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eal plane tickets; in his supermarket of imported goods in Fribourg, the public
could really compare the prices and purchase the products (Super Discount, 1998).
Far from an esthetic of the reconstitution (as with Guillaume Bijl, who transformed
exhibition spaces into trompe-l’œil figures), Haaning constructs structures whose
functioning is the very object of his practice, beyond any consideration of the nature
of art or the museum. This attitude towards the art system is actually typical of the
art of today: while the exhibition space was a medium in itself for conceptual artists,
an exemplary space from which one could start questioning society as a whole,
today it has become a space like any other, an almost neutral space, since all social
spaces have been homogenized by the neo-liberal economy. Why work specifically
on the museum or the gallery since they are only elements in a chain of interdependent
spaces? The issue is less to analyze or criticize this space than to define
its site within wider systems of production, whose relations have to be established
and codified by the artist himself. In short, it is the socius (the complex of channels
distributing information, goods and human relations) which has become the real
space of the exhibition for the artists of this generation. The art center or the
gallery are particular cases which nonetheless belong to the totalizing whole one
could describe as the "public place". This is for example the case with Untitled (de
Appel — de Gelderse Roos), 2000, a work where Haaning installed a live transmission
from an art center to a psychiatric hospital. This was no exploitative model of
exchange, since the connection worked only one way, turning the exhibition space
into a human zoo. Where one would have expected a commentary on the art
institution, Haaning made us reflect on that of psychiatry.
Society, seen through the work of Jens Haaning, is a body divided into lobbies,
quotas or communities. But it principally appears as a vast catalogue of narrative
frameworks governed by the audiovisual model of editing. His work asks a question:
is this edit in which we live the only one possible? From the same material (the
everyday), it is always possible to produce different versions of reality. His work
thus functions like an editing suite, reorganizing social forms by producing
alternative scenarios. Haaning de-programs and re-programs, he suggests that
other uses of collective space are possible. His pieces hint at these uses while
materializing them.
One of his favorite models is the immigrant community. In any society, for an
important part of the "national" population, immigration is seen as a kind of foreign
body. This image is further reinforced in the collective imagination by the fact that
immigrants are generally denied any positive representation, any space of inscription.
Off-screen in relation to the social imagination, it is a "margin" without images
030, 031
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NBP
P.103