Christian Hasucha

Andrea Knobloch, WAITING FOR ‘JETZT’, in: CHRISTIAN HASUCHA, Öffentliche Interventionen (Public Intervention), Verlag für Moderne Kunst, Nürnberg, 2013 (Monograph)

‘One day, when he was the guest of acquaintances whom he did not know very well, Mr. K. discovered that his hosts had already laid out the breakfast things for the next morning on a small table in the bedroom. After he had initially praised his hosts in his mind because they were eager to see him on his way, he remained preoccupied by the thought. He considers, whether he , too, would get the breakfast things ready at night before going to bed. After some reflection he concludes that at certain times it would be right for him to do so. He likewise concludes that others should also concern themselves with this question for a little while.’^[1]

I wait weeks for the right time. An opportune moment, a draw of the breath with which the writing can begin, of a text that deals with what Christian Hasucha does as an artist and what he, himself, calls ‘public interventions’. This moment does not come. All tricks and manoeuvres do not work this time. Instead, new questions constantly arise and all previously gathered trails and conjectures become lost in the semi-darkness of insecure suppositions and all-too hazardous deductions. The documentation^[3] I have on the artistic activities of Mr. Hasucha appears clear and coherent. Now 59 numbers in the project series, ‘public interventions, are available any time as a ‘complete archival list’^[4] on an internet side on the world wide web.^[5] Their formation as a series and the constant style of presentation - some photographs, a short and sometimes almost banal text, a plan drawing - point to a concept planned well in advance and that was just as effective in the year, 1981 (Nr.1, Die Raketen von Budapest), as in 2011 (Nr. 59, J. Frh. v. Eichendorff-Gedenkpfad). Everything there is to know appears to be here in strict order and clarity - no more and no less. Carefully, and with an obliging exactitude, places, procedures and constructions are enumerated. Precisely this prompts the question of what might have eluded the analysing order and comprehension. Is something deliberately hidden, to create the impression of reservation and inaccessibility? My curiosity is now aroused about what I conjecture to be behind the so bright and clearly-lit stages that Christian Hasucha conceptualises with the documentation of his ‘games with public potential’^[6]: an intangible residue of texts and reproductions that escapes the grid of the documentary layout designed by the artist for his activities.

Christian Hasucha deals with position. He withdraws himself as far as possible from institutional spaces that are dedicated to the manifestation of artistic artefacts. His standpoint is always somewhere else, preferably at the edge. The landscapes between cities, the flip sides of metropoles, overlooked and special urban places awaken his interest and demand from him methods that he designates ‘city implants’ and ‘attributive sculptures’, and summarise the term, ‘public interventions’. He tries to give the rituals of the art market a wide berth. The preview public or the so-called ‘informed art lover’ have only, in his view, an indirect and therefore limited perception of his everyday displacements. Only casual passersby or habitual visitors to these places can plumb their depths in all their facets.^[7] Otherwise the staged presentations of documentary materials allow at best a superficial understanding of events. Thus the position within his work that has made my starting point so difficult was outlined to me, the author of these texts, by Christian Hasucha. What escapes me and, and precisely because of this arouses my curiosity, is the experience of the ‘chance viewer’,^[8] which is not possible for me, for I can never casually come across one of his arrangements. I would never be surprised in my everyday life in such a way by a ‘public intervention’ so that I could now report on it and entirely penetrate and interpret the available information as intended by the artist. I have always actually been an ‘art lover, prepared and informed and anticipating an art experience when out and about, and can therefore never be a ‘passerby’ or ‘resident’ and unexpectedly come across one.^[9] I find sanctuary in this so self-assured sealed-against-the-art-market work only in the form of the FT (Fiktional-Teilhabender - Fictional Participant).^[10] For I am certainly ‘a person who is also interested in the oddities of each environment.’^[11] As an FT I gain admittance into the cosmos of the ‘public interventions’ in search of secret pleasures that are hidden in the shady corners of bright consistency, order and consequence.

My first attempt as an FT was in a London park. It is 1982 and there is a hefty storm passing. It leaves behind an electric atmosphere. In spite of the wild commotion, a refreshed calm lay over everything.

Paths and benches were completely damp, shiny, wet leaves and broken branches lay on the ground. A branch sticks up from the ground in view of a park bench. Standing upright, its twigs stretch sideways in the direction of a non - or no longer - available gust of wind. Painted white, just like the branch, strings hold the twigs in a position that they had held for a split second when buffeted by the stormy wind. I would have liked to stay here for a while but the rain-soaked bench prevents me. The pale white ghostly tree conserved for a moment in its tilted position that it never would have had; for during the storm this branch was still part of a living organism. A sudden gust of wind hit the treetop, the crack in the wood opened further under its pendulous weight in the wind until the fibrous remains could no longer hold. It fell down, and was taken by someone who set it upright in the earth. By someone who had the tools to dig and colour to paint, as well as enough string to bind all the twigs to the opposing slope and pull them in that direction. It was someone who was prepared and had taken the time to invent an action and subsequently weave it into the past of this place. Someone who stretched a bow and shot an arrow, whose flight described a journey in time that extended the invented moment into an uncertain future. Someone who tied a branch and forcibly bent it, so that he could photograph it and leave it there. Who? If I could touch it, I would set the branch free, loosen the strings and watch how the once living and still elastic wood relaxes and springs back upright.

The unknown antecedent and the uncertain results meet in the photographs of ‘Windbaum’ that I found on Christian Hasucha’s website. In three views, one in colour, I see the whitened branch, the supports that held it, the bench and the slope. Three times they show ‘Windbaum’, always leaning to the same side, from a slightly shifted perspective. Three moments in which the camera shutter opened, the penetrating light hit the film, froze the servile attitude of the forcibly bowed twigs in the photo-chemical coating of the film material, time again elapsed over it, fixed in the apparatus in order to carry it from this one to another place, to many other places. The photographs of ‘Windbaum’ are present today on the world wide web.^[13] They refer to a past event; as if numerous cracks had severed the hour and second hands as the branch fell, someone took it and left it in such a manner upright in the park. Cracks that discard the flow of time and always and forever open wide anew. Perhaps that explains the ineffable sadness that envelops me when looking at the ‘Windbaum’ pictures. I do not know who saw it there, how long it stood so, if someone else undid its restraints and took it away, or whether, invaded by fungi and beetles, it collapsed at some point.

‘Jetzt’ lights up. In Cologne in 1989, a year later in Frankfurt - three weeks long, every evening at irregular intervals. Again and again, for a few seconds only, it crowns the free-standing, 15 metre high brick wall of a multi-storey house in the inner city. Similar to neon writing, its wires short and light up in an irregular rhythm. Hardly recognisable in the darkness, sits a man on a chair mounted next to the electrically illuminated lettering. He wears a security harness and holds a toggle switch in his hand. What incites him to flip the switch and burn a sudden ‘Jetzt’ in the dim evening sky remains unclear. He sits there, concentrated and calm. He does not call out into the panorama of the evening city. ‘Jetzt’ appears silently as soon as an electrical impulse chases through the no longer broken connection between the current’s source and its target. To flip the switch and show ‘Jetzt’ means to manifest something that is no longer present in the illumination of the letters. The lighting up of ‘Jetzt’ may be the result of a perception that surprises the man on the chair. While lit, it highlights an arbitrary event that follows the release of the light impulse, and could have occurred so or quite differently. For the man on the chair, it is impossible to catch the moment that moved him to switch on the fluorescent letters. It will always fail him and, instead, always mark another. The repeated flipping of the switch, every evening for three weeks, is an insistent, almost defiant sign of the impossibility of precisely catching the point that jumps to and fro between memory and expectation. It is just as impossible to merge two magnets whose ends have the same polarity.

The resident encounters the illuminated writing suddenly and unexpectedly. The word at some point appears to him for the first time and breaks his step, because a ‘Jetzt’ that he is not thinking about at this time rushes in between and confuses the the flow of his time springing over from the future into the past. The shining ‘Jetzt’ appears for a few seconds before his eyes. He will read it, recognise it and pause to question it. In pausing, time stretches out between standing still and moving forward. A sliding opens up that remains disconnected and bulky, a hindrance swelling from seconds to minutes. The hurrying passerby glances at the ‘Jetzt’ and possibly does not look at it. He perceives rather an impalpable lightness on the pavement but ascribes it to the usual phenomenon of the city; perhaps a car is manoeuvring into a parking space and its headlights sweep over the asphalt. Or the light in a first floor kitchen suddenly comes on. Or a defect lamp post flickers irregularly over the facades and paving stones. The silent ‘Jetzt‘ above him is subtle and does not halt his progress.

The artist, a guest in Cologne and a year later in Frankfurt, provided an intricate construction in both places. For three weeks he employed a man to wait, securely harnessed to a chair 15 metres above the city, for the ‘right’ moment, which he could never deliver because, although he wanted to mark this moment, he always failed. ‘Jetzt’ cannot be met, time is a sleight of hand and escapes the directing of the artist. This moment of re-pass, the reversal of the composed situation and the springing over of preconceived expectations is the moment that the artistic aim targets, but it is not to achieve intentionally. This moment triggers a tension that builds up in the powerful and considered activation of the preparations for a pre-designed event. With all power and dedication its realisation is pushed to the edge over the descent in which, released from the apparatus of safeguards and anticipation, it remains in a fragile balance for a few seconds until it tips into a beguiling present and has taken place. Although initiator and ‘catalyst’, the artist is now just as much ‘affected’ by this event that his production has elicited as his audience. He lives with it, it happens to him - just as it happens to the man on the roof, the casual passersby, the residents of the houses and the invited and informed ‘art lovers’, or evades them because luck strikes slightly away from their paths. Each will perceive different facets of the experience, which no longer reveals a before or after, but traverses all the senses as an inevitable ‘Jetzt’.

As a Fictional Participant, I ordered an ‘Adsorption Fleece’ from Christian Hasucha in 1995, and mounted it according to the instructions in my home. The half-circle in white filter material was fitted in to a metal holder screwed onto the wall. Five years later I received, unrequested, a transparent cover that could be fitted to the holder to prevent further dust and micro particles in the flat’s atmosphere from sinking into and accumulating in the fleece. Henceforth they fall onto the surface of the cover and build up in my duster. Friends and family have wondered about the strange fixture. Moreover, it never received any publicity outside my flat. The artist has never visited me to check whether I interpreted his instructions ‘correctly’ and mounted the fleece as he intended.

Over a hundred of these fleeces were sent out nationwide. In possibly over one hundred homes such dust-filled mats may be preserved and installed under transparent covers. The discrete operation of the five-year long particle collection took place everywhere. Imperceptibly, the originally white fleece became gradually darker, silent fibres and floating particles landed on the soft ground, and its weight over time increased by barely a few micrograms. Between the ordered beginning (install the fleece) and the end (mount the cover) a process of enrichment unfolded of whose progression the senses were almost completely deprived. That something did happen had to be told and visualised. The ‘adsorption fleece’ is a mental experiment with a material removal as the vicarious indication of a process that - limited to the few square centimetres of the half-plate-sized fleece - was arbitrarily concluded, but otherwise proceeds with inexorable consistency. It is an embarrassing revelation of the always active and passive participator; the dirt of urban activity is not kept out by the house door, it sticks to clothes, is carried around, inhaled somewhere and exhaled elsewhere, and persistently breaks through all protective barriers. Inside the home is the place where the public being of its inhabitants is dustily defeated. Inside the home is the living room that speculates on the possibility of a visit, the sudden and unprepared seeking out; a diorama carefully calculated in its effect in order to place oneself in the limelight and, if necessary, to perform the show of hospitality. The placing of the furniture, the kind of decoration and drapes, the lighting and the self-imposed rules of behaviour for the occupancy of these rooms are directed towards an audience that is always latently present. It hardly makes sense to set the so-called ‘private’ against the ‘public’, for it is permeated by and related to the experience of the public and vice versa.

The construction of an outer or outside in abutment to areas of the exclusive interior has long been carried along in the turbulence between privacy set up for public show and a sprawling public stage that also floods the most intimate areas of life and washes away borders, or even makes them disappear completely. In order to mark a specific position, the boat floating on the waves must constantly be rowed against being carried by the current or shifting wind. The rower exerts himself to control the boat and is also subject to the forces that promote or redirect his efforts. The perception of what is and what is happening is a process that is not arbitrarily begun or ended but continues. The inexorably expanding collection of sensory impressions and perceptions is caught in unsteady motion. The particles touch, cross or avoid the fast-drying and then softening border membrane between concealment and revelation, forgetting and remembering. Ineluctably involved and clamped like the fleece in its holder, we are evermore besieged by them. Perhaps they accidentally touch a sensitive knotting that suddenly unravels and challenges us to actions that - interwoven in constantly changing surroundings and events - sometimes condense into an art event and can be brought to public viewing.

As an 'FT'^[17] I visited 'Die Insel' in Berlin Neukölln in the summer of 2006. The grassy, gentling sloping from the centre to the edges, elevated green mound also rose in the following two years in Lier, Belgium and in Fribourg, Switzerland. In the middle of the city there is the lake that surrounds the three metre high 'Insel': the air space that extends from between the towering walls of the adjacent buildings over the paving stones in the market place or grey-paved pavements. The continental shelf on which it sits is the small piece of land under it that is dedicated to the community and over which, following the sun's path, its silhouette creeps during the day. At certain hours in the morning or the evening, Christian Hasucha awaits his guests in Neukölln. In Lier and Fribourg, one can choose a day to reserve several hours on the island and use it as desired. There is no pier, instead a ladder and a small hatch that can be opened and through which one can climb into the sky above the 'Insel' in order to enjoy the short escape, the programmed opting out from the city rush, on the green grass. It is called a break in English, a calculated break in the everyday. 'Die Insel' describes a retreat, a calm oasis in the drifting sands of deficiency. In the straightforwardness of a tightly confined space the perennial possibility of unforeseen encounters with the unknown that characterises urban life appear manageable and moderated. Those entering and occupying 'Die Insel' domesticate it as their own territory, those coming find themselves in the role of the expected guest, the surprising meeting with others is turned into an appointment made in advance. However, 'Die Insel' of Mr. Hasucha does not redeem the promise of restorative seclusion. It remains exposed to the rising and falling roar of the city and all its enervating impositions. And it exposes the temporary residents, lifts them out into the visibility of a market place vaudeville. In constant expectation of an audience, each involuntary gesture, each spontaneous movement is transformed into the demonstration of the particular. An insular 'living room', whose alleged landscapeness is broken by a surrounding railing that not only prevents falls, but above all reintroduces the possibility of an accident / the unforeseen into the arena of action in this city living room. The establishment of the 'Insel' in the fabric of the city as an architecturally designed fragment of the landscape, its circular shape implying the character of a plaza, do not mislead us away from the private retreat space that is interpreted here, hauled out of its hiding place between opaque walls and reflective panes and replanted in full visibility in city life. 'Die Insel' is a compact imaging of one of the moments of the publicly pervaded private sphere.

Meals are prepared on the 'island', one meets to eat with friends or family, makes phone calls, reads a book, rests, stays overnight and sleeps there. All these are activities that belong to home living. And home living is a principally exclusive process that withdraws from the availability and responsiveness of public life. They are also, however, activities that are increasingly and unreservedly exposed to public perceptibility. The barbecue with friends in the city park, the use of mobile phones anytime and anywhere, regardless of the intimacy of the topics discussed, post-midnight celebrations on quiet city streets all point to the fact that the use of available urban space is restricted mostly by unfavourable weather conditions. The ‘right to the city’ demanded in many places is often misunderstood as the right to the arbitrary use of urban spaces that in the meantime enjoy at best the status of a shared kitchen in urban society: used and consumed extensively by each, the responsibility is left to others. Crossed boundaries of the acceptable lead to inconsequential crisis meetings and agitated clean-up actions. A such, the lush green of ‘Die Insel’ functions as a magnifying glass in which the worn but still seductive arguments of the ‘re-appropriation’ and ‘recapture’ of the Res Publica and urban space dedicated to the public event go up in smoke.

A practice of screening the ‘private’ that civic cooperation has already achieved and that formulates the ‘public’ simply as a container in which isolated individuals assemble without actually meeting, is isolated and highlighted. Crowds and the relative differences between urban dwellers in public view replaces the surprising encounter with a stranger, which is tamed and consumed as imagination and spectacle, as fashionable dress or exotic ambient equipped with palm trees and sand beach.

If one climbs the green platform and lets the heavy hatch fall back into the square recess designed for it, one has by no means escaped; one is even more exposed and penned in. The rules of the administrative authority and commercial exploitation present and effective in civic society, as well the various practices of social and political uses of urban spaces are not excluded. They are at most circumvented. Through clever preparation and anticipation of the eventual concerns of officially responsible decision makers, Christian Hasucha repeatedly manages to infiltrate his ambivalent and questioning constellations into regulated daily life. The precision of his technical constructions and plans and the reliability of his foundations belong, just like neon yellow safety vests and red and white striped barrier tape, to equipment that helps the regulating authorities to overlook the speculative and unpredictable in his artistic doings. The temporary measures of Mr. Hasucha entice one into a constructed situation and at the same time twist generated expectations. They offer one moment and meet another. They direct the gaze^[18] to a siding to release it again on a certain day at a certain time. The shimmering Fata Morgana of an out-time, a suspended time^[19] sets moments of the present free, spinning around their orbits and no longer to be captured and reassembled as a whole .

Art is no spotless white vest worn through the world. It is rather the scissors that cut the cloth and open up our eyes to the unnoticed, and the needle that stitches and sews and constantly brings other, surprising environments and enables unexpected encounters. It is like a breakfast table laid out the evening before, of which no one can say if or who will sit here the next morning and drink from the cup with its handle turned carefully to the right. What remains is a beginning that swells into an unpredictable, powerful event that with irresistible impact irreversibly breaks into the deceptive certainty of continual relationships.

^[1] Bertolt Brecht: Stories of Mr. Keuner, On the disruption of ‘one thing at a time’, trans. M. Chalmers, City Lights Books, p.28

^[2] Response of the SDP Political Office member, Günter Schabowski to the question from Hamburg Bild newspaper reporter, Peter Brinkmann, about the date for the implementation of the new travel regulations for DDR citizens at a press conference on 9^th November, 1989, at approximately 18.53,. Source: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mauerfall#Mauerfall. Status 19.11.12, 9:55 am

^[3] http://www.hasucha.de and Sukzessiv-Dokumentation in 17 volumes of Kunstforum (beginning with vol. 113 and ending with vol. 159), various self-published mini-documentations and postcards of individual projects.

^[4] Quoted from http://www.hasucha.de/index3l.html, Status 22.08.12, 10:54 am

^[5] http://www.hasucha.de

^[6] Peter Funken, Monograph on Christian Hasucha, Kunstforum international, Vol.192, 2008, in: Christian Hasucha 16 Poller, pub. by inter-edition, Berlin 2009

^[7] ‘The throng of invited art lovers turns out to be a foreign body at the intervention site, newcomers are only able to gain a distanced overview of the intervention’s components and its sphere of influence. The incidental perception of puzzling things and events remain reserved for passersby and residents.’ Christian Hasucha: Über die Autonomie der Intervention (Catalogue text on the Dortmund intervention, ‘WEGE’ and the simultaneous exhibition, ‘ORTE’ in the Dortmund Kunstverein, 1995)

^[8] See note 4

^[9] The artist challenges this opinion of the author and puts it up for discussion, editor’s note, 07/03/2013

^[10] ‘How does an intervention develop? Apart from professional participants with whom I have intensive exchanges, there is someone I call the Fictional Participant (FP). The FP is my quality controller in the development of an intervention. Depending on the variation, I try to imagine his mind-set towards it. I imagine the FP as a person who is interested in the oddities of the respective environments and who then, for example, stumbles across the information about the16 bollards and stores them in his mental depot as curiosities.’ Christian Hasucha in: Täuschungen, Störungen, Schnittstellen und Ermöglicher, http://www.hasucha.de, Status at 24.08.12, 10:23 am

^[11] See note 9

^[12] Christian Hasucha, ‘Windbaum’ (Park in London,

branch broken off in wind, parcel string , white acrylic paint, 1982)

^[13] on 24.08.2012

^[14] ‘JETZT. At the top of a free-standing masonry wall sits an actor on a metal chair every evening for a period of three weeks. Beside him a rectangular box with a glazed front is installed. From time to time the sitter uses a toggle switch to trigger a light impulse in the box, whereby the punched out word, JETZT, shines out in the night sky.’ Realised in Cologne (1989) and Frankfurt am Main (1990), Source: http://www.hasucha.de/intervention_11/dokumentationl.html, Status on 26.08.12, 8:18 am

^[15] ‘Adsorption fleece: interested parties were sent a kit of adsorption fleece and mounting instructions on request. The fleece should be exposed to the air in the apartment for five years. Suspended matter such as dust, organic particles, micro-organisms and synthetic fibres could accumulate on the fleece. A ’settlement’ took place. After five years the participants received a transparent cover with which the adsorption process could be restricted. The ‘settlement’ sustained its own reserves. Over one hundred of these fleeces were sent out, the number of realised installations is unknown.’ Quoted on http://www.hasucha.de/intervention_22/dokumentation.html, Status 27.08.12, 10:57 am

^[16] ‘Die Insel: a flat, grass-grown mound floats - held by supports - 3 metres above the pavement. A man who appears to come from the neighbourhood, unpacks his breakfast there every morning. He is also there in the evenings. Every now and then he receives a visitor.’ (http://www.hasucha.de/intervention_49/dokumentation.html, Status: 18.11.12, 12:51 pm)

^[17] See note 9

^[18] For example, Intervention Number 54: ‘maintenant Three months long the 50-metre long floating word gave the present at the lake an undertitle.’ (http://www.hasucha.de/intervention_23/dokumentation.html, Stautus 14.11.12, 17:38 pm)

^[19] For example, Intervention Number 58: ‘JETZT and the River Unlike JETZT II (Project 23), this stone air word enclosure is permanently positioned. The river flows lazily past it. The bank is officially maintained from time to time.’ (http://www.hasucha.de/intervention_29/dokumentation.html, Status 14.11.12, 17:47 pm)