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SUPPLEMENT MATERIAL is an expanding series of conversations on new concepts of monumentality.
Edited by Caspar Frenken and Tom Vandeputte.
Perhaps (Perhaps)
Rotterdam & London 2010
Table of contents
Editorial Note
Obsolete Objects In Conversation with Mihnea Mircan PDF
Unrecognised Monumentality In Conversation with Daniel van der Velden PDF
Public Space Aestheticised In Conversation with Henk Oosterling PDF
Radio, Archaeology, Literature In Conversation with Tom McCarthy PDF
Spaces of Conflict In Conversation with Jonas Staal PDF
The Migrating Monument In Conversation with Anthony Auerbach PDF
Special thanks here to all those who have been generous with their time and involvement in the project: Pier Vittorio Aureli, Henk Oosterling, Nanne de Ru, Daniel van der Velden, Mihnea Mircan, Anthony Auerbach, Tom McCarthy, Matthijs van Muijen, Ross Adams, and, finally and especially, Annemarie van den Berg and Jules Schoonman for helping this project to come to fruition.
OBSOLETE OBJECTS
Tom Vandeputte in Conversation with Mihnea Mircan
Mihnea Mircan is an independent curator and writer who lives and works in Bucharest. He was curator of Le Pavillon at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris from 2005 and 2006 and curated several exhibitions at the National Museum of Contemporary Art (MNAC) in Bucharest, including Sublime Objects (2007). Among his curatorial projects are the Romanian pavillion at the 52nd Venice Biennale of 2007 and his exhibition Since we Last Spoke About Monuments (2008) in Stroom, The Hague, which sets out to investigate the ‘(im)possibility of contemporary monuments’.
Tom Vandeputte: You have critically examined the monument's current relevance and potential in the exhibition Since We Last Spoke About Monuments and the publication Memosphere, which you edited together with graphic design studio Metahaven. History of Art, The, your recent exhibition in London, does not explicitly address the same theme but again focuses on questions of collective memory and historiography – but perhaps from a shifted perspective.
Mihnea Mircan: Yes, structurally these projects are similar. And there is a third exhibition project, which takes the same approach to the topic of the Sublime. Each of these exhibitions addresses something that at first sight seems either an obsolete category, like the monumental or sublime object, undone by critical theory or by the serial ways in which our attention and emotions are processed today, or a dysfunctional rhetorical machinery like the history of art, geared to obtain the same results no matter what the supply of visual data. The repeated crises in the discipline of art history – revolving around the ways in which ideological missions inform critical biases, create geographic blind spots, and help shape, in tandem, an art-historical past and a hegemony – have not yet engendered a model capable of taking into account the diversity of practices and aspirations across the surface of the ‘art world’ or the different temporalities that are involved in the construction of the present tense. These three separate projects are fuelled by the same desire to understand obsolescence: why the monument was discarded and for whose benefit it is exhumed or revived; why the sublime is an ineffective instrument to conceive of contemporary experiences or as a category in judging and organising them; and why the history of art fails to have some sort of continuity with contemporary art.
TVDP: Or to imagine its future?
MM: Indeed, to look at the ‘formerness’ of these subjects, categories and possibilities, to dissect their anteriorities, was also a way of inquiring whether and how we are able to imagine a future: whether, within the territories that they define historically, the future is conceivable or can be fabricated. Or, conversely, to ask about the terminus point of a history of ends and deaths, illicitly conflating a form of messianism and the post-historical. History of Art, The, my exhibition at the David Roberts Art Foundation, wonders if art history can imagine a future other than that of ‘more, better art’, and whether this future can occur within disciplinary confines or at their expense. This is not about painting a moustache on the face of the Mona Lisa, but about testing the rigidity or porosity of art-historical enunciation, possibly what Donald Preziosi has in mind when he speaks of ‘catapulting the discipline out of its metaphysical circularities’ – to find an Archimedean point from which the discipline can be hurled out of its self-hypnosis.
TVDP: One of the works in your most recent exhibition is Luc Deleu’s Last Stone of Belgium. You have described this work as a ‘tombstone for commemoration’. Does it mark the transition between your earlier shows on monuments and this one on the history of art?
MM: That certainly is a central work in the exhibition and a link to the previous project on monuments. By declaring that this particular tombstone is the last stone of Belgium, any subsequent monument, glorifying whatever fragment of the history or self-perception of Belgium needs to respond to Luc Deleu’s claim to have ended a genre, to the impatience with which the work asks for other forms of addressing social or historiographic troubles than conventional monumentality. The stone purports to terminate the cycle of commemoration in a way that contradicts subsequent monuments, attaching itself parasitically to them and denying their right to exist. Perhaps it inaugurates a different, post-metaphysical kind of commemoration.
TVDP: The exhibition also contains the work Art, Property of Politics by Jonas Staal, which looks at the art collections of political parties, and the relation between the included art works and the ideological basis of the parties concerned.
MM: Jonas’ work displayed in History of Art, The is exemplary for the way in which his practice is enmeshed in local and national politics and for how it can re-script that context on a more general or conceptual level. I understand this work in the framework of institutional critique, and would say that the project Art, Property of Politics brilliantly subverts its traditional scenario as well as the idea of a transformative theatre within the museum that institutional critique encoded. Normally, institutional critique looks directly at sites with a consecrated and sustained relation to art. Jonas displaces this discussion: he does not look at the museum but at political power itself as a way of manipulating art. He curates and exhibits works of art belonging to various political parties in Rotterdam. The political party is mistaken for, or defined, as an art institution and the institutional critique treatment is applied to it, therefore at the other end of the spectrum where ‘regular’ institutional critique operates. The political party is questioned through its private art collection and the gestures and strategies that collection implies, the correspondences it establishes between the ideology or notion of self-identity that dictates which objects are collected, preserved, discussed and emphasised, put on a pedestal, if you like.
TVDP: When read between the lines, your essay The Geography Simulator, which appeared in a monograph on the Bulgarian artist Plamen Dejanoff, puts forward the idea that the monument can productively be thought of as a gesture or object that deliberately enacts or embodies a set of power relations that would otherwise remain invisible. In the conversation with Jonas, we discussed his work in similar terms: we spoke about the significance of the notion of self-instrumentalisation for his practice and the particular attitude of alignment that seems to be present in both the works of Dejanoff and of Staal – an attitude necessarily bordering on complicity.
MM: The work of Jonas has created a certain amount of confusion with his political interlocutors because he seems to function almost as a party artist in a dangerous position of embeddedness. He oscillates between a sustained polemic and moments; projects where he seems to translate political ideas quite literally, even if those ideas were meant rather as political metaphors. He would disagree to such a description, I imagine, and opt for an understanding that does not differentiate between ‘translation’ and vocal opposition. I too see a connection between this stance and Plamen Dejanoff’s proposal for the relocation of major international museums to Veliko Tarnovo, Bulgaria – the ‘middle of nowhere’, but also the epicentre of Western Europe’s dark side. The project operates on many levels and trajectories, but if Mumok [Museum moderner Kunst, Vienna] or any of its peers do relocate a part of their collection or their project spaces to one of the villas designed by Plamen, it is because their rhetoric of openness has been tested, instigated: their capacity to absorb and engage difference taken to an unexpected extreme. Planets of Comparison, Plamen’s proposal, twists the museums’ institutional limbs in a way that is both elegant and vigorous: the museums enact the neoliberal surge; they create a life-size version of globalization, rather than a critical reflection on it in an exhibition about the contemporary world. Critique and complicity are impossible to disentangle in the project; it does create an object with a duck-rabbit directionality. In the context of institutional critique, it does create a somewhat nightmarish proximity between the museums, and the forms or ideas of singularity they claim for themselves, elaborate, pretend to let go of and perpetually repossess.
TVDP: In the conversation with Jonas we discussed his Monument for the Chased-Off Citizens of Rotterdam – that seems to be the project where the affinity between their positions or strategies seems most obvious.
MM: Yes, the project where he took the reaction of the far-right Leefbaar Rotterdam [Livable Rotterdam] party to a proposed project for a municipal monument honouring the guest workers’ contribution to post-war Netherlands to its ultimate, implosive conclusion, proposing the design of a monument for a ‘regular’ family from Rotterdam fleeing their city in horror of repeated waves of immigration. I am interested in another of his projects that is much less known – a ‘grassroots’ work, as I think those are still called. The residents of the Maastrichterstraat [Maastricht street] in The Hague have a yearly celebration on the street with drinks and sandwiches and at some point they decided to look at the archives of the street. They discovered that 16 Jewish families were deported from there during World War II. From then on, the street that used to be very pleasant, with a strong sense of community, became something of a ghost trail, that kept indicating brutality, the destinies that had been ruptured there. The residents of the street went to seek advice, first from a Dutch artist, then from a Rabbi, and finally from Stroom, a centre for visual arts in The Hague. Stroom set up an informal competition. They put together a few portfolios of artists that might be able to handle such a topic. Jonas proposed to rename the street from ‘Maastrichterstraat’ to ‘Deportatie van Zestien Joodse Families Straat’ [Deportation of Sixteen Jewish Families Street].
TVDP: How does the project materialise?
MM: In the residents’ prolonged efforts to persuade the local authorities to change the name of the street, and all entries corresponding to it in all archival, bureaucratic systems of the municipality. It is a long-term, intensely frustrating process that demands countless readjustments of bureaucratic personae. Everything, all the thousands of details, needs to be slightly shifted around the task of commemoration, which is not consigned and externalised in an object. Nothing is more invisible than a monument, as Musil said, but in this case, nothing is more intricate, awkward, painful and delayed. The responsibility of commemoration is instead taken over by the social body, rehearsed daily, together with other forms of ‘identity’.
TVDP: When we met earlier, we talked about the particular relations that can be established between practices of publishing and curating. I have looked at certain exhibitions and catalogues of Broodthaers in which he questions the function of the catalogue as a documentation of the exhibition event and ultimately the possibility of its translation onto the printed page. Your recent exhibition deliberately engages with such issues, in the first place with how it documents itself and inscribes itself into history.
MM: The work of Nina Beier and Marie Lund, The Remains, for which a model of the exhibition is being carved out – with as much detail of the other works, exhibition space and itself, as the stone mason can put into it – from a block of limestone over the course of the exhibition, answers in a sense the question. Nina and Marie were also considering to cast it in bronze once the show ends, which would have reinforced the devitalised, depleted condition of the object after the exhibition, the way in which the documentation its performs brings about its complete exhaustion and pushes it out of use, or any scale of value. The work adheres so firmly to the timeline of the exhibition, while of course gesticulating to the more complicated timelines of art history, that it crumbles when that first timeline is severed by the next exhibition going up, and enters a bizarre territory of expendable documentation, in opposition to the fetish of the document in so many recent exhibition projects. It obliquely comments on how exhibitions try to inscribe themselves in art history; how the quasi-discipline of curating revolves around silent notions of art-historical inscription and participation.
TVDP: Does it relate to the way you have conceived of the exhibition catalogue? It seems that if the function of the catalogue becomes absorbed in the works themselves, the catalogue is, as it were, liberated from its usual function and is able to perform an altogether different function.
MM: The catalogue is based on the idea that it should not even try to recuperate the exhibition in the usual way, photographing it from different angles, describing it as a beautiful installation of really interesting pieces. This catalogue offers a completely different version of what the exhibition could have been.
TVDP: Recently I have been doing research on an exhibition organised collaboratively by RoseLee Goldberg and Bernard Tschumi, where the accompanying publication is a direct reproduction of the exhibition panels, and, conversely, the panels and installation of the exhibition itself appears to be directly derived from the logic of the printed page. Your catalogue seems to engage with the exhibition in a completely different way: it is not an equivalent but has a complementary relation to it. Am I right that the works included in the catalogue are precisely those that did not make it into the exhibition?
MM: Some of the material would have never made it into the exhibition even under ideal circumstances. Some was not present in the exhibition for practical reasons and other material in the catalogue is text presented as work, like a response by Luis Camnitzer to an October questionnaire. Instead of establishing a perfectly lubricated relation between exhibition and catalogue, the idea was to create a situation in which they expose each other’s incompleteness and insufficiency. Both of them are versions of each other, paler avatars. The exhibition is a failed catalogue and the catalogue is an exhibition that never took place.
TVDP: Also the publications related to your other exhibitions occupy an important and often remarkable position. I especially think of the Memosphere publication that you edited together with Metahaven.
MM: Yes, we made that publication for the Romanian Pavilion at the Venice Biennial of 2007. We printed 150,000 copies (a disproportion that is maybe in tandem with Roman Ondak’s disproportionately large cloakroom for the Kreuzberg location of the Berlin Bienniale). From the very beginning on, we imagined the publication as a work in itself. We thought of the stacks of publications as a wall or a ‘block’ of text, as a pseudo- or quasi-monument that is eroded by the passage of visitors. As people take bits out of it, it slowly decreases but does not disintegrate, it does not consume its own definition and perishability.
01/06/2010 (Edited 18/10/2010)
Daniel van der Velden is a designer and writer based in Amsterdam. Together with Vinca Kruk, he is founding partner of Metahaven, a studio for critical graphic design with a focus on questions of identity and branding. Many of their research projects and speculative designs, such as Museum of Conflict (2006) and Blackmail (2008), specifically address questions of representation and monumentality.
Tom Vandeputte: Over the past years, the work of Metahaven has demonstrated an ongoing interest in monumentality. Does this interest inform any of your current projects?
Daniel van der Velden: We are currently looking into what one could call an ‘unrecognised monumentality’. We explore this notion in particular in relation to Europe. It is remarkable that some competitions do not only call for a proposal new monuments for Europe, but also of new rituals. The idea has risen that things like these might inspire a common awareness of a space that large parts of the population do not relate themselves to in the first place. Such an idea is quite bizarre in itself. At the moment, we are setting up a research project on European identity tentatively called Europe from Below. We try to investigate the discrepancies between the intellectual idea of Europe, and some of the concrete forms that Europe has acquired in spite of that. One may observe such a discrepancy in the various discount brands which employ the ‘euro’-prefix – Euroshopper, for example. The ‘euro’-prefix has become a prime designator of Europe, yet not one that indicates a particularly high value: perhaps rather the complete opposite, almost a kind of counter-Vuitton. Although these ‘euro’-brands could be said to contradict the idea of Europe as an exalted space for democracy and human rights, we suspect there is a strange beauty in them and possibly a more advanced type of brand, one that employs its coherence by something that is perhaps involuntarily open source. Central control seems to have been replaced by a sense of loose coordination. This is quite far removed from the idea of the European superstate, and its superbrand. The monumentality of the ‘euro’-prefix is a European vernacular.
Jules Schoonman: Is this approach different from the way in which you previously engaged with monumentality?
DVDV: I guess so. Monuments are certainly tied to the idea of the State and maybe we are less interested in the State than we used to be. Blackmail, a piece presented in 2008 at Stroom in The Hague as part of the exhibition Since We Last Talked about Monuments, focuses on the paradoxes inherent to Europe as a political space and hence to its commemoration. We created a large sheet of postage stamps - the stamp being a unit of commemoration - scattered with possible monuments for Europe. They portrayed the (ideological) idea of ‘Eurabia’ as shown on a cover of The Economist, but also that of the banlieue, camps (centres for asylum seekers), fences, non-places and highway architecture - precisely the places which, in Europe, have not acquired symbolic capital while having become so essential to its functioning. These were juxtaposed with the Acropolis, Persepolis and other sites of historical achievement. Blackmail tried to show Europe as a network of contradictions. The network is sometimes seen as a non-political or anti-political form because, in it, the exercise of hegemony is concealed. We suspect that the network, and consequently European space, have their own politics. The political does not disappear, it merely takes on new appearances.
TVDP: This networked space suggests that contemporary monuments might lose their original scale and cease to be monumental in the traditional sense of the word.
DVDV: Eventually, a monument always needs scale, if only because it is supposed to speak to collectives of people. The question is how to arrive at that scale. It is a speculative thought, but maybe a monument could be distributed rather than sitting in a single location.
TVDP: Your essay 9/11’s Ghost Ship addresses some of the complex issues with regards to the memorial at Ground Zero. Can you explain the main thesis of the text?
DVDV: 9/11’s Ghost Ship focused on what happened to the actual ruins of the World Trade Center (WTC). The destruction of a modern day icon like the Twin Towers apparently left behind a problematic kind of ruin. The WTC’s remains were largely sold off, while part of the scrap metal was used to build the USS New York, a naval vessel. Some parts of the rubble, like a steel beam which had bent into a spectacular shape because of the heat, were saved and became exhibition items. We thought this an interesting case with regard to monuments and their relation to trauma, as 9/11 has immensely affected American self-confidence. At the same time we emphasised that many aspects of the events are still so shrouded in mystery that it is even hard to know what exactly it is that we should commemorate. Looking back at that essay, it feels a little pedantic and judgmental. It is very hard to judge these types of things, as difficult as it is to validate the different conspiracy theories around the 9/11 events between legitimate doubt and paranoia. But nevertheless we feel it would have been much better to leave a ruin at Ground Zero than to install this memorial.
TVDP: The totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century supposedly contaminated classical forms of monumentality in an irrevocable manner. Does the monument’s stained form and aesthetic have an appeal to you as some sort of forbidden fruit?
DVDV: Our work with Ceausescu’s House of the People in Bucharest absolutely relates to a desire to play with fire, a fascination for forbidden fruit and polluted, contaminated forms. No other building confirms all the clichés told about the other side of the Iron Curtain. The relative perversity of the House of the People is in the fact that people somehow prefer to love it even if it ostensibly stands for all that has been ‘overcome’. The building is too real, too large to demolish. Our Museum of Conflict project involved a conference, the Regimes of Representation symposium in the palace, and a series of interviews. We had no actual proposal for an intervention in the first place, also because it is extremely precarious to enter into such a loaded discourse. However, we are now working on one, opposite of what Pier Vittorio Aureli and the Berlage Institute have proposed for the rooftops of the European buildings in their Brussels Manifesto. In the case of the People’s Palace, our idea is to let roads traverse through the building, to extrapolate the city inside of it.
TVDP: Metahaven’s approach to speculative design seems to have a special affinity with architecture. One of the notions central to your early work was the ‘unbuilt proposal’ and the idea that this notion might be transposed to graphic design.
DVDV: The idea that an unrealised project may exert a certain influence is something unfamiliar to the discipline of graphic design. Graphic designers inherently work on a scale that is realisable and pragmatic. As such, the notion of the unrealised proposal has no history within graphic design. We have been fascinated by architects working with unbuilt projects within their discipline, if only because many of these projects had a sense of beauty about them and, though unrealised, were highly relevant. You realise that architects have to capitalise on the unbuilt only because of the physical and political weight of architecture, a weight that I guess many architects sometimes would wish not to be there. Our interest then evolved into the roads not taken in graphic design; questions not followed up because of this idea of short-term realisation that dominates the discipline. We started to get fascinated with the idea of an ‘unbuilt graphic design’ which was first tested out through projects like Sealand. Currently we are more pragmatic. Every project produces an excess of ideas which can be used somewhere else. It is maybe not so interesting now to talk about pristine, uncompromised ideas. Instead we see it as a hypothesis getting tested. The contamination of design with real world forces can be meaningful because it functions as a register of what is going on in society.
JLS: In a project loosely connected to this series of conversations, we examine the relation between monuments and the public space of Rotterdam. The city seems to provoke a complete reappraisal of traditional civic representation and monumentality.
DVDV: Ever since its bombardment, Rotterdam has protracted around the void. The emptyness of Rotterdam is still at its core which is, if you think about it, quite monumental. I suppose that the most remarkable developments since its relatively cosmopolitan heyday in the first half of the 1990s have included the rise of Pim Fortuyn and Rotterdam’s becoming a frontier city in the European social discourse around migrants; and Rotterdam’s public spaces are quite radically fragmented. Moreover, almost every ‘social policy’ is also very visibly a form of policing. In December, with Metahaven we will be doing a workshop in Tarwewijk, a district in the South of Rotterdam, together with Cohabitation Strategies. This group of architects and urbanists calls itself a ‘cooperative for socio-spatial development’. The workshop will be part of IABR [International Architecture Biennale of Rotterdam] 2009. The issue is not to demolish the existing buildings and replace them with middle class private apartments. That approach has copy-pasted identical and predictable buildings all over the country, and there is simply not even enough middle class available to live in them. Instead the existing dynamics and structures should be the point of departure in formulating solutions which may have a stronger accent on informality, provisional hybrids. We are interested in a new European informality - one that may accidentally appear monumental but is always permitted not to.
19/06/2009 (Edited 10/11/2009)
SPACES OF CONFLICT
Tom Vandeputte in conversation with Jonas Staal
Jonas Staal is an artist based in Rotterdam. Projects like his Monument for the Chased-Off Citizens of Rotterdam (2008) and Icons 2002-2006 (2006) either take on the form of monuments or make use of their particular language and conventions. Other works address existing monuments or involve their modification: the Plastering of the Dutch Constitution (2007) is an intervention on the monument for the first article of the Dutch constitution in The Hague; Replaced Street Signs (2008) is part a series of interventions on existing street signs.
Tom Vandeputte: In an e-mail discussion between you and Daniel van der Velden, you make a reference to Michel Houellebecq. It struck me as an interesting reference because there is a certain aspect of your practice that tends to remind me of his literary work, involving the deliberate choice to remove all resistance towards your socio-political context.
Jonas Staal: Precisely – to allow yourself to be instrumentalised by the culture that has produced you. That is an aspect of his work that I strongly admire. As well, he is part of a strong French tradition of artists and intellectuals for whom the choice to take a position in the public sphere is a logical complement to their other, sometimes highly specialised work. Alain Badiou is a good current example of this tradition.
TVDP: One of your recent works is a design for a monument, commissioned by the main populist party of the city. It is dedicated to the inhabitants of Rotterdam that claim to have been ‘chased away by the wave of immigrants’ of the last decades. It is perhaps a good example of this method of deliberate instrumentalisation. Another work, an engraved floor tile, has the title ‘Against Irony’. Would you say that your claim against irony is compatible with this Rotterdam monument?
JS: I think the floor tile precisely explains the criteria on basis of which I have worked on the monument. There is no ironic twist involved, no marginal note whatsoever. The monument was put forward by the party leader of Leefbaar Rotterdam [Livable Rotterdam], in reaction to the monument that was proposed by the Partij van de Arbeid [Dutch labour party]. It was to be dedicated to the immigrant workers of the city and to acknowledge those who, since the Second World War, have come to the Netherlands and have contributed to the reconstruction of the country. It was proposed that all former immigrant families were to be asked a contribution of 1 Euro in order to realise the monument. Leefbaar Rotterdam reacted immediately and furiously. They claimed that immigrants have cost the state more than they have returned and that the ones who really deserve a monument – the native Dutch workers that have reconstructed the city – are not able to recognise their environment anymore and ‘flee’ to the suburbs. That is what led to a monument for the chased-away inhabitants of the city. The party leader had described precisely what it should look like: a fleeing dockworker’s family, looking over their shoulder in a confused way to the city they have just abandoned – I have let it be designed precisely according to this description. In other words: I have not conceived it but merely facilitated it. There is an interesting mutual interest at stake: Leefbaar Rotterdam wants the monument to be designed and eventually to be built; my interest is to think about monumentality and its relation to the political, about democratic ideology and how this is translated into monumentality. For me, they are an instrument to investigate this, to render certain processes visible by representing their political position with their instruments. You could call this ambiguous, but in reality these interests are completely transparent, without ironic pretensions.
TVDP: Will it be built?
JS: That depends, as it is principally a reaction to the proposal for a monument for the immigrant worker. If the two monuments would eventually be realised, I hope they would be placed at a historically charged place: the Afrikaanderwijk [Afrikaner neighbourhood], for instance, as the area in Rotterdam in which a race riot took place in the 1970s. In any case, they should be placed at the same location, opposite one another. In isolation the two monuments are not that interesting, it is much more interesting if the conflict could get a permanent platform by means of these two points of reference. You would accept that the current debate is made visible in a permanent way. It is very different from another monument that was recently proposed: one dedicated to ‘all of the inhabitants of Rotterdam’ that would take the form of an enormous LCD screen, displaying the names of everyone that has lived in Rotterdam since 1940. Of course, this completely disregards the conflict that is inherent to the conception of a monument.
TVDP: It can only exist by virtue of its abstraction, a mere list of names.
JS: Yes. What remains is dubious and trivialises questions: what the concept ‘Rotterdam’ entails, why to take the year 1940 as a point of reference, etc. When thinking about monumentality, it is more relevant to take the continuous tension of existing conflicts into account. There is no such thing as an ideal or ultimate monument. That is one reason why I find politics is so interesting: if politicians make a statement on what a certain work of public art or a monument should look like, it is often much more compelling than what an artist him or herself has to say about it.
TVDP: You are based in Rotterdam, the city in the Netherlands in which populism first acquired a notable presence, and your works frequently situate themselves in the political context of this city. Do you think that the city of Rotterdam functions as a successful political space?
JS: Conceptually, yes. This political space does not, however, manifest itself physically at a particular location. In that sense, a provincial city like Venlo is a successful political space as well. It is politicised simply by the coincidental course of events: as the place of birth of Geert Wilders and as having the highest percentage of votes on his party. Practically, however, it is a place that is hardly exceptional in terms of public security or immigration, but reacts violently to national issues – similar to the situation we discussed earlier. Rotterdam, as a successful political concept, allows to think about new forms of political engagement and redefine what the term ‘political’ actually means. It is important that we do not reconcile ourselves to this currently prevailing definition of the political: four-year ballots, the civil administration, etc.
TVDP: How would you define your concept of the political?
JS: For me, the political is essentially about representation. It is the moment you draw consequences from your idea of what the world is and should be, represent them in public and lay a claim to some sort of collective thinking, however contradictory. To intervene when someone spits against the window or plays his music too loud is a political act in itself – even if some people do not bother about such things and don’t feel the necessity to intervene. This concept implies a politicised public space, one from which you could infer the contemporary meaning of collectivity. Such a thing is impossible in the completely pacified space that Dutch policy strives to attain: a public space that is not public at all. Because this space is not allowed to be in an index of the existing collectives, there is a sense of constant surprise: suddenly a mass of people votes on populist parties and nobody understands where they came from. This is the direct result of a government that does not accept that a functioning public space is necessarily a political space, and of citizens that go along with this idea and accept that the only way in which to make themselves known is through a ballot offered every four years.
TVDP: Your idea of a fundamental political act reminds me of a remarkable scene in Michael Haneke’s Code Inconnu – the one that is also shot in the tube. I mention Haneke in this context because the way in which some of his work functions as both symptom and critique reminds me of the approach we discussed earlier. Think of Funny Games or Benny’s Video, which function perfectly as violent cult films for high school kids – it somehow becomes the very phenomenon it criticises.
JS: I agree. Code Inconnu is Haneke’s best, but most undervalued work. He completely abandons the dogmatic nature of his first three films. It shows his ability to think as a filmmaker. Elementary to this thinking is his editing, the choice where to cut a scene. This is fundamental to all of his films. His choice to adapt Das Schloss is interesting. In Kafka, the incompleteness is simply the result of the fact that his work was never meant to be published. For Haneke, this incompleteness becomes a deliberate choice.
TVDP: Or the opposite: to let things take too long, to record events in an overly minute way. This delay and oversaturation appears in works of both of them: to be too precise, to explain too much, too rationally... But perhaps we should return to this idea of the symptom. It strikes me as a concept central to certain contemporary art practices. Some months ago, I saw a discussion with the Bulgarian artist Plamen Dejanoff during a conference at the Witte de With Gallery in Rotterdam; what struck me about his practice is, again, that it seems to work with an attitude of disturbingly pure conformism.
JS: Are you familiar with Neue Slowenische Kunst? Their practice is interesting because it does not make an effort to create or formulate a work of art by itself. Rather, it is about the radical identification with the ideas of others. The idea is that this radical identification makes ‘hidden’ ideological layers visible by following the logic of certain ideas through to its end. It is a powerful political experiment. I think that art is very well capable of interpreting inconsistencies and contradictions and to make them visible. Politics could challenge art to truly participate in the exercise of power. And art could in turn challenge politics to think more consistently about questions of democracy and representation.
03/08/2009 (Edited 24/03/2010)
PUBLIC SPACE AESTHETICISED
Jules Schoonman and Tom Vandeputte in Conversation with Henk Oosterling
Henk Oosterling is a cultural philosopher based in Rotterdam and associate professor at the Erasmus University Rotterdam. He is initiator and director of Rotterdam Skillcity, a bottom-up research model for urban revitalisation and renovation focusing on the socio-economical and cultural conditions of Rotterdam. Amongst other things, his work examines the relation between art and public space.
Tom Vandeputte: In a recent lecture you suggested to think of art 'as public space’. Can you explain what you mean with this notion?
Henk Oosterling: That would need a brief historical contextualisation. It is the result of a rather simple development from pre-modern art, which essentially functions as a monument: it is an object of gathering, an object that functions to celebrate the history and collectivity of what is typically a national identity. This idea has completely disintegrated. In modern times, art acquires a function that serves the ideology of the individual—the creative individual that we know of as the modern artist. Art is essentially produced in isolation—in the space of the studio—and is only subsequently transposed into the public sphere: art in public space. Over the course of time, this art takes on a variety of forms; in other cultures, like the Muslim culture, artful objects serve as a point of gathering in the public space – this is what can be called an art of the public space. Finally, in the last decades of the twentieth century, artists tend to take public space as a point of departure in order to intervene in it or in order to create public space or at least attempt to do so. This is what I mean when I speak of art as public space. The process and the participant’s sensibility are primary.
TVDP: What is the position of architecture in relation to this production of public space? You once wrote that architects do not build walled volumes but produce relational networks and construct a collective awareness.
HO: In recent urban planning, architecture itself often proposes these elements. In Rotterdam, a current example could be the development of the Schouwburgplein by landscape architect Adriaan Geuze. He implanted cranes that can be manipulated by the public, displacing industrial steel from the harbour area by cultural steel for the square. Here, public space in its architectural form absorbs interactive art. This interaction was also the topic of an event that was staged by Rafael Lozano Hemmer. He calls his work relational architecture: he creates a stage on which bystanders become reflexively aware of their presence in public space, their being-in-public, their in-betweenness or inter-ests. All this corresponds to the general dissolution of the borders between art as an autonomous discipline and architecture and urbanism. The aestheticisation of daily life in these disciplines is highly similar to how contemporary art produces public space. Architecture and design acquire a new significance in an age that is principally digitally mediated. These once purely applied arts now gain an autonomy because they implicitly govern public space. The visionary character that is nowadays attributed to contemporary architecture is a mere consequence of the belief that architecture, by now, is the only discipline that still has some kind of comprehensive view on urban life. Deyan Sudjik’s Edifice Complex is interesting in that respect: it describes how architects, similar to surgeons, have the idea of administrating and distributing everyday life. This relates to how the work of art has lost its claim to the status of an autonomous document. It is always already embedded in publicity. Here, I think of Foucault’s distinction between document and monument. His Archaeology of Knowledge shows, at an epistemological level, that all universal truths are the outcome of power relations. We used to transform monuments into documents, as silent witnesses of a continuous history; these documents are split up, linked to others on different levels, and testify of the disparity of what we use to call history. Yet documents become monuments when they are analysed from within: such an analysis would reveal that all documents have a historical background and have emerged from a field of power relations. Fossilised universal statements are to be traced back to the micropolitical relations from which these are extracted. Art as public space could be an attempt to open up these fossilised fields. At the point where the work of art succeeds in doing this, it can be experienced as new public space. Bourriaud speaks of ‘relational’ aesthetics.
Jules Schoonman: To get back to the ‘walled volumes’ that architects are generally supposed to build: Herman Hertzberger once said that the bigger a space is, the more public it becomes. Would you agree?
HO: He is right. In order to relate to a large space, more people are required in order to relate to this space on a human scale. This, however, has a less enlightened side as well. Public space also functions in a repressive sense. For Foucault it potentially normalises behaviour in an implicit way. Space disciplines the body. Since we are aware of this, I think artists are in the position to relate to it differently by thematising these disciplining effects. The work of art then becomes public space itself.
JLS: In a recent lecture you refer to Peter Sloterdijk in order to explain how reflection might go along well with indulgence.
HO: In a rough parallel to a line of though I have developed in my recent work, Sloterdijk shows in the Spheres trilogy (especially in the last part, Foam) that public space has acquired an aesthetic dimension. This is exactly what I mean when I speak of ‘art as public space’. Sloterdijk argues that we have entered a period where this aspect of public space is to be taken seriously and we should understand ourselves as part of this work. In other words: we are situated in an aesthetic environment and the realisation that you act in a public space has to become productive and reflexive.
TVDP: What kind of motivation underlies this ‘art as public space’?
HO: Ultimately, the crucial idea is that every individual is first and foremost relational. We are embedded in networks. As such our most dear value nowadays is interest in the most pregnant sense: being (esse) in between (inter). A square, even a skyline situates people and makes them aware of being situated. Apart from giving a feeling of being small or large, safe or exposed, it makes one aware of being related in a physical, social and mental sense.
20/05/2009 (Edited 28/02/2010)
THE MIGRATING MONUMENT
Tom Vandeputte in Conversation with Anthony Auerbach
Anthony Auerbach is an artist and curator based in Berlin and London. In 1992 he founded the Vargas Organisation and since 2002 he has been involved with the semi-fictitious International Necronautical Society as its ‘Chief of Propaganda’ concerned with ‘Archiving and Epistemological Critique’. His project Aerial Reconnaissance Berlin (2009) documents a series of investigations which take the monumental sites of Berlin as their main locus of research.
Tom Vandeputte: Your 'Aerial Reconnaissance Berlin' project documents a series of ‘low altitude aerial surveys’ which were part of the International Necronautical Society (INS) ‘Inspectorate’ in Berlin. Where does your preoccupation with these aerial surveys come from?
Anthony Auerbach: That would be very low altitude aerial surveys. My first expedition of this type was an aerial survey of the carpet in my studio, done from a height of about 90 cm. I had worked for years in that studio on drawings. They had gradually become more and more intense, complicated, and, in the end unmanageable, partly as a result of what you might call centrifugal tendencies – an interest in architecture, landscape and cartography that eventually drove me out of the studio – and partly as a result of allowing the space of drawing to be infiltrated by other spaces, like that of games, maps and so on. There was one piece that got quite out of hand, so I resorted to subdividing a grid that was already part of the structure of the drawing and notating it, making a map of the drawing in 81 parts, encoding the ‘topography’ of the drawing like a map encodes a landscape. That way I hoped to be able to discard the original drawing. The aerial survey came about from the wish to turn the practice of drawing ninety degrees. So instead of recording something in some system of marks and traces in the vertical plane, a picture, I turned my attention to recording the marks and traces that might remain of the practice of drawing, that is: on my carpet. An aerial survey is a series of overlapping vertical photographs that covers the whole terrain. I realised that an aerial survey examining a surface, moving rhythmically back and forth across it, implies a notion of reading. That idea of reading, reading material, was what I brought to the Berlin project.
TVDP: The locations you surveyed in Berlin are described as ‘sites of erasure’. What do you mean by that?
AA: Whereas the sites I surveyed in the context of my own practice were more or less accidental or biographical, the INS’s ‘central concerns’ suggested criteria for the selection of sites for inspection that could be formulated precisely: ‘locations where no trace can be found of incidents or persons of interest to the INS; where there is evidence of attempts to cover or erase the traces of incidents or persons; where there is evidence of attempts to conceal the erasure’. That sounds like a contradiction of a method – aerial photography – that is supposed to be all about registering traces. But why not record erasure, or whatever is written over erasure? It is often said of cities, Berlin included, that they are like palimpsests. To me, this always seemed a rather sentimental notion, presupposing that the text, once erased and overwritten, could be recovered: made legible again if one only could inspect it closely enough, or, presupposing at least that the obscure remnants of erasure and inscription – the present state of the surface – will stand in for this promise of legibility. I am all for letting a look, inspection, arouse such desires, but the point in Berlin was to examine surfaces where there really is no trace of any ‘original’ mark or inscription, and to let the material complicate the method. Finding such sites in Berlin is not difficult if one takes into consideration that the places of the most intense, most intentional and ruthless erasure tend to be those sites that have been memorialised or monumentalised in various ways. Berlin, the city the INS has designated the World Capital of Death, exhibits an unusual abundance of such places. That line of investigations has led me to think quite a lot about monuments, and monumentality.
TVDP: In our project we talked a lot about the precise distinction between the notion of monumentality and the monument. The term monumentality seems to suggest an effect, independent from the particular object of the monument. For example, scale is a property that seems to stick stubbornly to whatever we conceive of as monumental.
AA: Do you mean size? Monumental means big. Monuments are supposed to look like they are not going to move, therefore should be very heavy, and to look heavy, they should be big, shouldn’t they. I would put the emphasis on seeming immobile – though in fact monuments often migrate. A thing called the ‘Schwerbelastungskörper’ [heavy burden body] in Berlin could be embodiment of monumentality in its pure form. It is a large concrete cylinder built for no other reason than to be very heavy, and it has no other inscription than ‘Denkmal’ [monument] since it is a protected building and has recently been restored. Although it is indestructible, it became dilapidated. The object was originally built to test the foundation system for the colossal architecture of the ‘Welthauptstadt’ [world capital] that Hitler and Speer imagined; it is a monument to a failed utopia, albeit a Nazi utopia.
TVDP: We like to think of it in terms of scale, because it seems possible to understand this traditional aspect of monumentality in terms other than its physical dimensions. Attention seems to be a concept which allows us to reconceptualise this aspect of monumentality: eventually, monuments need to attract attention in one way or the other.
AA: One way or another. Recently, I came across an advertising agency whose specialty is what they call ‘monument veiling’. If a monument is being restored or redeveloped, they will dress the scaffolding with monumental advertising posters. They offer brand-owners building-sized advertising opportunities in prominent locations, and monument-owners revenues to support redevelopment. If the client monument does not need the money, or the agency cannot sell the space, they make replica façades – a simulation, an idealisation, one might say, of the monument that is for the moment hidden by this very simulation. In Berlin, they also provide replica façades for monuments that don’t exist anymore, or, as the sponsors of the such façades would wish: don’t yet exist again. In any case, it looks as if monumentality and advertising are engaged on the same territory in the battle for eyeballs.
TVDP: Debord considered monuments as part of the society of spectacle. There is an interesting part in his technical notes to the films he made in the late 1950s. Some of these films document the situationists’ ‘dérives’ through Paris. In the technical notes on ‘On the Passage of a Few Persons Through a Rather Brief Unity of Time’ Debord remarks that, whenever the camera would risk filming a monument, they would shoot the scene from the opposite direction: that is, from the point of view of the monument. In our project, we have appropriated this idea and extended it: we have made a photographic documentation of the city of Rotterdam, shot through the eyes of monumental statues: Erasmus, Pim Fortuyn, Hugo de Groot, Monsieur Jacques ... The view of each statue produces a double image: it consists of two photographs, documenting the statues' perspective through both of their eyes, together forming a stereographic image. We liked how it appears as a necessarily futile attempt to revive these figures of the past; to engage with the issue of personification; and of course to work with the idea of the collection of monuments as a representation of a city's historical conscience.
AA: The thing you really pick up on in your project is not so much the ‘spectacle’ and Debord’s aim, somehow to suppress it by not picturing monuments – I imagine that would make their presence only more palpable, and would set up quite a complicated protocol for a dérive in a place like Paris... what you pick up on is a connection between monumentality and surveillance. Debord’s prohibition on the spectacular aspect of monuments brings him to inhabit their gaze. You do that literally, in order to view the city through the eyes of a monument. I suppose the question that arises then is: What kind of subjectivity a monument would have – and how that subjectivity is mediated by a look. Clearly, a monument that presumes to admonish the public in the name of the dead functions like a system of surveillance; a monument stands in for a super-ego (like you say, the conscience) that should somehow moderate the behaviour of the people affected by it.
TVDP: I am interested in the persistent fantasy that we are being watched by monuments. Recently, I did some research on the pavilions that Nicholas Hawksmoor designed for the gardens of Castle Howard. The pavilions are predominantly replicas of ancient funereal monuments; most are placed on the upper points of the slightly sloping terrain. In the first monograph on the architect, the layout of the gardens was described as evoking a sense of constantly being watched. Similarly, the steeples of the churches he built in London are replicas of funereal monuments that are raised above London’s rooftops, appearing to watch over and admonish its inhabitants. In the case of his church in Bloomsbury, the steeple is a miniature replica of the Halicarnassus mausoleum – or actually, of a reconstruction of the mausoleum, which appears to be literally placed on top. In contrast to this collection of ancient funereal monuments, it is not at all clear what the incoherent collection of statues accumulated over the years in a city like Rotterdam is to remind us of and how it relates to the city's contemporary condition.
AA: I’m not sure if it’s safe to generalise from a case that might be the extreme, but certainly, examining a system of monuments like Berlin’s brings to light aspects of monumentality that are not so obvious in other cities. The notion of the super-ego I mentioned already in connection with the surveillance comes out of psychoanalysis. It that context, it is the component of the personality that extends beyond individual subjectivity and indeed is often regarded as the internalising of collective figures of repressive authority. Aerial Reconnaissance Berlin suggests the Freudian concept of neurosis could be applicable to a city. At any rate, I’m prepared to treat Berlin as a ‘case’. On the face of it, the symptoms are abundant. One could say that monumentality is the architectural form of anxiety. As such it is associated on the one hand with death, and on the other hand, with neurosis – to align it with vaguely familiar Lacanian terms: on the one hand, the real, and on the other hand the imaginary. The monument is architecture pitched too far, for too much is demanded of it: to protect us from the dead, to preserve us till the resurrection, to give meaning to death. Architecture’s hyperbole becomes its horizon: the aspiration that can never be attained, the ideal that is written into the language of architecture. To the extent that monuments provide the repertoire of forms that make up architecture’s self-image, to be self-consciously a work of architecture, any building has to display monumental qualities. That’s what I mean by the migration of monuments. Partly – there are also several examples in Berlin of monuments literally moving from one place to another, being banished, buried, melted down, renovated, resurfaced etc. Architecture, like monumentality, incorporates the image of its own ruination, because the image of the ruin preserves the ideal that was never attained while recouping that failure as the pathos of tragedy. The true hero has to be a broken statue. Ruination can also make a monument out of a city, as I discovered in a draft plan for the devastation of Berlin from the air. Most of the ruins of Berlin were later levelled, but some are preserved as monuments. Monumentalisation fixes the desired image for a moment, but at the same time precipitates the further anxiety that the ruin will decay, just as much as if it were an ideal. On the other hand, the decay of monuments arouses the anxious desire to restore them, and thus, often, to repress the only thing that was arousing about them.
An archaeologist will tell you that the best way to preserve a find is not to dig up in the first place, or if it’s exposed, to bury it. But that wouldn’t satisfy the spectacular demands of monumentality. In Berlin, the iconography of the ruin tends to predominate because the trend, under various regimes, seems to have been against figurative monuments: Bismarck was moved from his place in front of the Reichstag to somewhere in the woods, the Kaiser Wilhelm Denkmal was demolished, the statue of Karl Liebknecht was never erected on the pedestal put up for it, Lenin was buried in a sand pit on the outskirts of Berlin. Since 1990, the norm for new monuments and revisions of old ones has been what I call sentimental minimalism – a kind of empty solemnity, that, at its most bombastic refuses inscriptions. For instance, the so-called ‘Holocaust’ memorial (officially the central memorial to the ‘Murdered Jews of Europe’) bears no inscription except the visitor rules which state: ‘Alle Anweisungen des ausgewiesenen Sicherheitspersonals sind zu befolgen’ which should be translated: ‘All instructions of authorised security personnel are to be followed.’ Which may as well replace the whole monument. The point is, the super-ego function of monumental sculpture – how it incorporates repressive authority – can also be fulfilled by a blind design-style.
But I wanted to give just one example of the fascination and anxiety of ruins. ‘The Topography of Terror’, is an institution which now occupies the block near the centre of Berlin formerly occupied by the headquarters of various branches of the Nazi security apparatus: SS, Gestapo etc., buildings formerly occupied by various other institutions – an art school, a museum of prehistory, for instance – and aristocratic mansions. The buildings were severely damaged during the war and were later flattened, but the site was not redeveloped. In the mid-1980s buried parts of the demolished buildings were excavated and became the setting for a didactic exhibition on the Nazi state security institutions and their victims. The present building and landscape design is in fact the third attempt to formally recover the site as a monument. Nothing came of the first architectural competition. The prize-winning design of the second was half built then demolished again. In the present complex, the exposed remains of the cellars are displayed for contemplation, while the didactic exhibition has been moved into a new pavilion built in an ultra-orthodox minimalist style. Parts of the foundations of other buildings have been newly exposed – and hence are rapidly disintegrating. Signs indicate where the previous tenants had set up shop between 1933 and 1945, but nothing marks the place where the previous, failed attempt to monumentalise the site was erased. Whereas in the makeshift ‘Topography of Terror’ exhibition of 1987, the quasi-archaeological remains served to authenticate the didactic exhibition, now they are preserved as a relict of the exhibition and serve to authenticate the institution. Stripped of their annotations, the remains would be trivial – after all, this isn’t Rome! – if it weren’t for their function as ruins in the monumental landscape design. The excavations suggest the anxiety of conflicting desires: to get to the bottom of things – literally, by exposing the foundations of Nazi institutions – and to re-present the recent past as pre-history – for which purpose the landscape design exploits an established repertoire of architectural readymades – literally, stuff that’s already there.
TVDP: Is there something similar going on with your aerial survey ‘The State of New York’? You talk about a survey of a map that’s turning back into a landscape.
AA: I would have to say you are right about that, although I do something different with it. There is an obsessive quality to recording the state of decay of the terrazzo map in two and half thousand vertical photographs, and certainly I play with everything that’s arousing about ruins and everything that’s dizzying about looking down. The survey I did is also something like what you expect an archaeologist to do. The day after I finished my survey, a team of architectural conservators started work on the map. They are actually more used to dealing with ancient mosaics than terrazzos from the 1960s, but it seems they thought the New York State Pavilion would be good practice for their students. Curiously, the first thing they did was sweep away everything that my survey recorded, in order to create their own status quo ante, which they duly photographed. Although they claimed to be sensitive to the ‘philosophical issues’ of their profession, their idea of conservation was repairing the terrazzo panels as if they really were ancient mosaics, thus restoring them to the banality that had inspired their earlier neglect. You cannot blame a conservator for having a professional interest in ruins, but the episode highlights the particular attraction of this building. The pavilion designed by Philip Johnson, and advertised at the time as the ‘The Tent of Tomorrow’ should have been demolished like the rest of the World’s Fair pavilions. It was donated to the City of New York because the sponsors wanted to avoid the demolition costs, but since no permanent use could be found for the building, it gradually fell into disrepair, the roof started falling in and so on, until it really was a ruin. Apparently, the architect was utterly delighted that his building had achieved that status. The building’s accidental prestige and the pathos of its ruination prompted calls for its restoration. It’s probably only in Berlin that a ruin would proposed as a permanent use for a derelict building – although, even there, they probably wouldn’t put it quite like that. This is not the first time that the aspirations of modernist architecture have been affirmed by their ruination. Architecture, as long as it’s architecture, seems bound only to build the monuments to a future that is already lost.
http://aauerbach.info
http://www.necronauts.org
http://www.vargas.org.uk/aerial
03/07/2010 (Edited 23/09/2010)
RADIO, ARCHAEOLOGY, LITERATURE
In Conversation with Tom McCarthy
Tom McCarthy is a writer and artist based in London. His recent novel C was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and his debut Remainder was described by Zadie Smith as ‘one of the great English novels of the last ten years’. In 1999, McCarthy founded the International Necronautical Society, with which he has worked on a series of art projects. His literary and artistic work amongst others engages with issues of mourning, (cultural) memory and the technologies sustaining it.
Tom Vandeputte: Monuments, and more precisely crypts, occupy an important position in C. Some of the spaces in which the narrative is situated are literally defined by the presence of monumental tombs: the first part of the text is for instance situated on a family estate, around a centrally located crypt where all the ancestors are buried; but also in a more abstract sense, processes of burial and encryption reappear frequently throughout the novel.
Tom McCarthy: I suppose that Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’s discussion of the concept of the crypt has been important for me. I encountered their work while I was doing research for an art project. It builds on Freud's history of the Wolf Man, which is about a wealthy, young, Russian man who loses his sister and goes through a protracted process of mourning. Because this man never properly mourns his sister, she inhabits him like some kind of ghost for the rest of his life, dictating his compulsive behaviour. Freud compares his mind to a set of hieroglyphic overlays: he describes it as a space of code, of burial, and ultimately of the failure to bury. Abraham and Torok argue that Freud should have called it a crypt: a funereal monument, but also a site of encryption in a linguistic sense – the Greek kruptos means ‘buried’ but also ‘hidden’. They argue that the fundamental structure of neurosis is cryptological: its architecture is a labyrinth with a void at its heart. In case of the Wolf Man, this void is occupied by a dead person who is not properly there, who escapes yet still remains there; and I suppose the same can be said about Serge Carrefax, the protagonist of C, after his sister commits suicide. In linguistic terms, the concept of encryption also has to do with transmission. Freud, of course, understands neurosis completely linguistically: in terms of word-associations, changes of language and translation. Abraham and Torok describe this as an encrypted transmission: the compulsive behaviour of the Wolf Man re-transmits the crypt's signal onwards and onwards.
TVDP: Wireless transmission figures prominently in C. The novel is situated amidst the tumultuous developments of early twentieth-century modernity, with technology making the world smaller and more ‘knowable’. Serge Carrefax is born to the ticking and humming of an experimental radio station – and when he visits Egypt towards the end of the novel, he sighs that it’s not a distant, exotic ‘there’ anymore.
TMcC: Yes, the disenchantment. The experience that ‘there’ is only ‘here’, and ‘here’ has become everywhere. The last part of the novel takes place in Egypt of the 1920s. When people went there then, they had read Herodotus, or perhaps Gérard de Nerval, and thought of the Orient as this kind of creative space. Only when they arrived, they realised they were just on a package tour, and that it was all fake. I have read accounts of early tour-guides putting a mummy somewhere for you to discover. There is a great part in Flaubert, who writes that he is going down the river and says he feels like nothing of it is real – it is just like a panorama, the kind of installation you would encounter on a fairground. But in the earlier passages of C, it is paradoxically enough precisely technology that makes the world fantastical. As a teenager, Serge is eavesdropping on the world by tuning in to all kinds of signals in the ether and seeing what he is able to capture. Starting from his bedroom, he first intercepts local traffic, then Liverpool ships, Atlantic ships, fragmented messages from Gibraltar, and then finally this intergalactic noise of meteorites and star deaths. It is essentially a huge opening out. You find something similar in Kafka. There is a really good passage in The Castle: when K. phones the castle, he is always put on hold. He describes hearing a kind of static on the line, which is like children's voices, singing at a distance or just beyond the range of proper hearing. The phone never lets you to the castle; it just makes it more concealed. In these passages, technology is not bringing things near but it is expanding the here into an infinite space.
TVDP: The atmosphere of C is densely filled with all kinds of transmissions, codes and signals, of which radio is only one. At times they seem to become almost palpable.
TMcC: I absolutely think of messages as material phenomena. When Serge is eavesdropping on all the ship-to-shore and ship-to-ship transmissions, I’ve tried to emphasise the fact that these are pulses coming physically through the air – he almost feels them against his skin. Later, this accumulates and accumulates. By the time he is in London and he encounters the code-rich drugs underworld and is taking heroin all the time, which slows everything down, it is almost as if he is underwater: he is seeing ripples moving through the air and movements as if they are filmed in motion capture delay.
TVDP: Several years ago you have also set up a radio station yourself. How did this come about?
TMcC: I was doing an art project at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London, which was based on Jean Cocteau's film Orphée – the bits where the dead poet Cégeste transmits messages over the radio and Orphée picks them up. I have always thought these are beautiful scenes, and beautiful lines of poetry, but there is also something else to them: they establish a relation between technology, death and politics. Cocteau based these transmissions on the résistance in France during the Second World War, which used similar encrypted messages to communicate with London. The film is situated in a landscape of war, occupation and resistance, but also one of desire. The messages in the film are being transmitted because death, the Princess, wants to seduce Orphée, and she knows that they will draw him into the underworld. I was interested in this triangulation, and I guess it also appears as such in C. In the ICA we reprised Cocteau’s set-up: we started a radio station, transmitting messages around London from within the gallery space.
TVDP: You’ve said that you started writing C from the idea that archaeology and radio are two facets of the same thing. Archaeology also seems to play an important role in your previous novel Remainder.
TMcC: The two novels definitely overlap at this point. In a key scene of Remainder, the main character looks at the surface of the road, a material surface with all kinds of marks and paint stains, and understands it is also a palimpsest, layers and layers of messages of what has happened there. He realises, like Freud, that he is only looking at the surface. In the street, there are all these holes, the electricity and the plumbing, leading to other places. I suppose that the last section of C almost literalises that metaphor. Here, the main character, Serge, is on an Egyptological dig, going through endless layers of stuff, some of which are Lipton teabags left there five months ago, other stuff is five thousand years old. But it has all just mulched together and, no matter how deep he goes, there is still more and more.
TVDP: You also use these technologies as a metaphor for your view on literature. In a recent lecture you said that ‘writing is like radio’.
TMcC: The year in which C ends, 1922, is the year in which the BBC was founded, Tutankhamen was disinterred and Egypt got its independence. But it is also the year in which James Joyce’s Ulysses and T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land were both published. This is for me most important: it is the great year of literary modernism. I like to think of The Waste Land, in particular, as a kind of radio programme, which gathers voices from different places. Towards the end of the poem, Eliot writes: ‘these fragments I have shored against my ruins’. He is gathering together bits and remainders, and tries to make them re-emanate something new: something which is new precisely because it is old.
TVDP: I noticed that many parts of C are borrowed from existing texts. The protagonist’s observations on the particular aesthetics of a battlefield when viewed from an airplane for instance repeat those of the Futurist poet Marinetti.
TMcC: There is definitely a lot of embedding in C. You can see it as a response to mainstream culture’s inability to talk about literature. A writer is supposed to have and express thoughts and feelings which are absolutely unique, authentic, and individual. This is completely wrong. Literature is a continuous embedding and encrypting; it is the interment, disinterment, and re-interment of other literature. In C I wanted to take that logic very far. The climax to the section of the novel called ‘Crash’ is more or less a reprise of Marinetti's well-known crash into a ditch as it is described in the Futurist Manifesto. Also the autobiographical account by French writer Maurice Blanchot of the moment he is almost executed is in the novel. Besides that, many of the characters of C reprise historical figures whose biographies I had looked at when I was doing my research, with completely recognisable phrases and scenes. Writing C was almost like soldering, meshing and crushing these things together.
TVDP: What are you currently working on?
TMcC: I’ve started to work on a new book, which is all about pollution. In fact, I have just been in Stockholm for two months on a residency, where I’ve been writing on this book that has been in my head for years. It is weird: I always wanted it to begin with an oil spill – I knew that would be the first scene. In Stockholm, I was reading about oil spills, looking at images of them, and then this spill actually took place in the Gulf of Mexico. The novel is going to be called Satin Island. Some time ago, I woke up in the middle of a night from this dream which was full of oil and rubbish, a bit like Staten Island in New York, but it was more like a Satin Island: full of pollutants and rubbish, like an incinerator being burned, but kind of rich and beautiful. I knew I wanted my next novel to be thought outwards from that image.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_McCarthy_(writer)
11/06/2010 (Edited 22/10/2010)
Editors:
Caspar Frenken
Tom Vandeputte
Copy editors:
Ross Adams
Jules Schoonman
Contributors:
Anthony Auerbach
Tom McCarthy
Mihnea Mircan
Henk Oosterling
Jonas Staal
Daniel van der Velden
Thanks to:
Pier Vittorio Aureli
Annemarie van den Berg
Matthijs van Muijen
Nanne de Ru
This series of interviews followed from the research project Monuments and the Public Sphere, initiated by Jules Schoonman and Tom Vandeputte.
This publication was made possible by the financial support of: