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Each of these projects, by refusing to be apprehended on an aesthetic level, frustrate
the spectator’s conventional expectations of art, redirecting his attention to the
potential use value of the works. The latter are valuable for what they do, and not
just for what they are saying on a purely discursive level. From this perspective, Jens
Haaning’s work can be understood as a catalytic agent, to borrow a concept from
Adrian Piper: "The work is a catalytic agent, in that it promotes a change in another
entity (the viewer) without undergoing any permanent change itself. The value of the
work may then be measured in terms of the strength of the change, rather than
whether the change accords positively or negatively with some aesthetic standard." 4
As catalytic agents, Haaning’s works confront the viewer with realities that can
potentially change his perception of his cultural and social environment, and make
him question his own prejudices, his perceptual habits and thought patterns. In this
sense his art is critical, but it is never a form of agit-prop; the works never propose
ideological counter-contents against existing representations, they contain no
messages or slogans. Thus their functioning, in relation to "political" art, could be
compared to the difference between ethics and morality. The former evaluates an
action for its capacity to increase or strengthen life, while the latter utters slogans
and norms that can actually hinder it. Pieces like Middelburg Summer 1996 or
Foreigners Free - Biel Swimming Pool did more than simply test the limits of their
field (art), they were more than purely formal exercises (a form of institutional
critique). They also exposed the cultural other bursting into the economic and social
reality, instead of just giving a (counter)-representation of it.
Other projects by Jens Haaning also foreground the figure of the cultural other, not
through univocal representations or one-sided statements and denunciations, but
by making the receiver’s expectations and prejudices one of the principal subjects
of the work: Arabic Jokes (1996), Turkish Jokes (1994), Ma’lesh (2000). Again, these
were direct interventions in social and political reality which did not expressly
designate their (inter)locutors. In Arabic Jokes, a megaphone installed on top of a
car broadcasted jokes in Turkish in Oslo’s Turk district. In Ma'lesh, a big lightbox
spelling out the title word in Arabic — i.e. "who cares?", an expression which can
have a series of different meanings and can be used both to apologize and to
understand resentment — was installed on the façade of a building (located in a
very ethnic neighborhood in Besançon). Formally reminiscent of the logos on
corporate headquarters yet written in a language incomprehensible to most people
and bringing no decisive meaning to those capable of deciphering it, Jens Haaning’s
lightbox has no commercial function. It only retains the generic symbolic dimension
of this type of signs, thus bringing it to the fore. Symbols of specific private powers,
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