Thomas West Republic of Ready-Mades …The best sculpture in Germany this year, however, was not found at Documenta but in Cologne… …lt has been traditional at least since the sixties to contrast the politically engaged, sometimes hysterieal tone of the Berlin artist with the calmer, more conceptual mode of the Rhinelander. But, in the case of Christian Hasucha, the contrast does not work, perhaps because Hasucha is that rare Berlin artist who was actually born in Berlin. Far removed from Bergmann hut just as approachable, Hasucha at thirty-three has already shown in London, in Brussels (at the Camomille Gallery) and in Cologne (at the Galerie van Aken). He is a shortish, quiet man with a reddish beard. He studied in London where he learned to wear a cloth cap and reflect on the work of Tony Cragg and Marcel Duchamp. The first time I saw Christian Hasucha's work was through a peep-hole in Cologne's Brüsselerstrasse. There I detected the image of a tree that had been painted blue and inscribed with the word Orinoco. I asked Mr. Hasucha to go into the back room with me where we had the following exchange: Question: You mix paint and nature in a physical sense, i.e. in painting trees. Why? Hasucha: I've not only painted trees but I've transformed them, that is, sawn broken branehes and, like a carpenter, used dove-tail joints to put them back together in a tree-like structure. As a person from the city, for a long period in my life I had hardly any relation with nature. In painting parts of the natural world I concentrate for a moment on a specific part of something I see, mainly during travels. Part of a Iandscape inspires me to want to add somthing to it something which the site I see calls up in my imaginatin. I add acts like an "alien" in that it appears to originate in another world. To underscore the contrast between the original surroundings and what I add, l've used a number of devices. l've photographed puddles that I've reshaped against the light, so as to obtain white, reflecting forms on the dark street. The most recent experiment was conducted on the canals of Berlin and Amsterdam where I floated a ten-metre platform with cut-out scenery, with "living pictures" to be seen by chance passers-by. I fitted a ship's propeller to float which was powered by a bicycle pedal system. My next, long-term project ts to hang a three-dimnensional drawing above a number of sites I have in mind. Question:  Why do you place such emphasis oin unconventional methods? Aren't there expressive possibilities enough in painting and sculpture? Hasucha: What I 've described surely has expressive possibilities! Painting and sculpture I found unsufficient in so far as I they only allow, at best, for variations  on what has already been discovered. I can't free myself from the suspicion that traditional mediums are often used in order to preserve the conventional, commodity aspect of the work of art. This commodity aspect then conditions the formal if not the aesthetic character of the work. Things that have been made with unusual materials or  which require an unusual or difficult means of presentation can be sold only with difficulty an can be shown less often. I mean, this has always been the problem for dealers, not for extremists in art. I view the field I work in more as one of research into unusual forms of representation than production of artistic commodities. Question:  I've noticed that you use ordinary commercial objects in your work. Is there a specific reference here to Duchamp? Hasucha:  You've come to an oeuvre that's interested me throughout my career. The problemof the appropriation of reality was demonstrated in exemplary fashion by Duchamp's ready-mades". He allowed objects without an imaginative function ti represent themselves. For some people this may have a provocative act. I cannot judge exactly how explosive the provocation was at the time, and I'm only mildly interested in provocation in todays art, especially when it springs from a desire to contradict a dominant idea. What is more interesting for my purposes is the fact, that in calling the urinal a work of art, Duchamp transformed it into a true-to-reality copy of itself. Question:  Hold on a moment. Are you saying that calling an object "a work of art" is enough in itself? Hasucha:  Not necessarily. One becomes aware of reality's potential for self-reference through the way something is presented: the way something is exhibited in a museum, for example. Once one object is presented in such and such a way, every other object thereafter takes over or inherits something from the first. The mode of presentation contributes decisively to the atmosphere that an object creates. Wheather the "bottle-drainer" stands on a simple stone floor or on a platform surrounded by a hawser cable, the gradual effect it will have will be different in every case, even for the the least experienced observer. Where I differ from Duchamp can perhaps be illustrated by an "environment' or installation which I showed several years ago in a cellar in Berlin-Kreuzberg. There was rubbish, a sofa, chairs, a milk jug etc-all of which I had cut through diagonally and filled in with plaster of Paris, up to the edge of the section. I wasn't prepared to accept naked self-representation within the setting. On the contrary, I marked the objects off, changed them according to the way I imagined them and took from them part of their authenticity. What I did allowed my imagination tu break through into the "real" world of the cellar." At his best Hasucha is a subtle Martian who can infuse a landscape or a trivial setting with a remarkable and exciting sense of alienation. Without this, however, such self-conscious sculpture can fail to register any kind of meaning. If the commodity aspect of the art work is what really preserves paint and traditional sculpture, then I wonder why the reverse is untrue. For instance, no publisher has as yet snapped up the sonnets of my Swabian friend, Heiner Thiel. And yet each has fourteen lines and all of them rhyme just fine.. -