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other goods and thus could be sold at a 40% discount. Yet consuming the purchases
as commodities would evidently destroy them as art works and thus constitute a
form of vandalism. Travel Agency gave rise to a similar predicament by selling travel
tickets as art works and thus at a lower rate of sales tax. Each purchaser was left
with a choice: either enjoy the ticket as an art work or use the ticket to make a trip.
By choosing the trip, the individual transforms a "beautiful" presentation into a
merely "agreeable" one. While gaining a trip, the individual misses a chance to
realise a universal community.
In a similar vein, Haaning seems to exaggerate the universal claims of the public
museum as a place. The museum’s attempts to be comprehensive in its collection
and inclusive in its public are taken to an extreme in projects such as Weapon
Production (1995), Middelburg Summer 1996 (1996), Flag Production (1996, 2000),
which transformed exhibition spaces into factories for producing, respectively,
handmade weapons, clothing articles and flags for imaginary states. In the case of
Middelburg Summer, an entire factory — the Turkish-owned company Maras
Confectie — moved into the exhibition space of De Vleeshal in Middelburg, the
Netherlands. For the duration of the exhibition, Turkish, Iranian and Bosnian
employees continued to produce their wares while museum visitors looked on and
asked questions. Here, the "exotic" and "international" nature of the museum
presentation proves to have a local flair since the Maras Confectie is situated in the
neighbouring town of Vlessingen. For Copenhagen – Texas (light bulb exchange),
Haaning took the exhibition space of Overgaden in Copenhagen to an unexpected
foreign location by exchanging the fluorescent light bulbs from the space with those
in a Vietnamese-owned food store in Houston, Texas. In these projects, a familiar
object — be it clothing or a light bulb — suddenly gains an uncanny status, being
local and foreign, familiar and strange. The ubiquity of the public museum does
not produce the transcendence of a universal community but rather leads to a local
immigrant factory or a corner grocery store.
III.
As a house built for the subject of Kantian aesthetics, the public museum may have
been domesticated by the nation-state, but it still enjoys a high degree of autonomy
while promoting national and international culture. Haaning’s work links the public
museum with other state institutions that have a special status because they are
also both inside and outside society, abiding to its rules while creating different
ones. Haaning’s photographs of refugees living in Copenhagen as well as The
Refugee Calendar (2002), which features photographs of refugees in Tampere,
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