Stefan Brüggemann: A Text broken in Several Places
By Nicolas de Oliveira

Small Pathologies of Everyday Life or Eine Keline Nacht Musik
By Papus von Saenger

Essays & Press  

HANS ULRICH OBRIST and PEDRO REYES INTERVIEW STEFAN BRÜGGEMANN
At breakfast Hotel Nacional Madrid February 2003

HUO It's always difficult to begin! Yesterday we were recording an interview with Abalos Herreros, and he said that we should just talk about beginnings and ends. Perhaps to begin with today we could talk about your book. You work with books not in a secondary way, but as a significant form in themselves. Could you tell me about the role of books for you? What was the very first book that you made?

SB My very first book was Gasoline, which is a book I made about Mexico City, charting all the bridges from the north to the south. I took photographs of each bridge I came across.

HUO When was this?

SB 1995. I made just one copy.

HUO An edition of one!

SB Yes, and it was photocopied and stapled very simply. That was my first idea.

HUO And where did the idea come from?

SB I think my first inroad into artists' books was Ruscha, and that was the first time that I realised it offered a different platform for doing art.

HUO It's amazing that the books of Ed Ruscha still resonate almost four decades since the first one was made. It's influenced generations of people. I interviewed Robert Venturi last year and he said that Learning from Las Vegas was inspired by Ed Ruscha. Could you tell me why Ruscha's work was a trigger for you?

SB A few years ago Jonathan Monk did a painting of Ed Ruscha. In a way, these platforms for being able to present things in different ways are becoming more interesting than ever. Using the platform of the book makes it an art object, and something transportable. I'm interested by the 'portable museum', and things that you can take anywhere. Books are not site-specific - they become part of the life of the reader. Books enter the home. And they don't need installation. There is a part of my work that is very site-specific, but the book means that my work is also non-site specific.

HUO In the '60s there were a lot of people that made artists' books, but few seem to have had the influence of Ruscha. Was it Ruscha's interest in the city that particularly attracted you? What is it about his books that resonates so much?

SB I think it's the simplicity of his books. It works architecturally, as a document and as a book, changing the narrative of book reading. That is what has influenced me and others - it's the idea of making and reading books in a different way. Simplicity is attractive. They become like travel guides, in which you go back and forth between the pages, like a ping-pong narrative.

HUO And how did the bridge project evolve from there? You started to exhibit at around the same time too - was there a relationship between the two?

SB I think it's part of the same thing - the two activities run parallel to each other. I wouldn't like to separate it into exhibitions and books, because for me they are the same thing. The second book was called Intellectual Disaster. It was an easy way to pull all my work together.

HUO And in which year was this?

SB 2000.

HUO So there was a large gap between the first and second books?

SB Yes. The problem with books is that you need someone to publish them. When I did the first one, there was just this one photocopy. Then you have the illusion of having mass production, and it takes time. That's the only thing I don't like about books: the production of books. It's like making a movie - you have to start working with lots of people, putting things together. It takes time to work in group situations.

HUO So you do not enjoy the lack of autonomy?

SB My work sometimes addresses simple production methods, but when you come to do a book, you need a production team, designers, sponsorship and so on. It becomes more complicated, and waiting can be frustrating.

HUO The second book is bigger and while it is not necessarily a retrospective, it is a collection of documents. Was it the intention to give an overview of sorts?

SB The work is very text based. For me it was a challenge to do a book of texts. It's very hard to decide where to situate text and photography and that which is in between. I think, for example, that conversation is a way of avoiding writing, but at the same time you are still writing. So it's a question of doing a textbook; when I was doing the first book I was very inspired by typical state educational books - thick and with lots of texts and images, with cheap quality paper.

HUO And what about the title?

SB I like book titles a lot. I always like to stay at the beginning. The title can say a lot about what's going to happen, so Intellectual Disaster came fairly early on in the process. Firstly I was going to call it Intellectual Entertainment! But then I decided that Intellectual Disaster sounds more chaotic and has more relevance for me and my work.

HUO Titles play a big role in your work, how do you find or come up with them? Do you make lists like Kippenberger?

SB I like to make lists of titles as a way to help define situations and clarify the work.

HUO What will this next book be called?

SB It will be called Capitalism and Schizophrenia. It might have been called Getting and Spending or Unproductivism.

HUO It seems that some titles choose themselves while others do not. And there must be many unused titles.

SB Yes, and there is a piece I have been working on called Show Titles - I have a hundred titles and the list grows every day. It's an invention of concepts and ideas. Sometimes I use my own titles for my works, and on other occasions, curators and writers use my titles for other projects. There was a show in Germany about Mexican art. The title was Zebra Crossing, which was something that I picked up when I was in London walking around the streets.

HUO It would be good if you can come up with a title for this interview.

SB We'll see later on. Perhaps something about situations of talking and not writing.

HUO Earlier you mentioned different ways of speaking. What exactly did you mean by that? Would you consider an exhibition as a way of speaking, or a book as a way of speaking?

SB Ways of speaking have different platforms.

HUO That's a good title Ways of Speaking.

SB It could be our title! Some titles come from things I hear and I know instantly that they are suitable. The thing I've noticed is that you can always change the way you speak - there aren't any rules about it. It might be an exhibition, a conference, a book, a postcard, an action or whatever. It is interesting how you can challenge these things, so you're always inventing new ways of speaking.

HUO I'd like for a moment to come back to your second book before coming on to the new book, future books and many other things. In your work you often use found documents, such as things that you use from magazines - I was wondering how far this is a systematic or non-systematic approach to the notion of archives? Gerhard Richter's Atlas had a very open structure whereby things that inspire him enter the atlas. It goes from loose strands to the completely obsessive categorisation of people such as Gilbert and George. How do you see yourself in relation to archives?

SB I think it's a question of editing. You're always trying to edit the world. It's a constant impossibility because there's always lots of footage and you can never finish editing it. It's a little bit about this illusion and this frustration at the same time - trying to edit the world. That's a problem for art as well, for it is constantly in the process of editing. In my case I think it's a very chaotic process. I like structure so you could describe it as an archive, but that would be a misinterpretation of an archive because it doesn't really have a straightforward taxonomy as with some other artists. It's strange that we are constantly editing things.

HUO We could talk about the parallel practice of editing. That's another good title.

SB Yes, that's a good one. Let's call it that. Then we'll have to edit it, which will mean looking at techniques and styles of editing. Artists like editing in different ways.

HUO Or non-editing.

SB I don't think that non-editing exists.

HUO Why's that?

SB You always miss something. There is always an illusion of reality, but it is never real. Everything becomes fiction and fiction is editing. At the end, there are no real things. In my work I think trying I'm trying to edit all the pictures in magazines - that's the kind of illusion.

HUO This idea of editing in your work offers both a possibility and an impossibility, rather like Flaubert's notion.

SB Yes, and I like the idea of pages - my format for life is based on pages. Every time I work I make a big series of what I call notes. These are always pages. They could be on A4 paper, a page from a magazine or whatever. It's always very difficult to separate the notes from the work, so the notes often become the work, and yet at the same time the work can never be finished. So it's a very traumatic thing to be in my studio with all these sheets of paper, writings and sketches, and having to decide what is a note and what is not a note. I always try to frame everything and it becomes an obsessive kind of archive. Then sometimes you have to destroy things.

HUO So one could say that an editor's work is never done. In terms of archives, I am also interested to learn more about the way in which you work and your studio. How systematic is your archive, what role does the Internet play, would you describe it as a post-studio practice and so forth?

SB I think it's a very instantaneous practice. Sometimes I tear things out of magazines, or I might be at the theatre or a friend's house and see something there that might be useful. Then I put these cuttings on blank pages in my studio. I think it's an obsession that is based on a need for information. Perhaps it is very superficial information, but it is information all the same. I don't keep the magazines though. I tear out the things I want and then throw them away. I don't hoard in that sense.

HUO It's an instant archive. That's another good title.

SB Yes, and you know, I really don't like to keep things. That's a really strange idea for me. I just like to have them as art. Things catch my attention for an instant and I very rarely go back to a collection.

HUO So there is no archive of the things that you don't use?

SB I only cut out what I use. This is also a problem of editing in that I destroy everything else. I don't like to have things in my studio that aren't finished. Once it's in the studio it has to be finished and there can be no leftovers. The idea of leftovers is also very interesting for me.

HUO For the purpose of the readers, I'd like to point out how early it is! We are in Madrid during ARCO in the month of February. It's kind of chilly. We're in the breakfast room at the Hotel Nacional. It's still dark. We're drinking mountains of coffee and hot chocolate. Anyway, back to the notion of leftovers!

PR Well his house is certainly almost empty.

HUO Could you tell me about your house?

SB Well I try to keep it empty, but there's always something there that you have to throw away. I'm always looking for something to throw away. It's all a question of how you get things and how you get rid of them. It's impossible to have nothing in a space.

HUO And how do you see the notion of the studio? In the '60s Buren wrote about the idea of 'post-studio' practice, and he was one of the first artists to publish endless lists of his trips or to talk of the aeroplane or hotel room as being the studio. In our generation travelling has increased much more. So I was wondering how you see the studio and travel in relation to your work?

SB I think the idea of 'the studio' has been lost. The studio is portable, but there is always a space that you go back to and where you can sit at your desk. That is the real studio - the place where you sit down and bring all your information together. The computer is like a studio now, but there is always a place where you put the computer in which it fits perfectly and where you can concentrate properly. That might be for just ten minutes in a month, but it is still a special place, and that is where the studio comes into its own.

HUO So you've got an empty house with a computer in!

SB And a desk! That's very important for the studio - a desk, some sheets of paper, and then there's the matter of emptying the space.

HUO A film director once described it as 'the fighting of entropy'. But to come back to the topic of source material, could you tell me more about the content and nature of the source material?

SB Last year I was obsessed by fashion magazines. Many of them were published in London, Paris and New York, and some from Japan. I often refer back to the '60s and the ideas of conceptual art, especially consciousness and time, such as with On Kawara. Fashion magazines very much have this notion of time. It's like having an exact time in space. They change very fast. The first time I thought about fashion magazines was for the piece of Dan Graham - there was an image of a woman in a book, and I think that really attracts you to the work.

HUO And am I right in thinking that you are hoping to work on a project with On Kawara?

SB I don't know if it's going to happen, but I hope so. I would like to make an On Kawara straight line in time and try to destroy that line. I'd like to find a timeless attitude towards time and something that becomes timeless.

HUO And how would you envisage breaking the line?

SB The project's in its very early stages. Style always takes time. For something to become stylish is very difficult.

PR Stefan is well known for being a fashion victim, so he is definitely very concerned about style.

SB We could make a list of possible titles for this interview, and people can choose their favourite.

HUO Or perhaps they could chose their own title - a do-it-yourself title.

SB Or a 'having a choice' title.

HUO A multiple-choice title. As well as fashion magazines, what other kinds of sources do you use?

SB I use philosophy books and art catalogues, things people give me. I very much like the idea of recycling and finding recycled things. It's like when you go to an office and there's always a pile of papers that have been photocopied but they weren't needed so they use the other side as scrap paper. I like such random situations in which you don't realise what you're picking up. And then you start finding connections between the things that you find. You're sat there in the studio with all these things and you try to make a story. Suddenly it becomes a storyboard. I'm very interested in storyboards.

HUO Both in your books and in your exhibitions.

SB In the exhibition you saw there was a storyboard project. I like the idea of never completing a project. It's always about trying to see the process and working with storyboards.

HUO You mentioned philosophy books as another kind of source material - are there particular philosophers whose work interests you? Everything is about lists today - it's very George Perec.

SB I don't know what it's called in French, but in Spanish it's called Pensar/Classificar…

HUO Penser/Classer. I love that book.

SB And also lots of old books on philosophy, such as Derrida. I have recently been reading Deleuze. Perhaps they have become a cliché for our generation. What do you think?

HUO It's interesting. At the moment there seems to be a shift towards Italy. The great French philosophers have all died. Derrida now says that he is the last one. Each time another great philosopher dies, Derrida writes 'now I am definitely the last one'! So it seems to be moving to Italy, with Toni Negri, Giorgio Agamban, Paolo Vierno. There's also a rediscovery of Lyotard at the moment. He became a cliché for a while but has been resurrected. And you also use art catalogues?

SB It seems that these days art catalogues are the way that you see shows. I don't have a big collection of catalogues, but I have used some from the '60s, from abstract expressionism through to Laboratorium! Sometimes you mix them up with art or fashion magazines. I like it when the boundaries begin to fade.

HUO Another great title! It's like Blondie's Fade Away and Radiate.

SB Our list of titles is growing! I also like artists' books. I like the Small, Medium, Large, Extra-Large book by Rem [Koolhaas]. Lists always have lists. It's like Microsoft Windows - there's always window upon window and file within folder within folder.

HUO It's like the Russian Matriushka doll - the doll within the doll within the doll. When I started to work with de Appel at the beginning of the '90s, one of my first activities was to work with Kasper Koenig, the famous German curator. I was in deep shock because he used to receive all these catalogues everyday and he would just rip them apart, taking out the pages he was interested in! We all do that on a regular basis with magazines, but it still remains a taboo with books. You said you rip out pages from catalogues, which is not dissimilar.

SB And I also photocopy a lot. A book certainly commands more respect than a magazine.

HUO This interview is perhaps going to be used as a preface for the book, so perhaps you are inviting the reader to rip it up?

SB That's right, don't keep hold of this book! Treat it as a magazine! When we look at books, mentally we're tearing it apart. It's really strange how you try to edit a new book when you see another book - you criticise it and are never satisfied with it. A book often mentally disappoints you, though often it is quite the opposite and you are inspired and motivated by what you read. That can be a direct influence on the next work that I make.

HUO Has the Internet changed the way you work?

SB I don't think so. I'm not convinced the Internet has really defined its own structure of working yet. In some ways it has become a failure. It is so immaterial in a way. The book is still an object. I don't necessarily like objects, but they are certainly easier to read than a web page. I don't think the Internet has been used as it needs to be yet. Do you get a lot of information from the Internet?

HUO No. For me the main function of the Internet (apart from email) is to order books on Amazon.

SB So it's more like a service for you.

HUO Yes, and paradoxically, I have been buying many more books since the Internet came to prominence. On Amazon you can find books that you can't always find in a bookshop.

SB But you go back to the book.

HUO It's nice to order books online. Sometimes you receive something you weren't expecting. I ordered a big monograph on Peter Cook, and instead I got a monograph of a famous children's illustrator also called Peter Cook. I ordered a book about Robin Day, the famous British designer, but the book I have is about the television broadcaster Robin Day instead. So I have a new shelf devoted to the wrong books that I have been sent from Amazon! But let's come back to your books. What have you been doing between your second book and your current project?

SB There have been many projects in between but they have mostly been unrealised books. They stay at the point of storyboards. Some years ago I started trying to make a film. What I did was tear pages out of a magazine and try to make a storyboard. The story was not that important, but I wanted to use the same poses in the film that the models had in the fashion shoots. Then it became like a book, in black and white. I started shooting the film and I realised that it was much better in the form that it was already. One of them was realised, but I was not happy with it.

HUO This leads to the only question that I ask in all the interviews that I do, which is a question about unrealised projects. Could you tell me about a project that you have always wanted to do but have not yet realised?

SB I think you wake up everyday with a new idea or project. The biggest unrealised project I'd like to do is a feature film on 35mm. That's a dream I have, but one that I would never like to come into being. Also right now I'm working on something else called Video Notes and Video Diary, which involve taking my camera to many different places and recording them. I get home and can see things that I've done that day. I'm not too sure if I ever want to show that.

HUO So your current project is your third published book, in which this interview features. Could you tell me more about your plans for the book?

SB Well it's probably going to be called Capitalism and Schizophrenia. It's being made through many collaborations, and attempts to put my work into a framework. I like books that have lots of connections. It's a way of concentrating information and channelling a specific editing if the world. So for this book several people are collaborating, all in different ways. That's another thing about books - they try to explain things; they're about explanations. When you do a book or a catalogue, you're trying to explain yourself to the world. So I thought that maybe the explanations should come from other people, through collaboration but also through their own work, and not just me trying to speak. So it's a question of putting thing together and editing. That combination of things makes a statement. The book is not a documentary. It's very much about the present. Even if it lasts only ten days, that's fine. Otherwise it becomes like a document and a part of the past.

HUO And will the book be in colour or black and white? A lot of your work is in black and white. In the early '90s Felix Gonzales-Torres said that the only way to still catch people's attention is with black and white. There is a great book about the Spanish artist Pablo Palazuelo who wrote a book on geometry and vision, and in his interview with Kevin Powell, he is asked: 'You have used black and white on numerous occasions - do you give them alchemical or symbolical values beyond the fact that they serve as evident polar opposition? I also recall remarks by Klein and Escher in relation to these two counter tensions: Klein said that an artist tends to move towards reduction, towards black and white, when he has something urgent and ready to say. In other words, he tended to do so when he was looking for an effective cutting edge. Escher's description was more poetic, and he said that it was at night when white shows up against the background and day when black figures show up against the white. He was referring to its double potential within the same work. At root, he is not far away from Klein who saw both colours as protagonists. You have said that the infinite mixes of black and white are useful to you. In what sense did you mean this?' And Palazuelo answers 'Actually, I have used black and white because this highly expressive contrast of energy attracts me. With the question of capturing the pupils' extremes, the maximum tension, the most intense light and the most profound darkness, it is hardly necessary to say that symbolic echoes or alchemical ones occur almost immediately in this sense. I tend to agree with Klein that the painter reduces his palette to an extreme polarity when he is searching for a way to say something urgent or radical more effectively; it is between night and day when the sea begins its metamorphosis'. So I am curious to hear your thoughts about black and white.

SB There are the issues of form and composition, but in my case it is more a matter of economics. Black and white is cheaper to make. And for me that's very interesting. Also when I use colour, it is not a photograph that I'm producing. It's not just about economy; it's also about production. Having colour pages is more expensive. It's more about meaning and less about form. I think black and white gives me that solution. In this book, there will perhaps be two or three pages in colour in the middle of the book, just for a break, though I'm not too sure. Something I wrote the other day was: 'to be political it has to look nice', and it was a kind of reaction to Documenta in that political issues become style also. It's very confusing when you have ideas such as information becoming style. I don't know if that is destructive for information, or perhaps the other way round.

HUO That's a great final comment.

PR Can I just ask why you work is so a-topical? It isn't something that you can locate geographically. It seems that the work is nurtured from the media, but it has very few sources from the real world or your immediate experiences of the context in which you live. To what extent do you connect with your experiences of living in Mexico or in other places?

SB Maybe the answer is that our generation, (and perhaps it is a consequence of globalisation), has become international and global. It is a question of orientation within a third world city. And I think that I am a result of that. Sometimes it comes from a misunderstanding of information.

PR The notion of misunderstandings makes me think of the issue of spelling in your work - often there are orthographic errors. Are these intentional?

SB When you write with a pen, you often make mistakes, and then you reread it. I have a phrase about it: the event of writing being an event of reading. Sometimes it's very instantaneous. There are always mistakes and failures in my work. I don't like perfect works. I think it's good to be vulnerable. It's always a place of contradiction and danger.

HUO Well it has been great to talk with Stefan Bruggemann in February 2003 in the Hotel Nacional. The interview has taken fifty-five minutes and seven seconds. It is six degrees outside. As with Windows and Russian dolls, we have also had an interview within the interview.

PR And we are just a block away from La Cuesta del Moijer, which is a very interesting corner of the city for buying second hand books.

HUO And as Lawrence Weiner once said: 'books furnish a room'.

TRAVELLING (Light)
By Nicolas de Oliveira

'How can we make do with what we have?' , asks the French theorist Nicolas Bourriaud on addressing the development of contemporary culture. His question comes as a result of a perceived stasis which is due to the vast amount of conflicting information we are constantly exposed to. He argues that it has become impossible to invent or to propose new solutions, leading to an art of quotation and selection.
Capitalism and Schizophrenia, a combination of terms associated with the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, forms the title of Stefan Brüggemann's recent project, exhibited in various forms in Puerto Rico, London and Mexico City. For Deleuze this represents a reconciliation of Marx's opposition between production and ideology, and Freud's opposition of consciousness and desire. Desire is then a central feature of political economy. However, this active and revolutionary desire is always mingled with a reactive desire for repression, hence Deleuze's idea of desiring machines who acquiesce to their own slavery, as they are seduced by power and wealth. Deleuze believed philosophy to be a 'critical enterprise of demystification', which should not be sedentary, that is, working with a priori knowledge, but instead proposes a 'nomadology' which refutes the certainty of of a 'first principle'(arche).
In Puerto Rico, Brüggemann gained access to a factory that specialises in the manufacture of styrofoam panels. Over a period of two weeks machines were placed at his disposal to cut the material into vast letters which made up the work, while simultaneously spelling out its title: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Some months later, the same statement was used for a neon sign fitted above the entrance at London's Institute of Contemporary Art.

Text-based works were ubiquitous in the 1970s, a decade dominated by the language and processes developed by Conceptual art. While tactically using the language of the institutions of art in order to subvert them, Conceptual art came up with a distinctive 'look'; an appearance of restraint, intellectuality and polemic, an art which eschewed form in order to discover it anew through text.
This type of work achieved visibility through artists such as Lawrence Weiner, Joseph Kosuth, Barbara Kruger, On Kawara and Jenny Holzer and became widespread in the late 1980s.
A decade or so later, artists' desire to work with text continues, but the approach has undergone profound transformations. In an age dominated by tele-technologies, where the near and the far have been collapsed into simultaneous transmissions, vision is no longer associated with the perception of tangible space. It is possible to experience different places at one and the same time via the proliferation of the media. In an era dominated by vision, the internet may be the single most important reason in making us readdress our waning relationship with text, albeit in an altered form.
It is curious then, that a whole new generation of emerging artists finds itself with the textual legacy of conceptual art. Current practitioners include Gillian Wearing, Joëlle Tuerlinckx and Bob & Roberta Smith, among others. These artists scrawl their words across canvases, walls and doors or enlist others to write them instead. The negotiation of authorship remains at the forefront of these practices.
The case presented by Stefan Brüggemann is rather different, in that his textual work always relies on the established voices of others. He variously quotes Kosuth, Holzer, Kawara and Weiner. Brüggemann, though Mexican, invariably uses the English language and insists on repeating the same typeface, Arial Black, in all his work. A kind of formality is implied, one which pays homage to the appearance of International Modernism. These actions make clear that Brüggemann uses language as a style. The content lies in its appearance, its visibility: a repetitive and familiar format which remains fresh after may uses. Indeed, according to Bourriaud, artists' need to repeat familiar themes through quotation aligns their work with that of the computer programmer and the DJ. The artist is no longer responsible for creation (the realm of the new or the original) instead becoming a selector. No homage of other works is intended here: rather, they are plundered by the contemporary artist in the search for information. It is thus unsurprising that the visual appearance of these older works is highly prized and fetishized by current artists. The corporate identity of Conceptual art is then harvested like a brand and inserted into new contexts. This re-branding of contemporary art results in a new International style, one which can be seen in galleries from Djakarta to New York and Mexico City to London. It is a direct consequence of this new International style that the artist has returned to being the central focus of the work, not as an original creator or thinker, but as a master of ceremonies, as a host. The transferable nature of these works propose a portability which allow the artist to travel in search of new audiences. As we shall see, this type of physical displacement is not for the purpose of research or discovery, nor do these travels satisfy the artist's curiosity for unknown locations.
In his novel A Rebours, J.-K. Huysmans describes the journeys made by the central character, the Duc des Esseintes. Since des Esseintes spends most of his days in bed, it becomes clear that these travels are entirely in the imagination, the product of extensive reading and picturing. One day des Esseintes feels the urge to travel to London and sets off for the train station. Having purchased a Baedecker's guide to the city, he stops by at an English tavern to kill time before departure. On reading the guide he becomes entirely immersed in the descriptions of London given by the guide, eventually deciding not to make the journey, since the reality of the actual trip might prove disappointing when compared to the expectations set up in his reading matter.
Another example of such an imaginary journey can be seen in Xavier de Maistre's account entitled Journey around my Bedroom (1790). The introduction to the book recommends room-travel 'to the poor and those afraid of storms, robberies and high cliffs.' All that was required for such a journey was a pair of pink and blue striped pyjamas.
For the curious artist travel has always held a particular fascination. The Grand Tour of the Romantic period became essential to individuals with cultural aspirations. The great explorations of unknown continents in the 18th and 19th Century required artists to become chroniclers of exotic locations, animals, plants and peoples. The explorer Alexander von Humboldt's journey to South America (1799-1804) was epic in scale: it required ten mules, thirty pieces of luggage, countless scientific measuring and viewing devices, four interpreters and letters of introduction from the king of Spain . In the present day, however, artists have become wary of playing the role of the ethnographer and refuse to convey the notion of elsewhere as a place of exotica. Global travel and communication technology have irrevocably altered our relationship with once unbridgeable distances, while local information is available at the touch of a button. These developments have led the American art historian Miwon Kwon to describe the successful contemporary artist as someone who racks up airmiles in the pursuit of ever-increasing international exhibition opportunities. International travel is then seen as being analogous to an artist's marketability and success. Such a statement should not be seen as a way of reducing the importance of an artist's work, on the contrary, it becomes a way of assessing his/her cultural competence and ability to negotiate and communicate in the present.
The recipe of the successful traveller is outlined in the opening sequence of Lawrence Kasdan's The Accidental Tourist. A travel writer played by William Hurt informs us of the need to travel light, since we always overestimate our clothing requirements and our need for distraction through books and magazines. The key is portability: a small case carried on to the plane is always more desirable than a large suitcase in the hold.
This simple theory is echoed in the approach taken by Brüggemann in his work. Eschewing the need for a studio, he is content with a laptop, digital camera and access to a phoneline. It suggests that the artist is at home everywhere but nowhere in particular. This approach is entirely different to ideas of site-specificity so prevalent in the 1980s and early 1990s. In that period the site of the work provided both a location and a context. The context set a series of parameters for any given project which the artist was expected to follow and illustrate. This relationship between the artist and the site has altered, in that a place is now seen to provide none of the political, social or historical content for the work; rather, it becomes simply a place for a series of exchanges with an audience. In an age of travel it would be presumptuous for an artist to reveal one location after another to audiences already based there.

If revelation is no longer appropriate, what becomes of the traditional role of the artist? The answer lies in the mirroring effect of contemporary culture. Let us turn our attention to Michel Tournier's the Legend of Painting, in which two artists attempt to outdo one another in the production of a painting. The first artist , who had never travelled anywhere, produced an outstanding work, admired by all. The painting seemed peerless until the second artist, a noted traveller, revealed his own work: a mirror placed opposite the painting. This, he argued, is superior, since it incorporates the other, evidently outstanding work and the presence of the viewer. The audience's participation is not external to the work, as in the case of the painting, but instead is indivisible from it through the mirror.
This effect of duplication adds the experience of knowing to the phenomenon of viewing. We envisage ourselves in the act of seeing something of which we already have prior knowledge. Artists like Jonathan Monk, Fiona Banner and Stefan Brüggemann deal in second-hand goods. That is, their work is often derivative of existing cultural manifestations. They do not set out to expand art's remit into areas as yet untapped by art. On the contrary, their work borrows from, comments upon, and incorporates already existing works. This is hardly because they are bereft of ideas or enthusiasm, but instead provides a telling account of cultural production tout court. After all, we are consumed by a desire to repeat. In Harold Ramis' film Groundhog Day' , the central character, played by Bill Murray relives the same day over and over again with hilarious consequences. Ramis plays with the possibility that forearmed with knowledge, practice makes perfect. In music, on the other hand, one of the most popular song-forms is now the cover-version. If a tune was popular some years ago, why not re-record it using current artists? The Brit Awards in 2003 saw a performance of a Blondie song from the 1980s performed by teen idol Justin Timberlake accompanied by Kylie Minogue. Here we have a repeat version of a well-known hit, reprised for an audience who are too young to have grown up with the original but who are aware of its classic status, performed by a new artist, together with one who bridges the gap between the two periods. You can have your cake and eat it (again and again) in an ecstasy of false memories.

Brüggemann's more formal work has been accompanied in more recent years by his video diaries. These are labyrinthine, spiralling works which chronicle the artist's personal life. They register like out-takes from his more obviously productive periods. In other words, they represent the downtime when the artist is not clearly engaged in making specific works. They variously depict Brüggemann walking about in different cities (he privately abhors the countryside) talking to friends, sleeping and horsing around with his girlfriend. The unsteady camerawork, lack of editing pretension and general adolescent atmosphere combine to render these lengthy film enjoyable in the most disengaged of fashions. They are unpretentious diaries devoid of coherent narrative in the manner of Andy Warhol's or Richard Linklater's films. However, what appears like the depiction of a type of boredom, is in fact a calculated and repetitive pattern which appears to reveal the artist's private life. It is therefore particularly puzzling that nothing beyond the artist's appearance is given away. We do not know who the different characters are, nor are we aware of what they do. Instead, we are presented with opaque surfaces which remain impervious to scrutiny. A similar approach can be seen in the artist's printed works, in which he cuts pages from glossy fashion and style magazines. The images of male and female models are gently doctored by the artist and presented as his own works. At face value, they might be seen as critical of consumer-culture or the beauty myth in contemporary post-capitalist society. However, like Vanessa Beecroft's arrangements of live models, these works neither seek to critique nor celebrate any of the above. They are offered without judgement and do not amount to a clear position or statement, though they are deliberate and precise.
These works return us to Brüggemann's installation 'Capitalism and Schizophrenia': in all of these an attitude of criticism prevails. They appear to address social or political issues, yet demonstrably fail to deliver any such comments. Instead, they endlessly repeat the availability of such a position without actually assuming it. In this game everything is available yet nothing can be substantiated: the cause is capitalism, the medium is the mirror, the result is schizophrenia.

Foot notes

[i] Nicolas Bourriaud, Postproduction Lukas & Sternberg, New York, 2002

[ii] op.cit. Gilles Deleuze, in: The Continental Philosophy Reader, Kearney & Rainwater (eds), Routledge, London, 1996.

[iii] op.cit. Nicolas Bourriaud, Postproduction Lukas & Sternberg, New York, 2002

[iv] Alain de Botton, the Art of Travel, Hamish Hamilton, London, 2002.

STEFAN BRÜGGEMANN: A TEXT BROKEN IN SEVERAL PLACES
By Nicolas de Oliveira

'The writer, by which I mean...the subject of a praxis - must have the persistence of the watcher who stands at the crossroads of all other discourses.' (1)

Barthes' description of the writer might be extended to include the predicament of the contemporary artist. Barthes tells us of the problematic facing the writer in the pursuit of his craft. So how does the writer proceed? Certainly not by attempting to arrive at a new language. This is not due to an urgent sense of practicality, since to invest time inventing a new idiom would be foolish, but rather, it is due to the realization that instead of writing, the author is written. Thus the writer uses the language, which he is fully integrated into, one which there is no escape from.
It may be argued that artists have also been subject to this realization. Foucault's text 'What is an Author?'(2) could be said to examine all artistic endeavor. Like Barthes, Foucault suggests that artists work with what is given, or with knowledge, which is present in culture or environment.

In his investigation into artistic practice, Hal Foster proposes that since the 1980's a marked change has occurred:
'This shift in practice entails a shift in position: the artist becomes a manipulator of signs more than a producer of art objects, and the viewer an active reader of messages rather than a passive contemplator or aesthetic consumer of the spectacular'. (3)

The above statement, though written some years ago, has nonetheless been useful in describing the activity of a wide range of artist's works. Stefan Brüggemann, a young Mexican artist, might be said to epitomize this position.
His work has included text, video, objects and interventions. In addition, he is also a curator. It would therefore be futile to describe his activities through the constraints, which govern a specific medium. His practice, as Barthes describes, stands at the crossroads, watching and waiting to hitch a lift. To elucidate on this activity I propose a short imaginary interview:

Q: How do you see contemporary art as being different from past practices?

A: 'We take what we want. What we try to do is transport our message into all our projects, to those places where communication takes place...We want to participate in this cultural process. Because that's simply the way it's got to be.'(4)

Q: Does this process produce physical objects or something rather different?

A: 'I do not mind objects, but I do not care to make them. The object - by virtue of being a unique commodity - becomes something that might make it impossible for people to see the art for the forest ...I am personally more interested in the idea of the material than in the material itself.'(5)

Q: So what role does culture play in art's circling around the commodity?

A: 'Products which are considered "works of art" have been singled out as culturally significant objects by those who at any given time and social stratum wield the power to confer the predicate "work of art" unto them; they cannot elevate themselves from the host of man-made objects simply on the basis of some inherent qualities. Today museums and comparable art institutions...belong to a group of agents in a society who have a sizeable, although not exclusive, share, in this cultural power on the level of so-called "high art".'(6)
Q: You were speaking about art's position within culture, but what about its function?

A: 'Art "lives" through influencing other art, not by existing as the physical residue of an artist's ideas. The reason why different artists from the past are "brought alive" again is because some aspect of their work becomes "usable" by living artists. That there is no "truth" as to what art is seems quite unrealized...If we continue our analogy of the forms art takes as being art's language one can realize then that a work of art is a kind of proposition presented within the context of art as a comment on art. (7)

Institution

'Appropriation of a function necessary to the museum's daily existence and exhibition practice would have implied in fact an aestheticisation of alienated labor. However, a task both invented and referring back upon itself as function without actually performing that function (to display an object aesthetically) could not truly be aestheticised but only reveal the actual degree of hidden alienation within exhibition practice.'(8) 'Opening'

The museum is dependent on the exhibition-event, which, in turn, acts as a marker of recognition in validating the art object. Thus the destinies of the exhibition space and the work are inextricably linked through offering mutual affirmation. Whether the event actually takes place is of little significance. Rather, the gallery draws strength from the impending event's realization, which is to say that an empty gallery clearly lacks its contents, yet continues to be what it is: an exhibition space which validates artistic activity in its absence. The lack of work indeed affirms its position.

Brüggemann's work frequently references this relationship by underlining the enunciative power of the museum or gallery.
In 1997 he presented a work entitled 'Opening Titles' at Art Deposit in Mexico City. A wall painted red displayed white vinyl text presenting only the titles of the evening's events.
'Opening', an intervention shown at the Museum of Installation in London utilized the idea of presentation as a critique of the exhibition framework. 'Opening' related firstly to the official unveiling of the exhibition, and secondly, to the physical change to the museum's front elevation. The artist's removal of the plate-glass window, which offers visitors, their first glimpse of the museum's contents represents more than a simple act of laying the gallery bare to the elements. It represents both a physical act and a breech of the institution's armor, giving an impression of violence and ensuing dereliction. The window was in fact removed as a single piece and presented inside as a museum artefact, bearing only the title and the artist's name.
The subtle reference to Marcel Duchamp's iconic '11,Rue Larrey' is not without significance. The door in Duchamp's piece is centrally hinged and services two openings. It may therefore be both open and closed at the same time. In Brüggemann's installation, the plate-glass window fulfils a similar function, in that it proposes that the work is indivisible from the concerns of the museum, in fact it is the museum, both in its significance and physical corpus.

A group exhibition entitled 'Promo' in 2000 at Galeria de Arte Mexicano saw Brüggemann collaborating with a number of different artists to produce a catalogue as the main exhibit, much as the American artist Douglas Huebler had done some 30 years previously in an exhibition curated by Seth Siegelaub in New York. 'Promo' foregrounded the activity of selling advertising space to companies producing cheap unbranded goods in Mexico. The primary site of the work became the office, the telephone and the computer, rather than the gallery. The cover of the catalogue depicts the artists lounging around the gallery offices. A seemingly bored Brüggemann is seen holding a telephone receiver, while throwing a copy of the actual catalogue into the trash.
The image is suggestive of the eschewing of the conventional institution of art. It requires neither artist's studio nor gallery. Instead, the institution is reduced to the office, the banal place of work. The artist casts away his special status, for an instant becoming like everybody else. And being equally bored.

No Logo/No Programme

'A consensus emerged that corporations were bloated, oversized; they owned too much, they employed too many people, and were weighed down with too many things.'(9)

The Canadian writer Naomi Klein suggests that we have moved from brands to products over the last three decades. Products were once solid things made in factories, whereas brands represent the simulacrum, the final frontier of consumption, where all connection with an object and its origin is lost. (10)
In Douglas Coupland's 'Shampoo Planet' the reader is introduced to the narrator's museum, which consists entirely of haircare products. The labels and functions of the articles are extolled one by one, an activity that is reprised in 'American Psycho' by Brett Easton Ellis. The film of the same title opens its second scene with the central character in the shower. Washing has been replaced by a succession of brands used for the self-same purpose, from exfoliator and deep-scrub, to moisturizer and face-mask. As he finally reveals himself by peeling the face mask off, he states that underneath there is nothing, nobody.

In a world of logos, from Microsoft to Nike, artists have not been slow in the uptake of a new language. Brüggemann cites the textworks of Bruce Naumann, Jenny Holzer, Lawrence Weiner and Joseph Kosuth as important influences.
His works might be construed as paying a kind of homage, yet they fail to demonstrate the intellectual rigor and serious demeanor of their predecessors. To put it another way: they do not have the apparent authority of philosophical or political statements. Instead they present the only possible position left, that is the assumption of an intellectual veneer to which the viewer responds almost by reflex. This remains the artist's ploy, since the authority, once borrowed is assumed as if by merit or right.
Brüggemann's statements inform us of the presence of art's brand. This is, of course, an art stripped of images, leaving only the visuality of text. A large wall piece made with vinyl text entitled eponymously 'Looks Conceptual' draws the viewer's attention to the serious baggage trawled around by artists since Henry Flynt's first definitions of Concept art some four decades ago. Few observers would be able to define what those might be in our time. What remains is a look. The look, or indeed, the brand, bestows a kind of knowing upon both artist and audience. The knowing game concerns the difference between being and looking (conceptual). The text acts like a mirror, examining the viewer's understanding of what is truly at stake beyond the surface of the sly joke, since it appears absurd for something to 'look conceptual' as a serious proposition.

But if art has been replaced by a look, what is there to see?

Vanishing

In 2001 Martin Creed won the prestigious Turner Prize in London, showing as his major work 'Lights on, Lights off'. The title of the work describes precisely the visual elements of the piece. In other words, the appearance of the work is almost synonymous with its description.
Brüggemann shares Creed's fascination with a reductio ad absurdum, or with a desire to reduce the artwork's visibility to the point of disappearance.
While both owe a debt to Joseph Kosuth, Yves Klein and On Kawara, the present work has acquired another twist. The quasi-metaphysical examinations of their predecessors in the 1960's and 1970's have been exchanged for an apparent depthlessness.
As persuasively argued by the theorist Fredric Jameson, depth has been replaced by surface in the Postmodern idiom. (11) He suggests that our time has seen the emergence of 'a new kind of flatness or depthlessness, a new kind of superficiality in the most literal sense.'
Contrast this extract with a statement made in the 1970's by Lucy Lippard, and the slippage in intention becomes quite clear:
'The danger, or fallacy, of an ultra-conceptual art is that it will be "appreciated" for the wrong reasons, that it will...come to be mainly an ingratiating object of aesthetic pleasure instead of the stringently metaphysical vehicle for an idea intended.' (12)
Brüggemann's and Creed's work will be precisely appreciated because of the 'wrong reasons'. The exhibition has an inevitable visuality, its vehicle is the familiarity of repetition. For The British artist the paradox is represented by the everyday action (on/off), while for Brüggemann it might be seen in the word 'Nothing', crudely rendered in 3-D as a revolving projection. The aesthetic is 'No Style', parodying the Modernist directive of visible innovation.
The viewer's reward might be summarized in what Jameson calls the 'compensatory decorative exhilaration' (13), or, in this instance, what the exhibition is reduced to. The viewer grasps at the few visual clues in order to comprehend the work on display. Of course there is nothing to be grasped through this process, yet it compensates for the work's absence by its surface appearance. The endless repetition at attempting to heal the rift between subject and object becomes the task of the work.
No drama, no programme, no problem.

Driving/Death

One Careful Owner/Programa
Artworks, which feature cars, abound in the late 20th C. notable examples including Warhol's 'Green Disaster' (1963), Ant Farm's 'Cadillac Ranch'(1974) and Acconci's 'House of Cars'(1983), among others. We turn our attention to Warhol's example to examine Brüggemann's 'One Careful Owner'(2001) exhibited in the exhibition 'The Vanishing City'. The work consists in a crashed saloon car, which has been lovingly valeted by a contractor, thus pathetically restoring it as best one can to showroom condition. Our concern here is not with cars per se, but with the automobile as a symptom of an underlying condition.

American cinema has explored the motif of the car at great length. In particular, arrival scenes are important, as they confer status upon the driver. In addition, the viewer has the ability to engage and identify with all objects in film, cars included (14). So when a car is crashed on celluloid for example, we experience a kind of death, a mimicry of our own demise. The loss of the fetishistic object, its lack in our desiring field of vision becomes the void at the centre of our own death drive.

'I remember my first minor collision in a deserted hotel car-park, disturbed by a police patrol, we had forced ourselves through a hurried sex-act. Reversing out of the park, I struck an unmarked tree. Catherine vomited over my seat. The pool of vomit with its clots of blood like liquid rubies, as viscous and discreet as everything produced by Catherine, still contains for me the essence of the erotic delirium of the car-crash, more exciting than her own rectal and vaginal mucus, as refined as the excrement of a fairy queen, or the miniscule globes of liquid that formed beneath the bubbles of her contact lenses.'(15)
An earlier work of Brüggemann's, is in fact entitled 'Parking Lot'. Here, the artist transformed the flat roof of the Museo Carrillo Gil into an absurd car-park by tracing out car-port spaces and circulation diagrammes in silver paint.

The controversy caused by Ballard's book is not due primarily to the graphic depiction of sex. Rather it is the unusual triumvirate of sexuality, car and death which brings about a sense of great unease. The text actually deals with desire as such. Desire is levelled at the drive, not the object. 'Crash' is a catalogue of endless repetitions of sex-acts allied to car-crashes.
'That is to say, the realization of desire does not consist in its being "fulfilled"," fully satisfied", it coincides rather with the reproduction of desire as such, with its circular movement.' Desire is thus being endlessly deferred or postponed. (16)
The theme of desire is reprised by Brüggemann in 'Cutlass 92' (2000), a billboard depicting the burgundy interior of an American car with a reclining female figure. The full title advertises the car for sale and lists its various features and characteristics. The image, while ostensibly about a car (interior) references an illicit sexual act. After all, sex in cars is usually associated with young adults or adulterous couples who have no other place to go. Thus the feigned advertisement is not for the car, but for the desire of the implied sexual act.
The same girl reappears alongside the artist in the video work 'For those who are fond of the Contemporary' (1997) Both are visible through the windshield of a car while busying themselves removing lines of vinyl text from the glass. The texts, seen in reverse by the viewer refer to Jenny Holzer's 'Truisms', such as 'Protect me from what I want'. By reversing and subtly altering the original statements, Brüggemann is left with the vague echoes of recognition. The artist draws our attention to his predicament. The intellectual high ground and artistic/political power briefly held by artists such as Holzer in the 1980's has waned. This is typified by the tedious Warholian activity of the video's protagonists, that is, the relentless removal of Holzer's once hard-hitting words. The work might be seen as a rite of passage for Brüggemann, since the authority has passed into his generation's hands, but it is also a kind of wake. It is as if the death of Conceptual Art is being mourned with the peeling back of each letter. Finally, the monotony of the activity is replaced with a blank look on the participants' part, as if aware of the responsibility thus placed upon them, but unable to offer any comfort or direction.

Andy Warhol's 'Death and Disaster' series depicts a range of fatal moments and crashes of different types in silkscreen and liquitex. The most iconic image is perhaps his 'Electric Chair' (1965). It shows a room with such a chair and a small sign displaying the word 'Silence'.
Peter Gidal' states that were are in 'the presence of emptiness, nothingness it visible, immediate.'(17) The term 'Silence', though of language actually succeeds in denying it. The text is rendered mute and is transferred to the realm of the visual.
Brüggemann's 'Showtitles' (2001) exhibited at the Museum of Installation displayed a selection of 100 as yet unused titles for potential exhibitions. Visitors were invited to select and borrow a title, to be utilized in one of their own future events.
Mirroring Warhol, one of the titles spelled: 'Intellectual disasters'. The statement might be read as the artist's lack of confidence in his own work, or as a forestalling of inevitable failure. By nominating something as a disaster before it has begun, the audience has been forewarned. In other words, not too much should be expected of the event. In stating its disastrous nature beforehand, the artist can do no worse and must be excused. However, the statement condemns the work to failure, even though the secret hope is that it will turn out rather better than expected.

'An air of nondeliberate parody clings to everything- a tactical simulation- like an undecidable game to which is attached a specifically aesthetic pleasure, the pleasure in reading and in the rules of the game. (18)

To use the artist's own words: '(THIS IS NOT SUPPOSED TO BE HERE)'(19)

Footnotes:
(1) Roland Barthes, Leçon in: Harrison & Wood (eds) Art in Theory, (Oxford: Blackwell)1992
(2) Michel Foucault, What is an Author?, in: Textual Strategies, Harari (ed),1969
(3) Hal Foster, Recodings (Seattle: Bay Press) 1985
(4) Daniel Pflumm, German Open:Contemporary Art in Germany (Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg)1999
(5) Lawrence Weiner, in conversation with Ursula Meyer, in Meyer (ed) Conceptual Art, New York, 1972
(6) Hans Haacke, Statement, in: Harrison & Wood (eds) Art in Theory, (Oxford: Blackwell)1992
(7) Joseph Kosuth, Art after Philosophy, Studio International Vol.178 nos.915-917, 1969.
(8) Michael Asher, Writings 1973-83 On Works 1969-79, B.Buchloh (co-ed.) Nova Scotia University Press, 1983
(9) Naomi Klein, No Logo (London:Flamingo) 2000
(10) op. cit, ibid.
(11) Fredric Jameson, The Deconstruction of Expression, New Left Review 146, 1984
(12) Lucy Lippard, Changing:Essays in Art Criticism (New York:Dutton)1971
(13) Fredric Jameson, The Deconstruction of Expression, New Left Review 146, 1984
(14) John Ellis, Visible Fictions,(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul)1982
(15) J.G.Ballard, Crash, (London:Jonathan Cape)1973
(16) Slavoj Zizek, Looking Awry,(Camb.Mass:MIT Press)1991
(17) Peter Gidal, Andy Warhol:Films and Pictures,(London:Studio Vista)1971
(18) Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death (Minneapolis)1984
(19) Stefan Brüggemann, Private View Card, Museum of Installation, London, 2001

SMALL PATHOLOGIES of EVERYDAY LIFE
or EINE KLEINE NACHT MUSIK
By Papus von Saenger

"What are you doing, nothing, and you, nothing, OK, I'll ring you when i'm done".
S.B.

Language is everything, even silence is ruled by its discourse: You can only think what can be said, and non-expression still represents the existence of what is said. Words are all-powerful and they often limit the individual's sense of subjectivity. This act (speaking) which relies on technical rules and grammatical recipes, can only exhaust, its own sense (or the sense of the sense) in the source, (the speaker), when the user finds similar fundamentals to the ones he finds in language. As a tool, certain structural modifications, some alterations of normal use, can become a way to light up the gloomy essence of the self.

The most common procedure is to use language as an orthopedic instrument, to assign to this system of truth fictional facts -as in childhood-, in order to recreate them and to process them in a therapeutic way.
Altering the semantic structure of a phrase by exchanging two different meanings with similar sonorities create an oral incident, a lapse, and this failure reveals the real intention of the speaker.
One could isolate several suggestive but unconnected sentences, translate them into a foreign language, enlarge them, stick them on a white wall and call them a piece.
To extrapolate about the real intention of this procedure (it deprives language of its criterion and experience but employs its neatness and efficiency for the image) seems risky, doesn't seem to be directed to critical interpretation. Gratuity is a screen. It becomes a space for experience to recover its presence. It is a risible revenge over the concrete, and a topography of the conceptual artist.
Despite of what is suggested, conceptual art making is not confronted to an oppressive flow of ideas. To conceive is more a business resisting the domination of reality, a surgical operation that sections the appealing from what is not, a fashionable routine to transform the world into a visual supermarket. The artist gains a central position, an extremely personal situation that has displaced the object, that has launched work to gravitate around the instant when the idea popped into the mind. Then, using anew technologies and techniques, the conceptual artist t finds peace in his expression and regards with contentment his personal vocabulary of images.