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HFB
P.120
Harald Fricke, Berlin.
UNDER A FOREIGN FLAG
BUILDING WEAPONS, CHANGING BULBS:
STRATEGIES OF CULTURAL EXCHANGE IN THE WORK
AND PROJECTS OF JENS HAANING
Nothing must be forced to happen when everything is working. The way to perfect
unity in the social realm is via symbols of culture: that is how the German philosopher
Friedrich Schiller conceived the combination of society's forces in his Erziehung
zum Menschengeschlecht (Education Towards the Human Race). In his view, this
combination resembled a dance, in which couples always move to the place that
has just been vacated by another couple so that there is always enough space for
everyone. Today, this principle reoccurs in the belief that society's manifestations
are based on a differentiated system where all places and positions from the margin
to the centre can vary or are at least flexible. The same holds true for art. Since
Marcel Duchamp's "urinary," there is no longer only one place of art that elevates
art works to the status of museum objects; since Andy Warhol's "Marilyn Monroe"
silk screen prints, there is no longer only one clientele that acquires its "distinctions"
(Pierre Bourdieu) through its knowledge of how to deal with art; rather, a large
number of consumers is more or less well-informed about the art market and
oscillates between high, low and no-brow. 1
Conversely, the theoretical approaches defining the system of art start out from
different and varying forms of reception. The guidelines that reflect the system’s
coherence and differentiate it from other areas are constantly changing. At times,
it’s the history of art that sets the agenda and enables interactions; then again, the
semiotic character of art allows for relations and comparisons on the level of
codes. The sociology of art has different parameters than art psychology, and the
former can complement the latter. Anthropology, for its part, provides interfaces,
which prove to be manageable in relation to cultural studies, as far as the essentials
of artistic production are concerned — not to mention their applicability in terms
of architecture/urbanism or media/technologies. Last but not least, one also needs
to agree on what consequences economics or politics, for instance, have on the
production, perception and interpretation of art. The connections between these
fields make cultural knowledge and cultural production resemble each other, and
the transitions between description, theory and artificial realisation are fluent