download catalogue high resolution pdf (22.3 mb) - Jens Haaning

003
005, 010
025
030
JAB
P.106
Jennifer Allen, Berlin
THE ART OF BELONGING
Getting together. Coming apart. The push and pull of belonging runs throughout
Jens Haaning’s work. Trap (1994), invites people to enter an empty room, only to
have a sliding door close behind them, which temporarily isolates them from
others. Turkish Jokes (1994), and Arabic Jokes (1996), are enjoyed by Turkish and
Arabic speaking immigrants in Europe; their laughter binds them while cutting
them off from the native speaker in their adoptive countries who simply cannot
understand why they are laughing. Office for Exchange of Citizenship (1997-98),
brings together citizens of different origins to trade their nationalities, thereby
reaffirming the original difference between them. The refugees living in
Copenhagen, photographed by Haaning, belong through the name brands and prices
of their clothing, although they are barely Danish citizens. Super Discount (1998),
allows Swiss consumers to buy French goods duty-free while reminding them that
the prices are lower just across the border. Even Haaning’s assessment of the
internet — "a possibility to be alone together with other people" — presents
community as puzzle with no hope for a solution.
By creating communities — at once inclusive and exclusive —, Haaning underscores
what most art historians, theorists and critics have chosen to ignore: aesthetics is
about people, not objects. Museums may hold vast collections of art, but they are
places designed to orchestrate a sense of community, membership, belonging.
Along with the French Revolution, which established the public museum as a right
of the people, Kantian aesthetics offers the clearest expression of the community
realised by the public museum. In the third critique, the Critique of Judgement —
published in 1790, just three years before the opening of the Muséum National in
the former Palais du Louvre —, Kant sets out to prove what initially appears as a rather
curious proposal: people can create a community, not by voting, nor by speaking the
same language, but simply by judging beauty.
How does it work? When judging a "presentation" — Kant uses the term Darstellung
to give aesthetic judgements the widest possible range of application —, one must
be convinced that anyone in the same position would also judge the presentation to
be beautiful. Beauty has no concept and knows no definition but rather gives rise to
a particular form of pleasure: the individual enjoys the presentation and yet at the