The Art Snooper - Alexander Kluge

View transcript: The Art Snooper

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Text: Jan Hoet traveled the world for more than 100 days, searching for rare objects / In the African outback, in the Far East, beyond the Atlantic Ocean, he looked for art / What are they made of, the things he is looking for?
Text: The art snooper. Portrait of Jan Hoet, director of the DOCUMENTA in Kassel
Text: Great Hall, Academy of the Arts, East Berlin
Heiner Müller: Jan Hoet, you are organizing the “Documenta” this year. You are out of your mind, otherwise you would not have taken on such a task. What I am curious about is the following: earlier you said that you were in Africa, that means, you were looking for art in a culture you are not really familiar with. What does that mean? How does that work?
Jan Hoet: There are different paths I took. First, there is history.
Text: Jan Hoet, DOCUMENTA director
Hoet: African, ethnic history.
Alexander Kluge: What is that?
Hoet: It is art that is absolute, but contains within it social issues. Art that hasn’t distanced itself from life, that is directly connected to it. It is magic. I call it magic rather than art, to differentiate between our idea of art as an intellectual concept, between what we know about the earlier history of art, and its development since the 19th century when it really became art.
Kluge: But where do you find that?
Hoet: That is due to the way I was raised, my father was a collector, including a collector of African art, but then …
Kluge: You are Belgian?
Hoet: Yes. He had a collection of Expressionists and African sculptures, because there are a lot of similarities in their means of expression, there are formal connections to Expressionism.
Müller: How do you explain these similarities? Is it just because the Expressionists discovered African Art during that time, or is there something else?
Text: So called primitive art, Expressionism and “alienation” - -
Hoet: I believe that it has to do with a tendency in art to always dig up new themes. In 19th century it was mostly East-Asian art, and then at some point in the 19th century it suddenly becomes African art.
Kluge: In the 20th century?
Hoet: In the 20th century it is suddenly African art.
Müller: But during the second half of the 19th century it was more Oriental art, wasn’t it?
Hoet: In the second half of the 19th century it was Oriental art.
Müller: And then, what happened?
Hoet: Yes. In 19th century, Oriental art, and then at the beginning of the 20th century there was this interest in African art …
Müller: …the so called primitive art.
Hoet: …primitive art. Picasso…
Text: Heiner Müller, playwright
Müller: This change. The interest in Oriental art can still be explained from a European understanding of culture, but then – the other one is mysterious.
Hoet: This alienation, that certain people were aware of, in a way: the alienation from audience and environment. And that is why they were trying to get closer to the primitive form of expression. What is really true, what is not alienated from us, and magic, the magical art from Africa was the fitting expression for what we completely lost in the 20th century. An incredibly hieratic and strict and rigorous expression.
Kluge: Yes, and erotic …
Hoet: and erotic, yes … incredibly erotic systems of signs …
Text: Trip into the unknown / Where did they go?
Kluge: Could you tell me about it: How did you proceed? Where in Africa did you go?
Hoet: I was mostly running around around Zaire …
Kluge: Running around? By car?
Hoet: By car as well, yes.
Kluge: By train …
Hoet: By jeep, with a land rover and a boy, and then on to Zambia … Kinshasa via Lubumbashi, downwards…
Müller: It is interesting that …
Kluge: But how do you find art that way?
Müller: May I ask something: You walked around, but you walked around with a jeep …
Hoet: Yes … a jeep…
Müller: and a boy…
Hoet: … because it was somewhere in the unknown, part of an unknown …
Kluge: You drove up to an address and walked up and down … probably in the buildings … and how did you know what address to drive to? It is a very big country, after all …
Hoet: I went to Kinshasa, for instance, and to Lubumbashi at first, and then I tried to make contact with anthropologists, ethnologists on-site …
Müller: African Ethnologists, or…?
Hoet: African and European, anthropologists and ethnologists. And with those people I went to the museum, a museum that was completely … there were no visitors, only three helpless female guards and the director. And of course he was thrilled that I was suddenly interested in what he had worked on for a long time, but completely helpless, without any infrastructure, without any organization, without any support by the state, the government …
Kluge: It was interesting once, had been established a museum by the colonial power, or later by the developing republic, and then the world’s interest dissipated …
Hoet: Unbelievable, completely gone! With the exception of special requests: In Zaire for instance, Mobutu who founded the Academy in Kinshasa, after the breakdown of colonialism, and then founded an academy as a prestige object, that was designed exactly in accordance with what we know from our countries …
Kluge: And now there is a detective …
Hoet: There were bronze, silver sculptures … it was a real academy, I can’t find a more fitting description than an academy … just like what we see in our academies, not better, not worse …
Kluge: And now it was sinking …
Hoet: It had sunk.
Kluge: The interest of the world that still existed when Congo became autonomous, for a moment you see Lumumba, a moment of freedom …
Hoet: Yes, freedom, a short moment, a very short moment!
Kluge: … and it is drowning in murder, an UNO president is ruined and now the focus of the world shifts, and the art is forgotten, and then there is a traveler, basically like in the 18th century …
Hoet: Of course I also felt challenged by the exhibition “Magiciens de la terre” in Paris and so many exhibitions in other countries …
Kluge: What does that mean in German?
Hoet: “Les Magiciens”, the magicians …
Kluge: The magicians of the earth.
Hoet: … of the earth. And of course, with those people I did … they pushed me to be insightful, to pay attention to what was happening in Africa …
Kluge: And now you are doing several things. You are curious …
Hoet: Absolutely.
Kluge: And as an individual, authentic person, who is curious, who eats, sleeps, needs sleep, you bring a vivid interest to the table. At the same time, you arrive as a detective from the West, from Europe, and thirdly, you come as someone who brings back the stock value, who makes the position of the museum director important again.
Hoet: Really, yes. We are looking for new worlds. We are always searching for new worlds, for new expressions …
Kluge: “Mr. Livingstone, I presume?"…
Hoet: Exactly. And we are never, should I say, saturated. For instance, I think it is typically Western to climb a mountain, to come back down, and the next mountain will always be higher, or different. We are not satisfied, to always climb the same mountain. We have to keep going …
Kluge: It is a Celtic habit, you can’t really say Western, but Celtic …
Hoet: Celtic. That is true, yes …
Kluge: And the Celts always believed that treasures are buried somewhere, and they are on a treasure hunt …
Hoet: We try. And then I get in touch with these anthropologists, these museums in Africa, for instance, I get in touch with certain artists …
Kluge: Do you speak French or German?
Hoet: I speak French in Zaire, I speak English in Zambia, and of course I seek out the infrastructure …
Müller: And if you don’t know the infrastructure, you cannot find any art.
Text: Heiner Müller, playwright
Hoet: I believe …
Müller: I’m exaggerating …
Hoet: You have to get through that, you cannot – how should I put it – just go look out there to see what you can find. You’d be looking for five years … and then maybe find someone by chance …
Müller: That means you would need glasses to find them …
Hoet: “Chance” comes later. First you need the insight, you have to play those who can do something, you need to know the full octave. And then there are the intermediate tones, and that is where it gets interesting. You have to be confronted with the insight first, and then you have to reject or accept it.
Kluge: And you would not like the misunderstanding – when Schliemann comes to Troy, he finds all these things that represent misapprehensions, but he calls them artworks. And just like that a good colonialist could discover something that might not be authentic at all, and label it African art.
Hoet: Yes, you always have to label things, that is important. There are certain expressions that are assessable, of course, and I have bought a lot of art, for instance, but a lot of it was out of pity, for support, to support. I felt that this man really has the urge to paint, that he couldn’t do anything else …
Kluge: A big part of art consists of pity and exploitation. Someone calls something art, and that is basically exploitation. They deflower African art, so to speak.
Hoet: I cannot deny that, but I also found out, that a lot of it has to do with paternalism, this confrontation between the West and Africa, that pity is really in the center of it, that we somehow feel like it is our duty to do something for these people. It is connected to development aid and my …
Text: Is art “colonialist”?
Kluge: If we are brutal and colonialist, then the constitution of art is the same. And if that is the constitution of art, and if imagination depends on the existence of art, then the exertion of power is not something we should ignore. We should admit it.
Hoet: Yes, yes. But I also did this because I recognized that many interactions with these African artists really are neo-colonialist. I have acknowledged that. Of course that is very powerful.
Kluge: In a positive way, just like the Captain seduces Madame Butterfly … is that correct?
Hoet: Well, yes, sure.
Müller: I am also interested in the opposite perspective, the other view. There was a conference in Delphi about ancient tragedy, those are the subsidized topics …
Text: “Why do we expect understanding for European myths from Africans?”
Müller: …and there was an African man, from Nigeria I believe, who talked about the difficulty of understanding Oedipus in Africa, the Sophocles drama, that is, and he said, it is basically absolutely impossible to explain this to Africans, why it would even be a problem that a guy who has killed his father would sleep with his mother. For the Africans it would be obvious that he is now responsible for his mother and they don’t see that as a problem. And what they cannot understand at all is the problem of hubris. Hubris is pride and dignity and does not have negative connotations for the Africans, and so he explains why you just cannot put Oedipus on stage in Africa.
Hoet: Not the right place …
Müller: Somehow, I liked that … this completely different perspective.
Kluge: So now our history detective comes along and brings other categories to the table, of course. He brings with him the difference of guilt, so to speak, and … Oedipus’s guilt. And this pattern is what he uses to find art on this continent.
Hoet: Yes, not following the pattern, but …
Kluge: With kindness?
Hoet: Yes. We assume one thing, we find out another …
Text: Jan Hoet, director of the DOCUMENTA
Müller: I’ll tell you another example, which is a bit more brutal perhaps… at some point, there was a UNESCO project, an experiment. A UNESCO commission showed movies at a village in Central Africa, which had been chosen because the people there had never seen movies. And they showed two kinds of movies: Charlie Chaplin movies, silent movies with Chaplin, on the one hand, and American documentaries from concentration camps, Buchenwald, Auschwitz, right. And they were very irritated, because the Africans didn’t laugh at all at Chaplin, that did not do anything for them, they didn’t find that funny at all, and they laughed a lot at the CC documentaries. That was a great moment of irritation. Then, after long conversations, the Africans said: Well, we never … we never knew that white people could be so skinny. That was the gain of insight they got from the CC movies.
Hoet: Incredible. That’s how different the sign systems are.
Müller: Yes.
Text: Daily routine of an art detective
Kluge: Could you describe an average day, when you are doing research in Africa? So, you drive down the road in your jeep …
Hoet: Yes, and with a boy. That is the first thing we do, because we already have certain …
Kluge: …addresses?
Hoet: We have certain signs, certain addresses. For instance, I was at a house belonging to Pili-pili, and the children were there, the women were there and they were laughing a lot. I entered the house and I only saw one picture on the fireplace. And on this fireplace was a photo of Pili-pili, and the caption read: Pili-pili, artist. That was the only sign that an artist lived there. And then they said: He is not at home, we don’t know where he is, he is on his way to see his ill sister, up north. And then we just followed his trail by jeep.
Kluge: Just followed him?
Hoet: And everywhere we went, there is a telephone, a mouth-to-mouth telephone exists everywhere in Africa. And Pili-pili is very famous. 70 years old …
Kluge: What do you mean, mouth-to-mouth telephone?
Hoet: Shouting.
Kluge: Shouting …
Hoet: There are sounds …
Kluge: Bush drums.
Hoet: Yes, that’s it. Like a “tam tam”, but without [inaudible]
Kluge: Oh. They are called bush drums. So they called him?
Hoet: Then we follow his trail, and at night we arrive at some place, for instance, in need of sleep, so we look for someone wherever we are, we just have to find someone who will host us for that night. Then they prepare a hut, within half an hour a hut is ready …
Kluge: They build them for …
Hoet: … they build them for us, so that we can sleep and someone keeps watch. The whole night he stays put and keeps a fire alive. And the following day, he has fish and apples and vegetables that he prepares in the morning. And we can basically go on like that forever, you just always have to find someone … of course, you try to find the smartest people, intuitively that is, because you don’t always know the people, but the boy sometimes knows their language, and that makes it easier.
Kluge: And now: how did you meet up with Pili-pili?
Hoet: I met up with Pili-pili in the North, in Kenya …
Kluge: And what kind of art did he make?
Text: “Is what Pili-pili does magic or art?”
Hoet: And then he did. He creates … with small strokes, brush strokes, he paints scenes from mythology, for example snakes eating a bird …
Kluge: Does he present at the Documenta?
Hoet: No, he is not at the Documenta.
Kluge: Why not?
Hoet: It feels too much, too close, too … the experiences from back there, without keeping an account of the needs that we call universal. I don’t want the entire world. I only have a need for the exotic, or a need for information …
Kluge: But you followed him and you tested it …
Hoet: Yes, I wanted …
Kluge: You have seen it with your own eyes, you have seen him …
Hoet: I wanted to confirm it, I wanted to convince myself of the value of his art. And I also bought two of his pictures, but for my personal collection, and one now belongs to my children, and they love the painting, because it is also a souvenir of my trip to Africa, it has to do with memories, it has to do with a wonderful man, an incredible person. I have met many artists I valued highly as artists, but who did not have this wisdom, this …
Müller: Wisdom.
Hoet: To have wisdom as a person, with so much experience, but not have any knowledge about art, and still be able to express it in painting.
Kluge: And if you imagine the opposite now: an urban environment. What was the biggest city you did research in?
Text: What was the biggest city you did research in?
Hoet: Well, the biggest city was … either Daresalam or Kinshasa.
Kluge: And in the entire world?
Hoet: In the entire world? Tokyo.
Kluge: Tokyo. Could you describe what you are looking for in Tokyo?
Hoet: In Tokyo there are so many galleries that all present themselves as independent. No gallery is in touch with another. A very egocentric self-representation of each gallery.
Kluge: Everyone being exclusive…
Hoet: … and they also negate information about other gallery owners. There are art critics, there are museums, there are many private museums. There is a museum in a department store, for instance … and there you can suddenly stumble across an exhibition of an important artist. Suddenly I was at a department store and by chance I saw an exhibition of [inaudible], he is Indian, he is 65 years old now, I think.I was so inspired by his work, I went to see my contacts with him, and now this man is represented at …
Kluge: …“Documenta”.
Hoet: At the “Documenta”. And the visit was a total coincidence.
Kluge: And who drew your attention to it?
Hoet: I did that myself, I was at that department store …
Kluge: But where did you look it up? Did you look it up in the phone book, or …
Hoet: No, I didn’t. I was at the department store, I was running errands …
Kluge: Oh, okay.
Hoet: For myself, and I just saw an exhibition there.
Kluge: The Documenta is already a market, it is a selection, a decision whether something is authentic on the one hand, and at the same time should be part of the market, the world market. Could you say that?
Hoet: No! Could be part of it.
Kluge: Could be part of it…
Hoet: Could be part of it. That’s a maybe.
Kluge: But the meat market where the entire world meets, is one aspect, and the exceptionality …
Hoet: The exceptionality is the second one. And for me, the exceptionality is the first category, for me personally. Exceptionality that questions art.
Kluge: But you leave treasures in the ground, where they are resting and where they are supposed to ripen, and you wait; when you say, that there is not immediately this public interest of the art world.
Hoet: Yes, but you also need to be careful. You always have to question yourself to be sure you have observed correctly, that you have let things sink in properly.
Kluge: What would you say? The expression “art of warfare” comes up in Clausewitz’ texts. What do you think about that? Is Bonaparte an artist?
Hoet: No, definitely not.
Kluge: Is Friedrich II an artist?
Hoet: Not in my opinion…
Kluge: Why not?
Hoet: Because you did not need to be an artist back then. You could be a politician, you could be a war leader, you could …
Kluge: But there are brutal people, for instance, like General Falkenhayn, the creator of Verdun, in quotation marks …
Hoet: But they could have artistic souls, of course.
Kluge: He is this really bad guy, he causes a blood bath, he creates a disaster. There are others, like Rommel, like Guderian …
Hoet: Yes, for example …
Kluge: … like Schwarzkopf, who practice their profession skillfully – couldn’t you use a concept of art here?
Müller: …Or, this story about Napoleon. I can’t remember, was it Beresina?
Kluge: Yes.
Müller: I’m not sure … when he saw his soldiers drown in the ice, and he says: like toads. Kind of like that. Is that the perspective of an artist?
Kluge: There are patriots at work here.
Müller: There is a …
Kluge: General Éblé is up to his belly in water and commands the construction of the bridge that the army uses to cross the river. He dies two days later. Those are the patriots of the French Revolution, a motivation that is in the past, and as a battle artist, as the painter of the retreat, he puts …
Hoet: Yes, yes …
Müller: There is a passage in the Stalingrad novel by … what’s his name? “Life and Fate”, do you know that one? What’s his name? I keep forgetting his name, it is …
Kluge: Plivier?
Müller: No, not Plivier. No, a soviet writer, Grossman. There is an episode where he describes Zhukov during the battle of Stalingrad, during the Russian attack: he sees the sky, it is night, and the colors of the artillery and the fire and bombs and so on … and suddenly there is a break, and he says: How beautiful the colors are!
Kluge: Like Jünger, who remembers an air raid on Paris. He says it is simply absurd not to assume that this image of beacons, of a bombing raid, of explosions over Paris was beautiful. Like Nero, who watches Rome …
Hoet: People said that during the gulf war, too.
Kluge: All the viewers watch these green lights over Baghdad on TV …
Müller: Yes. They experienced it as a work of art …
Kluge: … at first, they experienced it as a work of art. More interesting than some art works …
Hoet: Yes. Bridges too, certain bridges …
Müller: But how does the artist react to that?
Kluge: Could that be something for the Documenta, in your opinion: Is that worthy of being discovered, selected? There are differences, after all.
Müller: Could you imagine that? That you …
Kluge: You can handle something clumsily, but you can always also do it elegantly.
Müller: … would show a documentary about an attack on Baghdad …
Hoet: Yes, yes, it was Baghdad. [inaudible, 27:02]…
Müller: ….as an artwork in one room.
Hoet: No…
Müller: …What would happen? What would that mean for you?
Hoet: Yes…
Kluge: Just like “Guernica” is obviously a work of art …
Hoet: Exactly…
Kluge: … it shows a war scene. What are the differences between that, and the intervention of a sense of art under real circumstances?
Hoet: That it uses a certain language system. A certain language system, that happened on us over the course of a long development. Via Egypt, Greece, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Baroque, Mannerism … a certain linear process …
Kluge: I understand that, but take … people like Hannibal, like Caesar and all these other ancient heroes put a lot of effort into doing something special. For centuries, people thought that the fame that accompanies you is something valuable. And you say …
Hoet: There are different goals …
Kluge: … that’s not possible. The goals are different. Couldn’t the goals be functions of the mind?
Hoet: Functions are different …
Kluge: So they can apply their skills, and it doesn’t help them …
Hoet: I think the difference is …
Kluge: …they belong to hell …
Hoet: … the fact that – but maybe that is something you could say about war, too. In any case, works of art are absurd, have an absurd …
Kluge: But war is absurd as well …
Hoet: That’s what I meant …
Kluge: So skills of warfare, knowledge of warfare could be art, so to speak.
Hoet: Yes, of course that is exactly the point where it becomes difficult to differ. And people have tried, have tried in 19th century, have tested these differences.
Kluge: Let’s talk about something else: physics.
Hoet: Yes.
Kluge: In physics, there is a difference between Einstein, Gauss, Galilei, for example, between great physicists and heavy-handed physicists. Physicists who do not care what happens with their products, and those who do care very much. When Dutch opticians invent optics that are now used for spacecrafts, Miranda on the moon, the one that circles Uranus …
Hoet: Yes, yes. …
Kluge: … that discover 96 kilometer high mountains, ice prisms, beauty. It was Dutch opticians in the 16th century who discovered the optics that are now used for the space-probes.
Hoet: …and it was also used to make artworks …
Kluge: Is that art?
Hoet: Yes…
Müller: What is the difference between Vermeer and the brothers?
Hoet: Well , I think that the artwork never really has the familiar under control …
Kluge: But this is something completely unfamiliar, I have never encountered 96 kilometer high ice domes before …
Müller: Basically the question is if …
Hoet: I mean, you try to keep it under control …
Müller: There is also a crisis of the visible, a crisis of representation in art. Doesn’t that have to do with the fact that more and more things that do not comply with the traditional image, become representable? And isn’t that a fundamental challenge to visual arts, in the literal sense? What is left for art to accomplish, then? What can art, the visual arts, still do, if more and more becomes visible, is rendered visible. Isn’t that the crisis of representation? Or the crisis of visual arts?
Kluge: And the export of the appreciation for art, so to speak. That means, the abolition of war requires for me to really understand it …
Müller: So this is a very primitive question, but I am still going to ask it, and it is really meant as a question: Is there a connection – and maybe I got it completely wrong – between the gulf war and the fatigue of the art market?
Hoet: In my opinion, of course, because of the recession …
Müller: Yes, but is it just the recession?
Hoet: Recession, you mean?
Müller: No, I mean, not the recession.
Hoet: No? What do you mean?
Müller: Maybe the recession is just a symptom. I mean, the art market slows down, tires. Does that have anything to do with the gulf war?
Kluge: The appreciation for art decreases …
Hoet: Maybe, I thought the same thing. Just like in the 1970s with the Vietnam war.
Müller: Of course, the gulf war was self-defense too …
Kluge: There were pictures during the Vietnam war, it was visible and not censored …
Müller: The gulf war was the self-defense of television against Hollywood, and also the victory of television over Hollywood. There aren’t any good Hollywood movies anymore since the gulf war, because now … A bold claim, but I believe it is a crisis of narrative film.
Hoet: You think that …. because these … are you talking about the virtual aspect of the gulf war, that was as much exposed as possible? That we suddenly don’t have any need for the concrete anymore?
Müller: Yes, yes.
Hoet: That is possible …
Kluge: On the one hand, the gulf war is the revival of the Roman circus …
Hoet: Yes, but …
Kluge: Real people are dying, I am the observer and I am not endangered myself.
Hoet: The concrete does not have any meaning. That’s how it was communicated to us …
Müller: Yes.
Hoet: Yes, right.
Kluge: That is the first point. The second …
Hoet: Unbelievable …
Kluge: Real images do not equal reality. Other things that everyone knows are happening, that a war costs lives, that these people die with their eyes open – you never get to see that.
Hoet: No, no. But that is exactly why I have such a strong urge to work with art now.
Kluge: Okay.
Hoet: First, because the artwork is a reduction of spectacle, that is how I experience it, unlike the gulf war, where it was the spectacular that was communicated …
Kluge: So art is the opposite of the golden calf.
Hoet: Yes, yes! And not just a reduction, but also a return to the concrete.
Kluge: Wait. Is art an image or is it not? Aaron, you know, Aaron …
Hoet: Yes.
Kluge: … wants to bring in images, but Moses says: a ban on image. Of course we are not talking about a ban here, but we are talking about the not-image. In which direction does art retreat in the face of the gulf war?
Hoet: The image. Back to the image.
Kluge: You mean, hiding in the image?
Hoet: …hiding in the image, well, I don’t know …
Müller: Is that true? That makes me think of, do you know this saying of Nietzsche’s about why humanity or society needs art, or why man needs art also as an individual? To be able to bear the paradox of human existence, that to bring it to mind leads to despair. But there is an antidote, the art medicine. But now we have a new situation, thinking is replaced by television …
Hoet: Yes, yes …
Text: Heiner Müller, playwright
Müller: …and what happens then?
Kluge: Then you need art, so to speak, that’s what you mean, right?
Müller: Then you need even more art, maybe …
Hoet: That is my guess, anyway. I was in the hospital during the gulf war, five days after my operation. I saw this conflict and suddenly I was so desperate … and I understood the expression: does it even make sense anymore to think about art?
Kluge: That’s what you thought?
Hoet: I was so desperate, really: completely desperate!
Kluge: That was after all your travels?
Hoet: Yes, yes.
Müller: And before the “Documenta”?
Hoet: Just before the “Documenta”, right. In January 1991. And I was already at the hospital, I was injured, was also in a state of despair about art, the necessity of art, because I was suddenly confronted with war. And only after three, four days I realized that there is really nothing to see about the war, that there is no war, that all the new communication systems create an illusion to replace reality. Baudrillard called that “virtual”.
Kluge: Okay.
Hoet: And then I suddenly saw the insistence on the spectacle, and then I returned to art. And then I returned to my bed …
Kluge: You saw the insistence on the spectacle? What does that mean? What does that mean here? You saw the spectacle? Please translate that again …
Hoet: I saw that the focus was on the spectacle, the spectacular. Spectacle! “Christmas tree”, the most beautiful Christmas tree …
Kluge: In the form of a designation …
Hoet: Baghdad.
Kluge: … the city for bombers, the “killing box”, so to speak …
Hoet: And then: I saw gas masks, but it was like theater …
Kluge: In the symphonic orchestra, the violinist plays without a gas mask, as if the gas was free to move, so to speak … so, it is unlikely that a rocket will hit the concert hall … and gas basically takes hours to spread out over a kilometer, and in that sense the danger for the star violinist is not that severe, but everyone in the audience is wearing gas masks … that is a propaganda image.
Hoet: And then suddenly I was in a performance and then I turned around, had a great need for art again. And I realized that on my hospital bed, in my bed. I was in bed … and just like, for instance, a lot of people in this war were also tied to their beds, with all the serious diseases and “near-death” and so on, but you didn’t get to see that! Only for a moment we saw something and that came very close to being art, in my opinion. It was when these soldiers, these captured soldiers suddenly appeared on screen: the sudden, real confrontation with what is seated deep inside these people. That’s when I felt close to art …
Kluge: Oh, when those prisoners, who were questioned by the Iraqis, and suddenly the brave RAF pilots …
Hoet: Yes, for instance …
Kluge: … appear as scared humans, without their masks …
Hoet: Unbelievable…
Kluge: And the torturers were refuted.
Hoet: Everything was forgotten, everything was focused on these people, on what was going around, because they didn’t express their interiority, but you could sense it, the globality, the secrets behind it, and that is what I am looking for in art as well.
Kluge: Did I understand you correctly? Art is never staged?
Müller: Exactly, that’s how I understand you as well.
Hoet: It cannot be staged.
Müller: The more staged reality is, the more real art has to be … or art becomes real …
Kluge: … it is something fictional, so that eventually a detective who sets forth to find something in the world, as random as that might be, a stone – a magical one, for example –, someone’s work, Mister Pili-pili’s work, or his son’s … that this is now established as an alternative world, which is something real, authentic. What are the fundamental laws of art? Authenticity, what else?
Hoet: Authenticity, yes …
Kluge: Regarding the material: authenticity … genuine ..
Hoet: Yes, but regarding the material: I believe that all material is available. There is no difference between authentic material and inauthentic material …
Kluge: There isn’t?
Hoet: There is authenticity in expression.
Kluge: …in expression. In the difference of material, life experience, topic, existence.
Hoet: That’s it. Those four things together, combined, in one picture. And the combination of these four aspects together creates a tension between existence and presence, banal presence, on the one hand, and exaggeration on the other. And that is the difference, within the differences. And then it becomes incredibly interesting.
Kluge: So, in German, in crime novels, the detective is called a snooper. The cops always say …
Müller: Yes, he is an art snooper.
Kluge: The officials call him a snooper. In unofficial function, he is hunting for art as a private detective, as a snooper.
Hoet: Of course you don’t discover something every day, you don’t discover something every year, that’s not how it works. And there are also artists who come to us.
Kluge: No, but with your plethora of slides, with your research, you were basically snooping for art. Could you tell us about your treasure hunt? What is the pattern you have in your head, when do you say: This is art!
Hoet: Once, in America, in New York, in Manhattan, there was a black guy. He is standing in the street, in winter, in the middle of winter, with snow and all that. In front of him there was a rug on the ground, one of these little Afghans, and on this Afghan rug, there were snowballs lined up, very orderly, like in a counting frame.
Kluge: A counting frame?
Hoet: For counting …
Kluge: Okay. Like an instrument …
Hoet: Yes, an instrument. Like an instrument, that’s how the snowballs looked on the ground. And he sells them, snowballs for five …
Müller: I think I’ve misunderstood. Like a …
Kluge: No…
Hoet: That’s what it looks like. That’s the … school children used to have them. Made from iron, and with balls on it.
Kluge: Balls on it … what is it called?
Hoet: Like, one, two …
Müller: Yes, like a …
Kluge: An abacus.
Müller: Like a slide-rule. Which was still used in Moscow until recently …
Hoet: All lined up nicely …
Kluge: Beads are lined up, and you can use them to count … and that’s how he built snowballs …
Hoet: And in winter. And he watched the audience, the audience didn’t even know what that was supposed to mean, snowballs on such a beautiful Afghan …
Text: Jan Hoet, director of the DOCUMENTA
Hoet: Then I made a drawing of that … what a strange guy, what is he doing? I look at the snowballs and ask: What is this? Well, I’m selling snowballs, 5 dollars each. I say: My God! Suddenly everything is silent. There was a black man, white snowballs, cold, warm, all these elements together …
Kluge: An object that you can count with, but that you cannot take with you …
Müller: At least not for long …
Hoet: You can take it, you can buy it, but it will melt.
Kluge: And if you take a picture of it, it would be an artwork.
Hoet: And I took a picture, took a photo, and I kept talking to this man, and became friends with this man, I saw what else he’s doing. And then I really saw how great this artist is. And he is also at the “Documenta”.
Kluge: As long as these people exist, there is magic. Could you say that?
Hoet: It is present magic, that isn’t …
Müller: Or there is a response to the state of the world …
Kluge: … that stays alive in the minds of people, and on the outside, in the cities …
Müller: Because the people who buy it for five dollars take it with them …
Hoet: Yes, the money melts …
Müller: …it melts and then it is gone …
Hoet: …goes away, disappears…
Kluge: Like in one of the Brothers Grimm’s fairy tales …
Müller: Yes, that is great.
Hoet: That is amazing, and I found that in New York …
Text: The art snooper, portrait of Jan Hoet, director of the DOCUMENTA in Kassel
Kluge: How did you include that in the “Documenta” that you are equipping?
Hoet: Of course not the snowballs …
Kluge: The photo?
Hoet: …the photo doesn’t show up either. Those are memories …
Kluge: Oh.
Hoet: … and there is … he comes to the “Documenta” with new work.