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Please give me the meaning of squatting again Camilla Palestra in conversation with Rainer Ganahl
Camilla Palestra I hope everything is well with you. This email is just to let you know that the deadline for our conversation has moved to beginning of May which is for me very good, but I wanted to check that that's still fine with you.
In the meantime we opened the exhibition and it went very well. If you want to have a look at the website now on line http://shadowboxing.rca.ac.uk/ from where you can also download the first two issues of the publication.
Looking forward to being able to send you some questions!
Rainer Ganahl Yes. Just ask questions. Start
CP: I could start from the title I thought of for our conversation. It is taken from The Basis for A Song, one of the works shown in Shadowboxing. In this slide projection installation, Wendelien van Oldeborgh features the voices of two hip-hop artists from Rotterdam recalling a specific moment in the late 1970s and early 1980s in which squatting, from being a form of acting against the system, became a form of integration and toleration by the system itself. Please give me the meaning of squatting again.
RG: I don't know exactly where you are heading to with your title and question but I do have some experience with squatting in Geneva. I was teaching there and some students of mine not only were having there a very contractually regulated existence with more stability than I ever had while I was a student – after occupation of a new space they first ran directly to the Swiss police for registration which offers a title to stay there and be protected from other squatters or even the owners. Finally, as a housing coop they ended up buying an entire buildling for very little money. So the Swiss system of the 1990s made squatters house owners something they might not have regretted since housing prices in Genevea skyrocketed and their shares are worth something.
CP To reconnect to the Agamben’s text ‘What is an apparatus?’, which marked the starting point for Shadowboxing, I think we can interpret the squatting act as a form of profanation. That means a counter-apparatus that restores to common use what has been separated and divided, following a sacred oath between the deity and the authority. I am particularly interested in the concept of profanation, which evidently brings us to the sacred sphere, also in relation to what we are witnessing at the present. I am thinking of the recent students’ and workers’ protests and even more of the uprisings in North Africa and Middle East. Do you these events are profanating the social and political apparatus?
RG: The Geneva example wasn't really a proof of any profanation nor was it lawlessness. In fact the registration process of these squats were like an exchange for one set of property/use regulations with another one which didn't really change the usual border/threshold dynamics. I experienced that already as a hitchhiking teenager when I was chased away from squatters in Copenhagen (Christiania), in London and other places by people who were not open at all to outsiders. All I asked for was a corner to crash in the backyard with a sleeping bag. For me nearly all encounters with squatters presented not so much a counter-apparatus but rather a continuation of the given apparatus with slightly bended rules. Non-squatters often were much more welcoming and generous.
Here, I would like to point out that Agamben's terminology is not necessarily helping, since “sacred” means in ancient Rome the outcast, the cursed, the banned, the outlaw whereas in Christianity it takes on different meanings that finds themeselves nearly on the opposite end of the spectrum. The same goes for profanation. I find it rather confusing to discuss capital(ism), commodification, exploitation and so on through the theoretical apparatus of theology or the history of religions. The sacred, the divine, the profane, the cult etc. are in themselves very complex categories that changed their meaning throughout history many, many times. As a student of history and philosophy, I was amazed by how these meanings travel and circulate non-stop. Marx, Engels, Lukacs, Weber and the Frankfurt School offered us a very accurate terminology and a fabulous conceptual frame work to target and describe what goes on around us. It is also never easy to abstract from the moral and evaluative biases of these theological terms. Concerning the liberation attempts of many young Arabs who risk and 'sacrifice' – here the meaning is clear also to people outside comp-lit departments – their lives, I don't need to label anything 'scared' or 'profane' in order to explain and describe oppression, excessive force, detention, torture, war, revolt and liberation.
CP What is resistance and what is profanation? And what can be the role of art, if there is one, between these two positions?
RG: Again, we all know what resistance is. It is relative to the oppression and the mechanisms of control, suppression and its consequences. When we have the right passports in our pockets, the right skin colour and are within reach of a functioning legal system – call it also an apparatus – resistance looks different to the one you have to adapt when confronted with Gaddafi snippers or Syrian secret police shadowing you. This is a pretty 'profane' knowledge you don't have to study. We need to just listen and read what people subjugated to these terrible ordeals tell us. Now, again, I am not willing to accept these vaguely made up oppositions that place resistance here and profanation there. To shit on a university table as Viennese Actionists did in the middle of the last century was for sure understood as an act of resistance to the post-war (post-)fascist order of things in Austria. Playing or even just listening to music in certain repressive areas of the world - dominated by theocratical impulses – can be life threatening, can express resistance as well as be viewed as a 'profanation' when you accept that there is something 'sacred' to be defended by force. In one simple expression: It all depends. Art is an engagement that responds to the status quo of things and can take on all kinds of forms and strategies. In certain contexts – for example - even abstract art was viewed as highly political and could signal resistance. It is much more a question of time, space, situation and context that gives you an answer to whether something is viewed as political or not. Don't forget even theoretical terminology is subject to fashions and fads and projecting the concept of resistance onto these currently fashionable terms – profanation, the sacred, etc. - produces very little reality effects outside the 'sacred' field of academia which actually is playing a very useful role in upholding barriers with perpetuating 'profane' effects that are better labeled class differences.
CP We can say with Max Weber that power has two poles: the command or authority and the obedience. Discipline is the mechanism through which the latter can be governed by the first one. To recall Paolo Prodi (Il sacramento del potere. Il giuramento politico nella storia costituzionale dell’Occidente, 1992), the oath, sacramentum in Latin, ultimately sacralises the authority. The right to resistance seems thus to be cancelled by the sacralised authority, let’s say by the constitutions. Is there a way through for the second pole of power?
RG: As a boy we learned the word “sakrament” only as a curse word without even having the slightest clue what it meant linguistically. I was quite a big user of it in all various combinations. It transported anger, frustrations and a certain taste for adult living. By the time I learned what a lexicon has to say about it I already stopped cursing 'profanely.' Is it the over-determining proximity of catholicism in Italy that renders these theological terms so attractive ? I have here an Italian friend who calls himself a Buddhist and his house is filled with lots of Buddhas and various species of the bestiary of Buddhism. My two and a half year old son Edgar just 'profaned' one of his elephants when he climbed up and nearly separated his nose from the body. My Italian friend doesn't take a bite without thanking some abstract entity dispersing with his hands his thanksgivings in all directions. Suddenly came a point where I couldn't see anymore a difference between his attitudes and his consumption of religious objects here in New York under the name of Buddhism and that of pious common people that deal in an exaggerated manner with saints, objects, practices and believes codified and sanctioned by the Vatican. I simply don't see any need to shoehorn something 'sacred' into political analysis. I am sure I don't have to remind you that authority and obedience are not only located on one side of the power spectrum. Since Hegel we know very well about the dialectics of Herr und Knecht, master and slave. Authority in the political arena is also very complex and we can discuss it without any sacrosanct aura. The current upheavals in the Arab worlds are the best example of the complexity of politics. Before we fall back to Eurocentric arrogance and think we know it better, I want to remind everybody that it took hundreds of years and a lot of blood until some kind of functioning democracy took hold in Europe and if we remember what is geographically part of Europe - the Balkan countries and their wars - we are not looking much better. All these conflicts can be endlessly described but don't need moral or theological classifications. I'd like to even beg people to stay clear of these proto-religious categories.
CP I understand the mechanism of profanation on two levels. One is revolutionary and one is partially borderline. Let’s go back to the squatting scene. When squatting is counteracted by tolerance by the authority, the profanation, its energy and aims, is embraced by the authority again. It seems we cannot escape from a friction/nexus between tolerance and profanation in a democratic system. Do you think this is a failure or rather a success?
RG: Revolution is always borderline, in fact beyond borderline: it is bloody, destructive, violent, cruel and unjust even in light of a larger justice depending on where you figure in this unjust world that is always to be newly reassembled – to be taken apart again when fighting over resources and power reoccurs, takes up again and again. And I say that not rejecting revolutions when they are needed and overdue. Democracies are for sure some remedy against revolution as it proposes a system of many actors comprising the majority of interests. Democracy functions as a very 'profane' political apparatus that tries to reject 'sacred cows' or at least doesn't place them in its centre with the exception of its very logic. Hence, if you want, a constitution might be looked at as a space filler for some vacuum for the 'sacred' - if you want to locate one (I don 't feel an urge for it). At least this is the American experience with our bill of rights which are perceived as sacrosanct, yet the interpretation and perception of it always is shifting. I don't see any failure or success in the ever shifting meaning of things. It is good even if it can drive you crazy sometimes. We artists are actually here to accelerate that process, we are some kind of a lubricant or the opposite, a disturbing and embarrassing element. If you allow some simple 'profane' parlance: art better is oil or sand in the machine.
CP In a recent interview you said: ‘As a cyclist I try to follow rules but as an artist I break them’. What differs a cyclist from an artist?
RG: Nothing. Any cyclist can be an artist and any artist can be a cyclist. I work as an artist and I am also “just” a cyclist amidst many more things: I am a tax payer (I did that today) , a father, a teacher, a radio listener, a consumer, a citizen with dual nationality, a traffic violator (190 dollars for a red light), a subscriber to the on line version of the New York Times, a Whitney Independent Study Program alumni. I am not a facebook member but am asked daily to become somebody's friend somewhere on line. I usually try to bike in a responsible manner but I have done a series of artworks that consisted of riding in the middle of the street against traffic without holding the handlebar. In that sense I broke not only traffic rules, I went against common sense, against the well established instincts of self-preservation and all this for the sheer sake of beauty, of art and the conceptual coherence to an idea. I could mystify it and say “art told me to do this and that !,” or “I just did it out of my stomach” or I could also say what I just said in the last sentence. When I was caught by the Parisian police in the middle of the Champs-Elysée , I opted for yet another explanation to escape their law enforcement instruments. I blamed it on my innocent ignorance and acted as if I didn't know what I was doing. I told them that I got lost in the middle of the traffic and couldn't make it back to where I belonged. They found this and my foreign language so compelling that they didn't even wanna ask why I didn't stop at red lights. As with so many things that depend on the context and not on a word or sentence, I got away with it not so much by what I said but how I stumbled it. Namely in a very 'maladroit' way, innocent, lost, intimidated by their authority and with a certain naiveté with which I wanna exit this interview as well.
Rainer Ganahl New York, 4/12/2011 www.ganahl.info
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