ UDÉ: I’m generally very methodical when it comes to work. Often, I frequent kiosks and news-stands and consume a lot of magazines with as much pleasure as critical distance. Going to news-stands already cuts down my work-load in half by familiarizing me with the identities, characters, styles, demographics, gimmicks or substance of various magazines. In choosing an image, I can decide to propose the antithesis of what a particular magazine, such as Vogue, would ordinarily choose for a cover, although they could very well do so if they allowed. I also choose magazine titles that have an orthodox partisan viewpoint or ones with cheesy left or rightwing politics couched under the hypocrisy of glamour, beauty, innocence, or sheer fun. Consequently, I gamely reciprocate in kind by betraying and erasing their corny games of innuendo. By turns I insert mordant, playful, absurd, taboo, sickly, or cool headlines dealing with larger or more boring issues of the moment. With all these elements together, a graphic designer is employed to execute the technical aspect of it under my art directorship. That’s all.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 73/2001, pp. 33–44.

STEPHEN WILLATS

Macro To Micro. A Report

Every cultural landscape requires its signposts, not just to get around in the present, to find out where and what things are, but to point to a vision of the future, to show a possible destiny. I see this as a consequence and a function of my practice as an artist to intervene in the status quo of the cultural infra-structure to implant signposts that will enable a perceptual transformation of existing reality. A transformation that sets up heuristics for approaching its future, and provides tools for understanding the ramifications.
In the conception of “Macro To Micro” it was certainly seen as such a “cultural signpost”, the feeling being that the moment here in London now demanded an experimental work that would seek to bring together the process of the work’s development and making, with how it would be presented and received by an audience, as a statement about contemporary society, and its destiny. Thus in the making of this work, the outcome was purposefully left open except that the various stages to its development, were to somehow express ideas and observations that are central to the future of contemporary culture.
While I would sketch out a rough framework for the initiation of the work, what it actually said, its form and composition, would be the outcome of events between a group of people who would come together in a workshop situation specifically for its development. Thus the work was to be founded on a social model of exchange, a model of communication in society that is increasingly effecting the formation of information and decision making. Social, dynamic models of exchange are now more and more acting as a parameter, that can be expected to guide the future of our social infrastructure. Consequently I saw in the conception of the events involving the workshop group, that they would involve the group in an informal decision making network of exchange, that would amplify the inherent relativity in the perceptions of individual members. This recognition of relativity in perception I feel is another important outcome of networks of exchange, as is also the idea of mutualism and the notion of divestment in authorship. The ramification for art practice from divestment is enormous, as it is the crucial recognition that the origination and reception of a work of art is not the sole product of any one person, but is a result of the society between people. From these basic observations, another way of looking at the origination and reception of the artwork seemed to open up the future, and thus concepts of relativity, mutuality and divestment shaped the conception of “Macro To Micro”.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 73/2001, pp. 45–56.

ROLF SACHSSE

Marginalien zur Fotografie. Vom Erkennen und Anordnen der Bilder

Text feature in Camera Austria International 73/2001, pp. 57–58.