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In June 2007 we, a group of visitors to Documenta 12,eager and motivated, mingled with the customers andpassers-by who were gathered, energetic, bored, idle,excited or lost, in a commercial space in the city cen-tre. All at the same time. The City Point shoppingarcades in Kassel’s busy Wilhelmstrasse were hum-ming with activity. Some, the locals, were takingadvantage of the supposed sales bargains all the shopswere advertising in their windows, or simply passingthrough that “worldwide country” shopping mallsestablish everywhere. Business and entertainment – orsimply a stage set to wile away the tedious hours ofearly summer in – formed the packaging of such animprobable meeting. The building’s centre of gravitywas occupied by a huge well that ascended towardsthe upper floors, where the shops were no longer vis-ible, and descended in turn in the shape of a subter-ranean lake giving rise to a small oval plaza. Others,we visitors, were convoked for the execution of an“opera”, a work created by Alice Creischer in collab-oration with the composer Christian von Borries andAndreas Siekmann, along with the musicians of theHesse Youth Orchestra, who were positioned on a

platform in the central oval of the escalator well. Thework was called All of a Sudden and Simultaneously.A Feasibility Study, and its subtitle is meant to correctthe description of the musical genre it is inserted in:Musical Scenes About the Negation of Labour. Theshort wait would serve to check out a landscape ofgoods in which the similarity of products and shopwindows with the ones we have in the places where oureveryday life unfolds is surprising. The same products,the same brand names… the same prices. It’s a land-scape with nothing quaint about it. There are no sou-venirs to take home, nor samples of local gastronomy.

From this sunken orchestra there will go on aris-ing, around the musicians, the movements of theactors, following the thread narrated by Creischerherself. The story spells out the fantasy of a worldwithout commerce, without temples of consumerismand without needs. The drama conveys us to a space-ship, in another time and another place poles apartfrom the sensations the sense of sight brings us. Weare in the presence of the staging of a farce about aparallel world presented as something of a utopia dis-guised as a satire.

ALICE CREISCHER: SATIRE, FABLE, SCIENCEBARTOMEU MARÍ

Alice Creischer, Christian von Borries and Andreas SiekmannAll of a Sudden and Simultaneously. A Feasibility Study: Musical Scenes About the Negation of Labour, 2007.

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Compère: Greetings, ladies and gentlemen! What youwill see in the next few hours belongs to the realm ofscience fiction. We will take you to a world in which,by being ignored, all the relations between work,merchandise and money go by the board. Althoughthis world already exists and is always present. If you,for example, take a little step to one side, you mightimmediately – oops! – fall into the intergalactic tun-nel. This tunnel is a short cut between reality andreality. It’s full of negative energy. At the end of itthere’s no ready-made world. But you might sud-denly not want to buy a single thing more.1

The actors are to keep moving through the differ-ent levels of the shopping mall’s atrium, where we,the audience and the customers, are milling around,some amazed and incredulous, all open-mouthed:suddenly and simultaneously. The action envelopsthe place the way a space army invades one galaxyafter another. The notes executed by the orchestra“sample” motifs from historical sources (quotes, forinstance, from Hans Eisler or Beethoven’s LeonoraOverture) in a compilation of themes dedicated tothe workers’ movement of various eras.

Alice Creischer has addressed the mechanism offascination that merchandise has over us before, espe-cially through the cathedrals of consumerism that bigshopping malls are. In the videos …To Earn It Again(1996) and The Generalisation of Not Working (2000)Creischer was already using the setting of a hugehypermarket to do a silent performance: the voicesof the characters were replaced by speech balloons inwhich quotes could be read from Marx and Nietzscheabout the human condition and the status of the com-

mercial object: fetish, object of seduction. Creischer’sactions, done with the collaboration of other artists,among whom we frequently find her companion, theartist Andreas Siekmann, are symbolic insertions ina world dominated by an advertising whose inten-tion is to seduce the individual enclosed in a suppos-edly marvellous world. The desire to marvel typicalof such spaces is the strategic goal the irony con-structed by the artist is aimed at: we are, effectively,what we buy. Or rather, we buy what we are. Theconstitution of the individual seems to depend uponthe acquiring of goods within a necessarily gregari-ous ritual, at certain hours and with precise move-ments, which in the ceremonies of existence contin-ually emit the meaning of authentic modern life.

If only Walter Benjamin were to come back tolife…! The representation Creischer offers us of thesespaces of seduction is not in itself ironical; the cam-era doesn’t falsify the location nor does it ridicule itin some way. This is an exercise in cinéma vérité inwhich the actions of the artists take place without anyhigh-flown pretension. A character seeks work theway Nietzsche sought God… With a lamp lit inbroad daylight.

The theatre and certain literary genres invented inAntiquity and perfected during the 18th and 19th cen-tury – the epistolary genre as a form of essay, forinstance – provide the artist with models of formali-sation for the telling criticism of those behaviour traitsthe excess of modernity has managed to almostimperceptibly instaure in our daily lives. They arebehaviour traits that we frequently adopt as if they

…To Earn It Again, 1996.

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provided us with a raison d’être. The early formula-tions of utopia spoke of an absence of need for theindividual, a state that would not make them wish forpossessions. In such a state consumption would notbe a destructive action but an innocuous act, likebreathing, like conversing. Creischer has done awaywith the idealised component of early utopia andconverted it into an object of irony in order to miti-gate, with laughter, the destiny of critical artistic prac-tices. What is the real object of criticism? What is thatwhich angers us and against which we direct the dartsof our rage? Is it ideology? Is it its discourse?

Satire and irony give Creischer a tool with whichto address one of the conundrums of art at the endof the 20th century: art’s need and ability to changethe world. After almost a century of art that not onlyrepresents the world but seeks to change it, with whattools may we seek to bring about a change of aware-ness in the society which welcomes it? Creischer optsfor three typologies in her works: firstly, satire willenable her to tackle, with humour, those questions thatat the beginning of the second half of the 20th centurywere approached with literalness or with poetry.Secondly, the artist has resorted to dramatised waysof communicating fables whose structure is put for-ward as moral. Lastly, a strategy of representationthat utilises forms of scientific method will introducethe wedge of overwhelming, deafening objectivity.The appearance of objectivity provided by scientificmethods (observation, the accumulation of data,analysis and the drawing of conclusions) is likewisean object of scrutiny on the part of the artist:

It would be wrong to define our fieldwork in thisproject (Ex Argentina, 2002-2006) as a transitionbetween two theoretical models: genealogy and mil-itant investigation. […] We will refer to the con-cept of genealogy that Foucault developed in one ofhis lectures at the Collège de France in 1976. Thislecture begins with a complaint about the deficien-cies of his research, which he considers to be frag-mentary and discontinuous, useless erudition […].However, he doesn’t try to defend this uselessnessin order to affirm its opposite, efficiency, but in orderto establish its critical potential, the local and partic-ular criticism of an autonomous, non-centralisedform of theoretical production, which would act asa brake on global, centralised theoretical productions.In that sense he speaks of a “return of knowledge”that has been covered by representational systems, alocal, different, non-universal knowledge. This wouldmean, then, connecting the useless erudition (as isalso stated about art) that goes nowhere to a decriedkind of knowledge: “popular knowledge.”2

I’m thinking now of Hans Haacke’s Shapolsky etal. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a Real TimeSocial System, as of May 1, 1971 (1971), which revealedthe coincidences between the action of political lead-ers in New York and the workings of real-estate spec-ulation which would provide fat profits for the mem-bers of a dominant class due to controlling not onlypolitical decision-making but also the judicial sys-tem, capital and information. And I’m thinking ofWindows Blow Up (1976) by Gordon Matta-Clark,whose destructive act of firing at the windows of thebuilding where the exhibition took place, the Institutefor Architecture and Urban Planning, revealed theineffectiveness of the action of architects (Richard

The Curved Claw, 1997. The Generalisation of Not Working, 2000. Brukman’s Suits, 2003.

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Meier, Michael Graves and Peter Eisenman, amongothers) with regard to the urban and social decadenceof local neighbourhoods, or, put more simply, theconnivance of these with the interests of propertydevelopers.

Direct denunciation and symbolic action may haveappeared at the end of the 1990s, with bullets beingspent in the continuation of a tradition that, above allin German art, had reached extremely high degreesof iconographic, conceptual and technical refinement.While during the 19th century French painters suc-ceeded in producing images whose aesthetic qualitieswere only able to be read in exercising an awarenessof political and social criticism at the end of the firstdecade of the 20th century, the Berlin artists intellec-tually affiliated to the Dadaist milieu, on the otherhand, would give very precise expression to the prac-tice of art as an instrument of political awareness anddenunciation in order to bring about action in anagitated world. John Heartfield, George Grosz andRaoul Hausmann, among others, flayed the bour-geois spirit of the place and of the moment. The per-fecting of photomontage and different publishingprojects were to produce a framework for diffusingmessages denouncing the absurdity of things andcalls for action. In the 1920s action meant revolu-tion, and the fascination this necessity caused in somepeople could only be put on a par with the panic ofothers. The advent of the fascist government of theThird Reich wiped out such activity, but the remainsof the attempt are still there for us to see. Thus, forexample, in 1920 Raoul Hausmann would call one

of the most enigmatic photomontages of the time Einbürgerliches Präzisionsgehirn ruft eine Weltbegegnunghervor (Dada siegt!) [A Bourgeois Precision BrainIncites a World Movement (Dada Triumphs!)].

In 2001 Alice Creischer mounted the exhibitionThe Greatest Happiness Principle Party in the WienerSecession building. The exhibition included collageswhich contained works on fabric, along the lines ofgreat decorative friezes, with texts, photographs anddrawings that traced a map in which the coinci-dences appeared between the shares of the Öster-reischische Creditanstalt and those responsible forthe transfers of foreign capital of the Nazis, as wellas the similarity of the financial techniques put intopractice by the latter and the forms of managementof the International Monetary Fund.3 The GreatestHappiness… is an example of the typology of workby Alice Creischer that is based on an almost scien-tific principle and in which representation tends tobe demonstrative; that is to say, it is assembled withthe organisation of data and allows conclusions to bedrawn from an argument. Its formalisation is a nodin the direction of forms that unite sculpture witharchitecture and of what we now call the applied arts: from the friezes of the Parthenon to the reliefs of Mesopotamian temples, or to the decorations ofthe domestic settings created by Jugendstil or ArtNouveau. Forms in which figures and vegetationintermingle and blur in order to create an idyllic spacein opposition to the brutality and grime of the worldof industrial work. Here are images and words thatjoin together to reconstruct an uncomfortable tale.

The Greatest Happiness Principle Party, 2001.

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The literary quotations of authors who have helpedcreate a certain line of argument, an ideology or atechnique of analysis are accompanied by data andfigures. There are many quotations from JeremyBentham and Thomas Carlyle in a comparison ofcontrasting models. Creischer concludes:

Showing how capitalism acculturates itself is some-thing that’s been done quite often. A new task wouldnow be to observe which type of culture produceswhat’s become known as “globalisation”, and whichnew powers of affirmation and values now becomeevident in art.4

The Apparatus for the Osmotic Compensation ofthe Pressure of Wealth During the Contemplation of Poverty (2005-2007) is the most recent case in whichCreischer’s scientific focus gives rise to an installationof great size, with a seemingly mechanical composi-tion. The very title of the work refers to the character-istics of a prototype, of an instrument for measuringthe sensations experienced upon being the witnessesand observers of the poverty of societies remote fromour own. The origin of the work goes back to a tripthe artist made to India. The landscape of extreme, gen-eralised poverty and memories of the experience livedin Argentina in 2002 impelled her to materialise thisfeeling in the shape of a mechanical instrument tech-nically organised for production.5 The basic hypoth-esis of Apparatus… is the observation that the massivepoverty experienced by the vast majority of the pop-ulation of a country (in this instance, India) is the resultof European colonising projects that ever since the

16th century have extended their programmes – pre-viously of pillage, now of investment – in regions ofthe world where the equation “raw materials /work-force” permits the greatest profit to be obtained. Thework seems to take the form of a camera blown up toa colossal size to show, alongside its different compo-nents, the links between different European colonis-ing projects: of the Spanish and Portuguese in SouthAmerica and of the English in India. The sculpture aug-ments and separates the parts of a mechanism whichextends in depth and which we first see in linear per-spective. Emanating from the different parts are data,images, figures and quotations about the distributionof property, the systems of price-control – those tra-ditionally used by the Mogul kings and those im-planted by English governors – and the different agree-ments with the laws that converge in the formation ofIndia as an independent, modern State.

The utilisation of the simile of the photographicapparatus is not gratuitous: the evolution of thesedevices led, at the beginning of the 20th century, to aqualitative leap in the constitution of an iconographyof the effects of colonialism that is fundamentallyexplained through the use of the portable camera fortaking snapshots. Until then photographs (of exoticlandscapes and their inhabitants, as well as the effectsof colonial exploitation) were taken with heavy cam-eras on a tripod, in front of which everything – bothnature and individuals – seemed “to pose” for thephotographer. Preparing the camera to take an imagehad a correlation in the preparation of the elementsthat were going to be photographed. The snapshot

Apparatus for the Osmotic Compensation of the Pressure of Wealth During the Contemplation of Povertyat Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst (GAK), Bremen, 2005.

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camera allowed instant images to be taken, without astaging of the machinery or a preparation of the pho-tographed object. In fact, the photographs taken byBritish missionaries at the beginning of the 20th cen-tury are the first that communicate the devastatingeffects of the impoverishment of Indian society, whichthe laws, administrative partitions and systems of tax-ation had gradually created in India. A voyage in timeand in space takes us in Apparatus… to the silvermines of Potosí, in Bolivia. Potosí was the biggestsilver-mining operation in the world, and also one ofthe main sources of capital for the Spanish crown andits European wars. Indeed, flows of capital at a globalscale are not a recent event in history: colonialismand globalisation are correlative, interchangeable andresilient factors. If colonialism initiated the interna-tional flow of finance, globalisation is nothing but acontemporary expression of the phenomenon ofcolonialism. At bottom, their strategies and theirresults are the same. Did someone say we live in thepostcolonial era?

Finally, let’s mention one last typology of workwith which Creischer has addressed the relationshipsbetween politics, economy and culture: the fable.

Proudhon, the 10 December Society and the IdleDebtors’ Club. A Concetto6 in Three Acts transformsthe fable into a satire about the relations between socialactors and the tensions between their conflicting inter-ests. A pig, a dog, a lion, an elephant, an owl, a bearand a badger are gathered together to discuss their posi-tions and priorities. The texts include data about thedevelopment of capitalism from the beginning of

the 19th century.7 Gradually the casuistry becomesdiversified and fragments are included of Karl Marx’sThe Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte in dia-logue form between the different animal-actors. In thethird act, Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s The Economy and ClassStructure of German Fascism. Notes and Analysis, isalso cited, in particular “The social reconsolidation ofcapital (German Letters by the Führer, September1932, within the framework of Central Germany’s Dayof the Economy, translatable today as ‘First Drafts ofthe German Industrial Union’)”. Historically, the fablehas “humanised” animals so as to soften the instruc-tive effect of the moral conclusion. Creischer utilisestoy animals that exponentially increase the satire withregard to the types of characters represented on stage,while the recorded voices recite bits of historical, ideo-logical or scientific text.

In the most recent exchange of letters between theartist and the Colectivo Situaciones, Alice Creischerasks:

In your text on militant investigation it’s clear thatit’s not a matter of commenting on social movementsbut – please correct me if I’m wrong – of a libidinalhermeneutics. Don’t you feel exhausted at times by,for instance, the way things have gone in Argentinasince 2001? How is it possible to keep this libidoentire? How do you see this concept today? Has itbeen relativised in the current context of post-crisisin Argentina? Doesn’t the loss of value of words incommon discourse make you fed up at times withthis concept?8

Creischer has, in different ways, suggested answersto these questions over the course of different works.

Proudhon, the 10 December Society and the Idle Debtors’ Club. A Concetto in Three Acts, 2007.

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One of the most effective, and perhaps bloodiest,forms of criticism is the one that includes laughter,which has been feared since the Greeks for its liber-ating power, for its ability to make he who laughs for-get his fear. But the laughter the ironical works ofAlice Creischer seek to provoke is a nervous, anxiouslaughter. We laugh with knitted brow.

Notes

1. Presentation of the work. Unpublished text. 2. Alice Creischer; Andreas Siekmann: “La experiencia Ex

Argentina”, in Sol Arrese; Gabriela Massuh (eds.): La normalidad.Buenos Aires: Interzona Editora, 2006, p. 6.

3. “In 1931 the Österreischische Creditanstalt [Austrian CreditInstitution] went bankrupt and thus triggered the second worldwideeconomic crisis. This banking group was the hub of internationalinvestments made in southeast Europe. In the entire following storyI refer to an essay by Detlef Hartmann published in the magazineAutonomie in 1982. It shows the conclusions that the subsequentNational-Socialist finance technology drew from this crisis and whythis became the model for organising the International MonetaryFund (IMF). Hartmann claims that the reason for the economic cri-sis was not the gold standard but the resistance of subsistence againstcapital – a thesis I don’t believe, but which I subscribe to because ofits beauty.” Alice Creischer: “The Greatest Amount of Happinessfor the Greatest Amount of People. On Rationality and Outrage. AConversation”, in Alice Creischer; Helmut Draxler; AndreasSiekmann: Alice Cresicher. The Greatest Happiness Principle Party.Vienna: Wiener Secession, 2001, p. 29 [exhib. cat].

4. Ibid., p. 31.5. “We read your letter on returning from our trip to India. But

we needed a lot of time before we could describe the black hole we’dfallen into there. Towards the end of our stay in New Delhi theyorganised a trip to Agra for us. We visited Matura, with its templesto Krishna, Fathepur Sikri and Agra: we saw the Taj Mahal, the RedFortress, we paid our guide in the restaurant, the driver left us in thestation and went. We waited for our train without the usual bubble

of services and immediately the beggars surrounded us: mutilatedwomen, men and children, the sick, the hungry. It was like we wereanaesthetised. We couldn’t give money, nor drive away the beggars.We might have supposed that all the actors of this scene depend ona ‘yes /no’, ‘money /no money’ as a reply. The fact is that one relieson what one has learnt to overlook, as if these beggars were air,or – at least – little flies in the air. But who can distinguish betweenanaesthetised and ignorant people?” Alice Creischer; AndreasSiekmann: “El agujero negro y los bandoleros mancos”, in La nor-malidad, op. cit., p. 217. Published in English in this catalogue, p. 123.

6. A form of textual assemblage that was often practised duringthe era of Mannerism.

7. At the beginning of the work the pig declaims from the pulpit:“Between 1803 and 1831 the population of Lyons increased from93,000 to 146,000 without the consumption of meat and wine goingup. An industrial bourgeoisie and a manufacturing proletariat areinvolved here. The entrepreneur is modern. He buys raw materials,has it elaborated in small workshops for a wage and sells the finishedproducts. The market dominates, it has people in the advertisingagencies and the work tribunals and determines the municipal author-ities through donations to the parties.” From the unpublished scriptof the work.

8. See p. 128 in this catalogue.

The Woman Painter's Atelier. Real Allegory Which Determines a Seven-year Period of My Artistic Life in the Berlin Republic, 2000.

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