Interview with Adrienne Goehler

Interview: Hanna Gersmann, Beate Willms

»We can’t leave the world to the experts.«

Part 1

Adrienne Goehler, the world today is marked by crises, whether we look at the financial markets, poverty, water, distribution, or the climate. Or politics: elected officials have long since adopted Margaret Thatcher’s credo »There is no alternative« as their own. Politics seems to have reached an endpoint.

What do we do now?

Thinking and acting in contexts, developing new forms of organization and movement. Liberating our fantasies on all levels, because man-made natural and financial catastrophes can no longer be solved with traditional methods. The big crisis we have today is also a crisis of expertise.

Does that include politics?

Yes, because democracy is not necessarily in good hands with politicians. However, the experts are failing across the board: the PISA studies on school performance show that it’s not a good idea to leave schools in the hands of schooling experts. The financial crisis shows that money is not in the best hands with the money experts. And for me, Copenhagen was another decisive turning point: the failed climate conference at the end of 2009 made clear more than anything else that the goodwill of governments is limited by economic or lobby interests. We can’t leave the world to experts in business and governments.

What do we have beside these experts, who are clearly implicated with private interests?

We have to work in an expanded form of democracy. Things have to be thought together. In a representative democracy that operates strictly according to divisions of responsibilities and the dictatorship of the 51 percent over the 49 percent, this can no longer be provided. The arts and sciences have a kind of model function in terms of method, in a sense they are the avant-garde of a fluid modernism that is marked by unsure relations and the loss of certainties. For they have to re-confirm their findings over and over. It’s not, »I thought this once, and I’m going to stick to that.« Everything is always in process of being questioned, being recombined, or at least being revised.

Why are artists better at doing that?

Maybe because they are anti-experts? Because they always think in new constellations: in art, there are no sure questions and even fewer secure answers. Instead, art re-interrogates the standard answers.

 Does art, do artists now have to save the world after the politicians have failed at it? How is that supposed to work?

No, art would be overtaxed by any kind of rescue function, and that’s not its job. But for some time, the responsibility for documenting the state of the world had been placed in art’s hands. Artists are taking on the task of listening to, observing, and publishing world events. And art can make the invisible visible, as for example Richard Box, one of the artists in the exhibition, who makes electro smog glow, and Michael Saup makes CO2 emissions visible that are created by uninhibited internet use. We need these expanded forms of perception in a larger sense, including sensuality in our actions, no longer acting beyond feeling, taste, smell, seeing, feeling and hearing.

The term sustainability—what the exhibition is about—was also conceived by the experts in very broad terms. But it was so overused that hardly anyone wants to refer to it. What went wrong in science and scholarship? Is it a problem of content or its communication?

There is a whole series of words that have been erected as a rescue umbrella over a reality that is failing us: innovation, creativity, gender mainstreaming, or sustainability. This is why Holm Friebe from Zentrale Intelligenz Agentur snubs his nose at the term and says: »The S-Word! The unsexy word sustainability!« We had a long talk, should we declare the concept lost or recharge it anew? I learned a lot from Ernst Bloch, that the word »homeland« can’t be left to the fascists, for example, but rather should be interpreted as a utopian site where no one has ever been, but for which we all long. We decided to take the offensive: the linking of aesthetics and sustainability.

What does this mean for sustainability?

In terms of our approach to sustainability, this means that we need to divorce ourselves from a technocratic understanding of the concept, and pick up on the 1809 definition of Joachim Heinrich Campe, Alexander von Humboldt’s teacher. »Sustaining is what one holds on to when all else fails.« Or Albert Schweitzer, who defines sustainability as the ability to look ahead, practicing prevention. I owe both definitions to Ulrich Grober, who goes into this in more detail in the Reader. Or quite simply: »Don’t fall more trees than grow!« The word artist Adib Fricke approaches the subject field of sustainability in a word installation.

To remain with the exhibition: How do you define aesthetics?

Aesthetics is the sum of perception. In recent years, it has been delegated to art. I would like to return it to the perception of the population, to the individual. In this sense, it means relying on perception and one’s own senses, and to understand that everything is linked to everything. Wanting to make connections was something that resulted from my brief and very informative interval in government. 

Beginning in June 2001, you served as an independent Senator for Education, Research and Culture in the red-green government of Berlin.

Yes, and there I noted that in politics things are not thought, acted or shaped in context, but in terms of departments and who has the authority to do what. What drives the world forward in terms of questions and problems always depends upon the way authority is divided up. Before thinking of the exhibition, we realized that we had to create (FÄN)—Fonds für Ästhetik und Nachhaltigkeit (Fund for Aesthetics and Sustainability) to bring back together things that had been haphazardly separated. We needed something that collected various perspectives and realms, and combined them. For it’s not just governmental policy-making that is divided into departments and responsibilities, foundations and other sources of funding function similarly, just that here it’s not called »realm of authority« but profile. And all sorts of questions don’t fit the usual categories.

That is why you left politics? 

Well, I only had a brief interlude in politics, and there I realized that we cannot delegate the continuing existence of the world to government policy. Artists should be observers, should do what politics cannot, and should also develop solar motors or recycling techniques to make society more sustainable. Isn’t that a bit much?

With the exhibition, the project leader Jaana Prüss and I pick up what we have seen in artistic practice, we have not commissioned anything. And its striking that Gordon Matta-Clark, Joseph Beuys, or Robert Smithson engaged with the questions: what’s going on with the planet, what about water, what about biodiversity and what power relations impact upon this, even before there was an environmentalist movement concerned with issues such as air pollution, erosion, or the depletion of natural resources. Art occupied sustainability earlier than other realms. From very early on it dealt with the relationship between nature and culture. If we go into this context of sustainability, in all manifestoes and fair weather speeches mention is made of the fact that there are not only three dimensions of sustainability, the social, the ecological and the economic, but also the cultural. But there is no practical action following on this insight. The fourth dimension, the cultural, is always forgotten. That’s just how it is . . .

. . . all that other stuff, as the former German SPD chancellor Gerhard Schröder put it?

Yes, it’s a kind of appendix that’s added at the rear . . . and this is especially true of women and children. Galerie für Landschaftskunst for example works artistically and across the disciplines with notions of nature, landscape and city, Clement Price-Thomas changes perception by way of his artistic engagement with natural phenomena and Néle Azevedo creates with her installations of melting ice sculptures a direct impression of climate change in a poetic sense.

What then have the artists themselves done wrong if they have had these ideas in their head for such a long time, or even already worked on them, but have not made their way into the global discussion?

The art context is not free of its own no-go areas, not independent of the mainstream. The notion of autonomy, of not

being committed to any clients, shaped art in the 20th century. And no one, not even Beuys or the others who were interested in something else than »pure« art could escape from hostilities.

What hostilities precisely?

The suspicion that it’s eco art, social art or political art. The fear of being used by parties or political currents is great. When I was President of Hamburg’s art academy, there was a professor who once was a follower of the German Communist Party (KPD). He almost inquisitionally asked all those students who wanted to paint what they thought they could do for the proletarian with their painting. This lead to people going into a kind of internal exile, they painted in secret. In the 1970s / 80s, in reaction to this, autonomy was celebrated, not feeling committed to any social current. Today, the art market is god. In addition, there are increasingly artists that do not want to befriend this divinity and do not sell their art. Christin Lahr is such an example, who with her work Capital Presents transfers one cent each day to »our« Federal Bank.

Do you understand your exhibition as a rebellion against the current art world?

It is neither about rebellion nor about the desire to serve a certain zeitgeist. It is simply the first large-scale exhibition in Germany that is concerned with the cultural dimension of sustainability. It’s impossible to say whether the concept will be successful. It’s a process, an experiment. But in general, the feedback we are getting is that yes, it’s the right exhibition at the right time. This encourages us to think that we can’t be entirely wrong. Clearly the feeling that the world is not in best hands with the experts is quite widespread. 

Why is the exhibition coming only now?

Because we needed three years to convince enough funders of the combination aesthetics and sustainability, for one foundation feels itself not responsible for art, the other not for ecological questions. In the United States, England, and Scandinavia, there have already been several exhibitions in this realm. Germany is a backwaters in this respect. Until now the question of eco-aesthetics, as Rasheed Araeen calls it, has really only been reserved for smaller exhibitions at Kunstvereins or for architectural contexts and always been treated in a monothematic way: climate, Level Green, Beyond Green, TAK Green, low energy house, solar technology.

But isn’t the goal to become as green as possible?

But a truly broad exhibition like ours, with more than 40 positions from art, the sciences, film, architecture, that respond to the burning questions of how life can continue on this endangered planet, has never taken place in Germany. But this is changing at the moment. Next year, the Kulturstiftung des Bundes (German Federal Cultural Foundation) will be dedicating quite a significant sum »on the art of living«. Perhaps in a few years it will be said that expeditions in aesthetics and sustainability opened new paths in the arts, sciences, and social practice: examples to follow !

And is this still art?

Yes, it is an expanded notion of art. For artistic interventions that reinforce social movements against hard political realities are still rather rare. Hermann Josef Hack brings the impact of climate flight to the locations of those responsible, parliaments and pedestrian zones of the consumer metropoles. Gustavo Romano has been concerned with the relationship between money and time since the state bankruptcy in Argentina. The piece Under Discussion by the artist duo Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla is part of the protest against the US Navy, which left behind lead, uranium, and cadmium—and cancer— on the island of Vieques. The interventionists The Yes Men smuggle themselves into international congresses and infiltrate them with communication guerilla tactics. Art can do all this.

Many of the items in the exhibition are thus very practice oriented. Does your context of questions force artists to again become more like inventors, a sort of Da Vinci type?

The works are targeted at a changed cultural practice. When Christoph Keller brings light into backyards with his patent, Susanne Lorenz, Jakub Szczesny, and Zwischenbericht experiment in their own ways with the purification of water, Jae Rhim Lee researches spores that are to turn dead human bodies more quickly into compost, or Otmar Sattel generates sounds using gas, or when Liebau | Lingk remind us of St. Francis of Assisi’s Canticle of the Sun, or Miguel Rothschild recalls the sinking of the Atlantides, when the group Superflex question dominant conditions of production by flooding a McDonald’s restaurant, an act that is globally understood. Is this art, is this science, is this practice or something in between? What is expanding what? For they need scientific findings for their work, or simulate them in critical intentions like Antal Lakner, who in times of a dramatic reduction of the habitat for human and plants has found out about their symbiosis.