Olga Hohmann
Language as an Unreadymade
Many texts begin with coffee. So does this one: it's seven o'clock in the morning, I've slept for about two hours and, on the way to "Santa Lucia", I've carried my wheeled suitcase over about fifteen bridges. I'm on my way back from the opening of the Biennale di Venezia.
I didn't have a preview ticket, but I got in anyway with a fake ticket. The train is already at the platform, a conductor dressed in red makes an annoyed gesture and I ask him the only thing I can think of at that moment: Can I buy coffee on the train? And he says: Coach 6.
Coach 6 is therefore the only term I can think of; it becomes the linguistic signifier for the experience of "coffee". With all the sensory impressions that go with it: The smell, which for me (and many others) works like an olfactory alarm clock. The heating, often too hot feeling on your fingers when you hold the cup or mug. The slightly numb feeling you have on your tongue all day because you were impatient and couldn't wait to take your first sip. The feeling that life suddenly rushes into all your limbs, muscles and tendons, as if the liquid were a kind of gasoline for the human body. The feeling that your eyelids open and you can suddenly see –– in the all-too-real as well as the metaphorical sense. The smell of urine, which you will excrete a few hours later –– and which clearly shows what you have ingested. The digestive function, which suddenly appears to be something linear –– like the dolls back then, which gave up the water they were fed after a few seconds. And last but not least: The person who supplies you with coffee, like a dealer with drugs. A kind of redeeming, angelic apparition. Coffee is a communication tool. The lack of coffee, better or worse coffee, the influence of coffee on one's own sleep patterns and the decision to switch from coffee to tea are also excellent topics for discussion, for connecting and differentiating.
Sanna's text on "Nicht-nur-Spekulativ" also begins with coffee –– it is a coffee that she drinks with the gallerist and that encourages her (in its material quality of getting people into conversation as well as into thinking, sometimes, if you have had too much, even into "pondering") to differentiate between terms such as "art-house" ("Kunst-Haus") and "house-art" ("Haus-Kunst"). The term "unreadymade" is also used at the beginning of the text and Sanna defines it:
"By manufacturing, producing or altering an object to appear as an already existing object, the artist engages in a deliberate act of refocusing, challenging and accentuating, not only the viewer's assumptions about authenticity, value, and meaning, but that of the act of display and showing."
The definition reads so coherently, so lexically, that for a moment you forget that the artist herself is the one creating her own lexicon here:
"The unreadymade presents an object that seems familiar yet is altered or fabricated but couples an act of criticality, questioning the viewer's own perceptions and assumptions about commodities. It prompts reflection on how we assign meaning to every-day objects and/vs art objects, and how our understanding of their reality is shaped by context, representation, and artistic intervention. By 'making' an object that resembles a mass-produced item, or altering a familiar and existing object, in size or scale, an artist may challenge the notion of value and uniqueness in a society dominated by consumerism."
The outcome of the story about Coach 6, my newly established but quickly manifested signifier for the saving liquid, is simple: there is a Lavazza machine in Coach 6, the Lavazza machine has no card reader –– and I have no cash. I stare in disbelief for a while at the display showing the different variations of the drink, then I give up and decide to write this text without my "brain gasoline".
I read Sanna's text, once, twice, I get stuck on individual terms and her explanations and am impressed. The artist develops an almost taxonomic system to contextualize her work. She provides the analysis for the sculptures with them –– developing a language all of her own, somewhere between German, English and the generic language of the art world, to which I was frequently exposed in snippets of speech over the last few days, when I spent most of my time waiting in lines, only to simply give up after a good hour or so of queuing.
However, Sanna does not use the linguistic "readymades" of the art world, instead she develops her very own "unreadymades" not only sculpturally, but also in her writing. The title "Nicht-nur-Spekulativ" is one of them, another "Site-specificity-cum-size-specificity", or "The New Avant-garde-Banal". These are terms that want to signify (just as Coach 6 only appears to me as a signifier –– or is it the signified, the idea of the hot magic potion?).
But they are also terms that refer to language itself –– a kind of serious linguistic slapstick. In the radical, stubborn opacity of the terms, of which one does not know whether they are theoretical or only appear to be so, Sanna creates her own system, which, in its hermeticism, points out that all the other terms we use are "readymades" anyway. They are manufactured, they originate from a specific world view that has a particular hierarchy. Sanna's terms appear to have a place in this hierarchy –– but in reality they are autonomous. They function as symbolic images ("Vexierbilder"): symbolic images that, depending on which side you look at them, represent very different things, sometimes even opposites.
Perhaps this is where the hyphen comes into play, which Sanna particularly likes to use: It connects, literally, different concepts with each other, which, in their connection, simultaneously give each other meaning as much as they deprive each other of meaning. The concepts are, to use a German proverb, "knapp daneben" –– or in Sanna's words "nicht ganz Standard", but in a "sehr konsequente" way. They are resolute in their multiple divisions. They want to express, describe or label something and at the same time are amused by those who think they are in a position to express, describe or label something without being aware of the linguistic context in which they are doing so. Sanna's conceptual "unreadymades" are autonomous precisely because they reveal themselves in their genesis. They are unique because they seem interchangeable. And they are revealing because they obscure rather than explain. Because: Who are we to judge anyway? And still we need to keep trying.
In Sanna Helena Berger's texts, we find ourselves on a linguistic Möbius strip in which all terms are turned "upside down", only for us to return to them at the end. Because: all terms are appropriations anyway. They stand for themselves and remain both painfully and playfully contextualized.
I wish I had heard more "Unreadymades" in the queues in front of the pavilions in the Giardini. But I only heard readymades. The only "Unreadymade": My fake ticket.