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function like inverted readymades: the mass-produced object does not change
status, but materializes a pairing; it links two places together and creates a
space which is the very form of the work. This very particular form (a space
in-between two places, a movement between two situations) also plays a very
important role in many contemporary artworks: Rirkrit Tiravanija recreated the
dimensions of his New York apartment at the Kunstverein in Cologne, Maurizio
Cattelan exhibited the loot of a burglary committed a few meters away from the De
Appel Foundation, Pierre Huyghe worked on the distance separating a lived experience
from a Hollywood fiction… The art of today follows the tracks of a border
zone, and Haaning is one of its most stubborn explorers. Matthieu Laurette, proposing
to become a citizen of a tax haven, formulates a similar problem like in
Haaning’s piece, Danish Passport (1997). Composed of his passport placed under
glass: both are premised on the idea that we live in a commodified space, where
nationality is only one type of property amongst others and thus also has a price.
This tendency to insert humanity within abstract structures is certainly the central
figure of Jens Haaning’s activities. The space of exchange does of course constitute
their place and form, but most of the time, what is at stake is an openly displayed
substitution that in turn exposes normative codes (ethnic, social, aesthetics). Hence
his Refugee Calendar is a calendar like any other which simply replaces the
customary images of desire with those we refuse to face, pictures of the alien living
a few blocks away from us, "in irregular situation", as one calls the illegal workers
and immigrants, the families or individuals herded in refugee camps. The artist
claims a similarly "irregular situation" for himself within the field of contemporary
art–working in the cellars of aesthetics.
Translated from French by Mai-Thu Perret, Geneva.
020
071
NBP
P.105