ILONA RUEGG

DEVIATION

From the mid-1990s Ilona Ruegg became known to a wider public with exhibitions in the Helmhaus in Zurich and the Kunsthalle Bern. If she was initially regarded above all as someone who produced paintings and drawings, she has, in the last eight years, branched out in her artistic practice. With her examination of time structures – whether they manifest themselves in the physical urban space, the acoustic space of the media, or in the immaterial space of data and information streams – Ruegg occupies a distinct and at the same time elusive position within the current world of art production.

DK: Let us begin with your last work, Ex Box/Time Construction 3. What in particular does the term “Time Construction” refer to?

 

IR: Yes, well how do you give a name to something that you’re doing? Am I naming what is seen or what I’m doing? Those were the questions I was asking myself. Ex Box/Time Construction 3 refers to the lorry which was carrying the heavy components of an entire façade. And Time Construction perhaps describes the construction I was thus making. I didn’t use a new façade, but one which had been dismantled. It was stored on the low-loader truck, on a series of lights. And what I was organising – at least this is how it seemed to me – was time rather than the material.

 

DK: Time Construction in the sense of building time.

 

IR: Time is something which comes to the fore, can become concrete, in a construction. I shift heavy material, e.g. the dismantled façade components of the Info Box, also the lamps which were present in this building, a series of these lamps, in fact. I made a translation and multiplication of them. The number of the lamps was determined by the number of missing panels in the facade, because these missing parts provided the window openings. Beside these material elements the transportation itself, for example, counts as a medium of the work, a transportation which I briefly diverted and interrupted. The events surrounding the sale and/or disposal of the Info Box count, too. All these threads of activity were externally determined, I only interrupted something. Of course, diverse factors
come to the fore simultaneously.

 

DK: This relationship of partly uncontrollable planning and events is the medium?

 

IR: Yes, these events in the broadest sense.

 

DK: Then I have to ask you again, why “Time Construction”? I haven’t understood that exactly.

 

IR: Because I work with material elements which are caught up in processes, and produce a structure in which time appears. Time is always present, everywhere. It’s there with those responsible for the planning of the Info Box and also with those who dismantled it. It’s present with me and with the observer. I only make an incision into this time.

 

DK: In Ex Box/Time Construction 3 a video work documents the delayed lorry. There are other media: the publication, the symposium with experts etc. There is another important question regarding the public, since the diversion doesn’t take place in the context of an institution. I mean, who saw this work? When was it seen? Who observed it if it wasn’t already encoded as an artistic intervention? In short, with this concept of “time” are we dealing with a metaphor or an experience?

 

IR: The work took place in a context outside the institution and was attached to the Frankfurter Kunstverein. That’s why there was an audience, which had come specially to see the low-loader which was parked next to a multi-lane one-way street in the city centre for 12 hours. Many had experienced the façade of the Info Box intact over a period of five years. But there were also passers-by, car drivers who came across this somewhat strange situation. They, too, were part of the situation which was changing constantly. The low-loader was practically removed from the traffic and at the same time placed within it, in traffic which flowed past or got stuck, as there was a set of traffic lights nearby. The low-loader stood out against the different speeds, the different strands of activity. That is all experience of time, but this time is so self-evident that I can only catch it in these differences.

 

DK: Can we say that the interruption of the strand of activity plays out in an anonymous sphere?

 

IR: It plays out in an extremely public sphere, not in the protective confines of the institution. As the low-loader drove off after the lights had been offloaded and so returned to its planned context, it was important that the work could continue as a reflection. At this point, other media come into play. Since the work itself moves an object but the object is not the focal point, I thought that a potentially fluid form of documentation would be appropriate, one which could define the edges of an event.

 

DK: Everything you describe as strands of activity, the transportations, the movement of material and immaterial goods, etc. is something very characteristic of today’s society. We are actually surrounded by a constant flow of goods and information. That means you could intervene at different places with this tool of interruption.

 

IR: Everything is movement. Even your own body, which perhaps when you sit still can appear a little static. There is nothing which isn’t moving. What is worth stopping for? What happens if I stop something? In the case of Ex Box/Time Construction 3 it was the façade of the Info Box, which served in effect as an information carrier for the Westhafen development in Frankfurt, as a place of information for the history and web of investments. I was struck by the fragmented surface, which really could be broken up into individual sections. They were able to form a completely different volume. Diverse, urban and even formal relationships were important. How do I show these relationships so that something becomes visible, something that we know but which is actually too complicated to be captured directly in an image? Let’s say, we can’t produce a photograph of this situation. Andreas Gursky can take a photograph of the stock exchange, which refers to very complex relationships. I am also doing a kind of exposure.

 

DK: Exposure would be, as it were, a displaced place. It would be what “occurs” if representation in the form of an image is no longer possible? So exposure instead of image?

 

IR: Yes, exactly. But also exposure as the time of exposure. The transportation was postponed by 12 hours. For 12 hours these lamps burned, powered by a generator. The lamps were loaded underneath; the first load consisted of lamps, the second of façade sections. The light only shone on the bottom of the first layer of façade sections, as well as the façade of the neighbouring building and on the road. The lamps didn’t light up the sections, only somehow irritated the heaviness of the second load.

 

DK: Can we return to the term strands of activity. As an artist you seem to be interested in the way society is structured, how it is organised, in its logic and in its irrationality, if you like. You don’t create new objects but rather observe processes already underway. Is it important to keep the degree of medial translation as small as possible in order to get as close as possible to these processes?

 

IR: That is basically an economic question. A storage space is unnecessary. The sections are indeed considerable and heavy, but at the same time they are quite light because their materiality is only borrowed. What I am moving is not these weights in particular, they are already being displaced, I am just adding a delay. Here I think of the safe that my father, as a bank employee, had to close every evening. As a child I had the strong feeling of something of great order being shut away which nevertheless could fit in the safe. Today things of great scale are moved, it’s more about the movement than the objects. Between Zurich and Bern milk is transported in both directions. That produces wages with which to buy milk. I am concerned with how these movements are organised so that they provoke questions in art.

 

DK: In that anecdotal image from your childhood it strikes me too that something was being shut away for possibly a very long time. Does this idea of permanence play a role, in contrast with your work which wants to be anything but permanent?

 

IR: Basically, nothing is fixed, and nevertheless every piece of work, every activity which wants to leave something behind, would like to thus make something permanent. Culture is created only through the tension between the durable and the transitory. Of course, as I am interested in mobility, I could keep as much as possible in motion. But I think I can better bring mobility to the fore by interrupting it. At the moment when the low-loader is standing still I am interrupting the promise which lies within the strand of activity, i.e. where the lorry is going to with its load. Through the interruption of the promise, every other kind of possibility suddenly becomes apparent
for a short while.

 

DK: It strikes me that the kinds of materials you work with can be in some cases quite solid and voluminous: façade sections, metals, etc. Is there a connection between this safe you anecdotically mentioned and the anonymous industrial standardised materials you’re working with today?

 

IR: It is not about specific spaces, but rather potential spaces. It’s always about possible space, extra space, “espaces auxiliaires” as I used to call them. The safe is of course only permanent in its having been constructed, not with regard to its contents. The value could rise or fall by the hour. You could perhaps draw a connection between the façade, which once separated an exterior from an interior, and the experience of a seven-year-old child standing in front of the safe door not knowing what was actually inside, what was really inside. Of course I somehow knew that it was money. I had already had some experience of that. I had my own piggy bank, and that had a certain weight. But what was behind this door was difficult to grasp. This real safe room which I had never seen existed in my imagination and its borders were very elastic.

 

DK: So would you say the imaginary element in space is an important point of reference in your work?

 

IR: It was certainly true as a child, but now a certain intangibility drives me to work with clear facts. So actually the concrete built nature of the space, which simultaneously has something intangible about it….

 

DK:… especially if we try to focus on what you call the strands of activity and when we see how, in the present experience of the world around us, different systems such as geography, urban space and information data are all linked together. If we also then try to understand how and by whom these are all manipulated… Then it all seems like the simultaneity of the non-simultaneous. I can see there a much larger area where the adjective intangible could be used.

 

IR: Yes, I agree. What is fascinating about it is that you never will touch it. These many complex simultaneities inspire me. It is certainly an area in which I can move and in which I know that I will nevertheless never quite know my way around.

 

DK: I am reminded of many other works which dealt with strands of activity or circulations, e.g. Haacke’s Real Time Systems or the socalled Irruptions into Ideological Circuits by Cildo Meireles. Meireles had the slogan “Yankees go home” printed on Coca-Cola bottles. I’m not interested in the anti-Americanism here, but rather in the concept of circulation. You talk of strands of activity.

 

IR: I don’t work so programmatically. I’m not interested in making a certain statement or evaluation of the question of economies. I would like to see them all emerge in all their contradictions. I interrupt the circulation, which is striving towards disposal and re-use. A material has served its time. By making the transportation late, it becomes more expensive. On the one hand, time is lost, yet artistically, value is added provisionally to a ware which is already in circulation. The displacement of the ceiling in Bern used a kind of future material; a ceiling for a burnt-down sports hall, it needed a new ceiling – an element which defines space, which was already designed for that location. I was interested in storing this ceiling in the Kunsthalle in Bern, in creating another volume and thus cut across the
spatial references of the Kunsthalle itself and transform them into another mass. It was mainly concerned with placing this ceiling component in a new context, in another economy; so that you didn’t have to stretch up to the ceiling or wouldn’t dangle from the ceiling, but could walk through the ceiling of a future place, as it were. – I am actually more interested in the operational relationships which arise when I turn things which are already caught up in an operation and introduce them to a new operation.

 

DK: I find the element of fabrication very striking. The everyday objects, the consumer objects, the built environment in which we live, it all appears to abbey the necessity of being put together. We are homo faber, we live in this context of fabrication: from the clothes that are sewn together, to the kitchen walls in which we prepare our food or store our crockery to the buildings in which we work and hang around. Fabrication as a social condition.

 

IR: To want to put something in a space presupposes the awareness that things have already been manufactured and have a meaning. I think there’s an opportunity in not taking ownership of the object. So I don’t just take on the role of placing the object in the new context but leave it in its production context and just borrow it for a while and then give it back. Duchamp didn’t give it back – I don’t think I have to remove it permanently and exhibit it.

 

DK: You raised another question earlier: What is it worth stopping for or temporarily pausing for? What are the criteria? Are we back at these “mad moments”?

 

IR: There are always things to consider. It has to be something which is within people’s experience: a house, something that has mass and can lose its mass. It’s about an old plane of experience and at the same time, the current one, which has something to do with this incredible movement, with the simultaneity of the non-simultaneous.

 

DK: You mean the digitalisation and networks…

 

IR: Yes, a world in which information can apparently arrive before it is dispatched, as I recently read in the FAZ. A world in which you have to look very closely to know where the stuff that we eat comes from, from distant continents or from the surrounding region. – Then again, an old area of experience in which things like counting, 1, 2, 3, 4 etc., play a role, which I took up in the work two or three things, in the use of counting sequences. Or a house. Everyone would like a house. A collector – as, for example in my unrealised project - would like a house and gets an artwork before the house is really built. And then he loses the artwork, it disappears into the house which is being built. And yet he still somehow has both.

 

DK: You describe this human scale as unfixed.

 

IR: I don’t think it is ever fixed or certain. It can change from one day to the next. The house which is big today can seem small tomorrow.

 

DK: And how is that related to the radio piece Two or Three Things?

 

IR: When I was invited, I was working with fragments of speech. It was obvious to me that the situation of the listener was important – with regard to the channel and the studio in which I was producing the piece, with a boy who was counting. I wanted to link it all together. The boy was at the place of production, a room with a sofa, a lamp, a light-switch etc. I told him he should cast his eye over these things and count them aloud. I told him to name an object if he came across it twice so that the chain of numbers – this continuity – would be briefly interrupted. And then there was a second part in which he counted the objects backwards. Then he set quite a different rhythm. I later placed both counting series on top of each other; I made a structure into which I introduced my own time. The boy had his time, he shot out into a visible world, which was similarly present in the world of the listener, too, and I produced a quite artificial time in the overlapping of the two systems. It was a form in which time arose on the basis of shifts, you could perhaps say. No size was separated in itself any more. Each order became something only in its difference from another order. And it was different for each listener in their particular time and space.  – I believe these points of connection are important to me, where no order is complete in and of itself, at least not in a predetermined way.

 

DK: The elements in Ex Box/Time Construction 3 begin to play a somewhat different role when I listen to what you’re saying about Two or Three Things. It’s as if the elements – the façade sections – were placed in quotation marks and final marks, through the diversion, held up as a model out of the fabrication events…

 

IR: No, I don’t think that’s the case. I don’t want to hold anything up and make a model of it. The low-loader remains a low-loader and yet it doesn’t somehow. It is in an exceptional state.

 

DK: Let me return again to the concept of the context of activity. You hold these connections up for a while at least, or you stop them in order to show what is invisible or hardly visible. You are exhibiting a little bit more than just the architecture in Ex Box/Time Construction 3.

 

IR: Yes, by stopping the façade in its transportation, other things come into view which belong to the reasons why the Info Box was built in the first place.

 

DK: And those would be?

 

IR: Well, The Westhafen area in Frankfurt was mainly renewed urban space, with buildings which mainly became office space. The Info Box was on the one hand a visible peg to hang things on, visible through its signal red colour, its small size and it wanted also to refer to information through the modular appearance of its façade. The Info box itself was not all that modular; it was much more permanently built and screwed together. That was also part of the difficulty in later selling it, because the costs for its reassembling would have been too high.

 

DK: The modular appears in this respect to be almost ideologically loaded along the lines of a quotation from constructivism which suggests lightness, changeability, progressiveness, etc. But the purposes which lie beneath this redevelopment, are more of a speculative nature, are they not, as it’s about questions of usage, of city marketing and suchlike. Were those reasons for you choosing this Info Box?

 

IR: Again: It wasn’t my interest, to present these things programmatically and in a manifesto. I was interested in the fact that this Info Box promised information. Now, you can never really keep a promise! That was my starting point. Precisely at the moment of its dissolution there was a possibility that this fragmentation would behave like information, without being a promise. How does information behave? There are parts, which are facts, and you introduce these into new contexts. You can use them this way or that or prepare them in different ways and present them. At the point of dissolution there is a kind of free behaviour, beyond meaning. These panels are actually without meaning and therefore so full of potential. So it’s not about the political, ideological elements, that I want to point at with my finger. Rather it’s the processes. I’d like to show what points of these and similar processes remain open and particularly at what precise moment.

EX BOX

There is a definition of ‘museum’ by Marcel Broodthaers which, if I remember correctly, appears as spoken text in one of his films. It is the voice of a child, presumably that of his daughter Puck, that reads it aloud. It stayed in mind also because of this shift of perspective: “Museum – a form, a surface, a volume – eager to serve. An open angle hard edges. A director, an employee, a cashier – museum. Children are not allowed in, open all day until the end of time.” For me this is first and foremost a piece of poetry because behind the semblance of analysis, such heterogeneous modalities of description are combined so that the definition can only fail. But at the same time this failure is the statement’s triumph – the complexity of the project that is a museum finds appropriate articulation here. Another memory comes to the fore, which is also to

do with the theme of inverted ‘architecture’: an installation by Michael Asher in the Kunsthalle in Bern which, despite its huge effort said something quite simple, or at least fundamental about how exhibition institutions function. Michael Asher had a number of radiators removed which he then arranged in the entrance hall into a humming battery of circulating streams of warmth.This amalgam of usually cleverly hidden radiators was an unmistakable reference to the material conditions of a gallery: the need for heating, to guarantee the comfort and wellbeing of the visitors. There was obviously also a metaphorical aspect to the work: the art institution providing warmth, as a system of connecting pipes, as energy transfer.In any case, the combination of a sculptural and conceptual approach was strangely proportioned. One thing was momentarily made clear: that objects and relationships which are ignored often require huge emphasis to achieve the recognition they deserve.
In May 2002, Ilona Ruegg showed a work in the Kunsthalle Bern which was called Volume/Unpublished and which spread out in the entrance hall a load of sound insulation panels which had been already assigned to the ceiling of a sports hall. The insulation panels were placed on their lengths on bases made from wooden slats and held together in blocks by small ‘fences’. The acoustic dimension to the work consisted of spoken and sung fragments of text and silent passages. At the time I didn’t know about the exhibition.

 

When I first became acquainted with Ilona Ruegg she was in the middle of a project which she called Hempels Hütte (Out of House and Home). It involved storing the elements of a prefabricated house, which had been designed by the Frankfurt architects schneider+schumacher and sold to a photographer called Hempel, for a certain period before the house was assembled near Aachen. Ilona Ruegg thus wanted to create an insertion or delay in the processes of time, space and organisation. For this the house’s components were to be displayed in a disconnected and loose arrangement in an “art space” (exhibition hall) for a typical period of exhibition. The sketches of the building showed it as a truncated pyramid cut in half with large glass panels which opened out onto a veranda area. In this form the project was not realised in the end because the owner would not accept the six-week delay.
The final purpose of the building components of Hempels Hütte as elements of a future house seemed decisive and full of meaning: only in this way could Ilona Ruegg’s planned storing of them be understood as an anti-categorical option and artistic alternative form of space, time and everyday economics.

 

The situation is different with Ilona Ruegg’s current project, the storage of components of schneider+schumacher’s Info Box on a low loader trailer. The Info Box, originally erected in a different form in Potsdamer Platz in Berlin to give visitors an insight into the planned development there, had come to the end of its purpose. It fulfilled a similar information and overview function at the site of the Westhafen development in Frankfurt but had found no buyer for its continued use. The hybrid construction, recognised for its mobility, was dismantled ready for disposal.
For her installation, Ilona Ruegg has created a one-day delay in the process. For this purpose a low loader trailer was stocked with the red elements from the façade. They were stored above an empty space created by wooden planks into which the artist inserted neon tubes and small lamps in a loose arrangement which were brought to light during the 12-hour parking phase by means of a generator. The “underground” exposure of the stored parts of the façade not only creates a strangely dysfunctional and immaterial space inside and outside the trailer. The noise of the generator, too, generates such a clearly perceptible yet siteless location.

 

It so happens that at the same time, in the Portikus in Frankfurt, an exhibition is taking place of work by art students from Pristina, and one of the works describes the continuing state of emergency, but also the new topography of that city by means of an arrangement of generator sounds which envelop us at intervals in a darkened space.

 

Rudolf Schmitz: Now, in order to define the components which gain significance in Ilona Ruegg’s installation, we could adopt Broodthaers’s definition and attempt to call on categories whose purpose is apparently to lose their rigidity. For example, is the generator in a sense the heart of this event, because it represents autonomy and introduces a new functionality of originally spatially-defined elements?

 

Ilona Ruegg: The low loader is carrying a three-fold load: façade components, light and the generator. Without the generator, there would only be lamps, but no light. It therefore makes a significant difference, by supplying materials with energy. Through its noise it isn’t only perceptible on site. Strictly speaking, the sound frequency can be heard on the other side of the river and beyond. The light radiates constantly, too. I’m interested in these borders that are open. The generator is necessary and a very pragmatic element, and yet it reveals a point in perception which shows that the object is not limited to its current location. I think it’s important that this work creates a notion of ‘multi-sitedness’. The generator gives the situation a certain autonomy, but still requires a supply of energy from elsewhere in order for it be transformed into light. I think we always try to do this in art: accept the given conditions but also maintain an independence out of which a transformation is only then possible.

 

RS: For me, it is also an image which simply disrupts certain usual connections, but in such a way that a new form of connection is created, semantically and pragmatically.

 

IR: The transportation of the façade was interrupted in a parking space next to a three-lane carriageway in the city centre and exposed for twelve hours. That is, of course, completely uneconomical. The transportation will then complete its journey without light. The interruption allows us to appreciate something, which we like to call an image because you can already see the photographs of it. In fact, the situation is much too intricate to be captured in an image. You can see the dismantled façade of the Info Box, but in the form of a load, an exposed mass, taken out of circulation for a while, but also placed in circulation. It is at the moment only a volume of possibility, it has potentiality. It could take on some new function. This selected moment, which only postpones the continuation, is at the same time embedded in the flow of events which are determined somewhere else. The daily traffic flow, which here draws the low loader into view temporarily and releases it again, shows just one of the connections which this work attempts to reflect.

 

RS: Perhaps we could open up the discussion here. I would be interested in how the effort involved in this work is experienced. With Michael Asher’s installation, the effort produced a smile: what he wanted to articulate could also have been said in a few words. But the effort was necessary in order to notice the facts concerned and to ensure there was no way back from this insight.

 

IR: I think the effort produces an energy potential which has something to do with resistance. An active material situation is produced with which something can be absorbed. With this work I’m actually returning to a point before the beginnings of conceptual art which opened up the possibility to conceive without having to carry out the work. At the same time I want to go beyond the materialization of an object and make a space tangible in which we have always been, which we therefore know but which seems mostly not to belong to us. Thinking about Michael Asher’s work has always been very important to me. I was impressed by the work with the radiators in Bern. When you were discussing it earlier I wondered when the question of ‘multi-sitedness’ began for me. Probably with the work Volume / Unpublished, when I re-directed a future ceiling to the Kunsthalle Bern. But going further back, I could say that it began with the appreciation of Michael Asher’s works. There is also an early work by Kabakov which was the first work he showed in the West, in the Kunsthalle Bern. He set up low, large-scale tables and allowed for only narrow spaces in between through which you could move. Along the edges of the tables ran a frieze of small men with sacks on their shoulders. It was one of my first conscious perceptions of art in which an overview became impossible. I found myself in the middle of a structure of relations and I, together with the other observers, was a part of it. Of course, the moment when something began stretches further back into other, personal spaces. Such experiences have also accompanied me as irritations and are a motor for my work.

 

RS: When we were having a look at the low loader this afternoon I asked you about the function of the light, and you said: “For me it is the exposure of the situation.” Exposure in analogy with the process of photography: something is made visible which anyway exists in reality but which is suddenly removed and through the light becomes visible as fragment.

 

IR: In English Belichtung is ‘exposure’, which is very close to exposition. In 1998 I produced a work called Exposure of the Showcase, to which I added later the title Time Construction 1. In the gallery in which I was showing there was a strange looking large wall which was set back 10cm from the rest of the wall. I was told that there was a showcase behind it which had been built into a former doorway. For the duration of the exhibition I had the wall moved 40cm further into the room so that light fell on the showcase again from the sides. I thus made an exposure, virtually a photograph without a print in the complex real situation. Today I would say that the lamps that lie under the façade sections not only give light but create an exposure, exposure of a multi-sited situation which doesn’t allow you a view in the normal sense of the word. They are economic events and processes which are largely determined by others: ideas from the architects, concepts from the town planners, offers, restrictions and promises from investors, etc. In this moment I am making an exposure of this wider situation. This is related to my questions about the visibility of situations which appear in different times and places.

 

RS: But you must also be fascinated by the thought of cutting through this jumble of system logic which such a thing is caught up in, and taking it to another level?

 

IR: I have always been fascinated when I notice that there is an overloading, or when there is a surfeit of references to be organized so that the overview gets lost. When I discover situations, they only interest me when I can no longer get into the picture. In other words, I try to place myself in a position which I can’t adopt completely and which I therefore have to use differently. This can happen when there is ‘too much’, so that I fall through the holes, holes which then produce new references. In the situation with the low loader you can, of course, also see a picture. I don’t want to deny that a picture emerges there. But that is only a part of the wider situation. There’s a lot more to it. In order for that to be visible I make an incision in something bigger, more far-reaching.

 

RS: You also take photos of this low loader, of this situation. So the photos that remain are only a small excerpt of your work. Exposure, as a metaphor, extends much further into the social sphere. In the process all the system logic is perhaps not being examined, but is broken up and laid bare.

 

IR: That raises the question: what can I expose? On photographic film, what is exposed is only what happens in time and place during a fragment of a second and is projected on to a surface. What I am exposing here is perhaps too difficult to be fixed on to a surface because it doesn’t take place exclusively at the low loader’s location in time and space. I actually work on these things precisely in order to be able to raise these questions. The façade is being exposed in a state of potential while the components have given up their space-dividing and enveloping function and any level of significance. That’s why the exposure goes further and we can catch a glimpse of something which apparently doesn’t belong there but which goes on all the time.

 

Audience 1: When I think of exposure I think of the depiction of a reality. For that you need equipment, lenses which then reverse the picture. I want to ask about the references, the relationships which exist here with the exposure of reality, and about what changes. When I arrived I first saw the low loader as a normal Frankfurt construction site. I noticed the light as a bright light but as nothing unusual. I also didn’t notice the generator as something unusual, as a depiction, for example, which gains such intensity via the exposure. From what you said, I understand a kind of pathos of the material as opposed to the cursory nature of the discursive. What makes this exposure metaphor more than just the lighting up of something which would otherwise be in the dark?

 

IR: I don’t think this is a depiction or representation. I am trying to expose something which can’t be captured in a depiction. The equipment would then be the low loader with its three-fold load. It would make something visible which goes beyond the equipment itself.

 

A1: But what then makes the difference?

 

IR: There is something comparable in language. When something is said, you can’t find the representation. Spoken words always become frayed and have many interpretations which can only fail. A sentence would therefore be an incision in the economy of speech, in which there are always several participants. In order to find clues as to where the representation in this project fails, as it were, we could break the whole thing down by focusing exclusively on the lamps. They are in a similar state as language and appear only in relations: lamps support lamps, lamps shed light on lamp stands, lamps are connected with cables, lamps shed light on objects which are not lamps, lamps burn for a certain period of time. Moreover, lamps themselves are lit up by daylight and by darkness. The lamps are not just objects for giving light or independent signifiers; they are stuck in their condition, internally and externally. They produce a picture which we can return to and transpose to another level. The picture can be a reference to the fact that reflection is happening on more than one level. That’s how I would frame it.

 

A2: But there must have been a point at which a decision was made to stack the components in a series, because it’s logical, and the lamps are to be arranged not in a way that an electrician would do if he had to set them up. He would probably put them in rows and parallel because that’s easier. At that point you made a decision: I’ll throw the lamps in. That’s what struck me, that the lamps contradict the order of the components above them.

 

IR: The serial stacking of the components is not a formal decision on my part but an economic decision by the foreman who oversaw the loading. The loading process was part of his logic; he was interested in using all the space available. I only asked the workers not to load anything at the beginning so as to create an empty space. I wanted to get round the loading process and to put nothing under the weight of the stacked façade components. During the stop the lamps together with their cables were inserted. I didn’t want to create an order which would refer back to the parallel widths and lengths of the load. You put it very nicely, that the lamps were thrown. If I’d had nuts, I would have thrown them, but they were fragile lamps with cables which were unmanageable. I asked the helpers to use the space by first inserting the neon lamps in all directions, placing them on top of each other and then inserting the smaller lamps in the gaps so that they wouldn’t be destroyed by the heat. I had no formal interest there but I did want to differentiate between the different loads in their layout.

 

RS: This afternoon, when we were standing on the other side of the street and a bus drove past, the noise of the generator was suddenly gone and with it this extra space: on the one hand, because we couldn’t see the low loader any more, but also because of the interruption of the acoustic element. I thought it was interesting when someone said “OK, that’s Frankfurt normality, what’s so special about that.” This afternoon I realized that a proper territory was being marked by the light and also by the noise of the generator.

 

IR: There is a border along which so-called reality can tip over, depending on the point of view of the observer. In day-to-day life, I get by more easily if I arrange everything in some kind of order. Ex-Box / Time Construction 3 is located on this border. When it disappears from view or earshot behind another vehicle for a moment and then reappears, you can recognize its appearance and its disappearance very clearly. If there can be said to be a marking of territory here, then only in an interplay of over- and under-determination. The artificial light shines differently in daylight from the way it does now in darkness. Meanwhile the passing cars bring headlights and brake lights into play.

 

A3: Were the lamps already loaded on to the low loader at the construction site or did you have them inserted here?

 

IR: Late on in the preparation phase there was a restriction imposed by the owner of the
Info Box, an investment firm. I was not allowed to stack the façade components on their property, as was originally planned. The version with the low loader arose from this setback. In order to get around this restriction I didn’t look for another site, but rather a situation which would not be dependent on the usual conditions of a site, and that was the transportation. Despite the stipulation that nothing should happen on the construction site, the intervention did actually begin on the Info Box site, before the light was added. The lamps and the generator were only added at the location of the stop. By the way, the lamps are of the types which were present in the Info Box. The number of lamps would have been too small to establish a relationship with the volume of the façade and change the weight of the load. The Info Box had a shell which consisted of these uniform red panels and where light entered through the windows, panels were missing. Had they been there, the façade would have been in tact and the interior as dark as a black box. In total, 94 components were missing, and I chose this number, so it was 94 lamps that opened the exposure.

 

A1: With its interruption of the actual events, e.g. the fact that the Info Box has no buyer, that it will be used or disposed of in a different way, makes the artistic intervention in the normality of this chain of events a tear – and this tear, it seems to me, opens up the opportunity to think about other possibilities in the broadest sense of dealing with reality. Today it hardly seems possible to interrupt and make tears in which other approaches and temporalities could become plausible or even necessary – at least on an abstract or a very fundamental level. In your work, is your theme this whole other approach to space temporalities and to social questions? Do you have a fundamentally political outlook?

 

IR: I think that art has always opened up these possibilities of transgression. When Cezanne painted The Hanged Man’s House, he did it on a surface which we as observers then stand in front of, but which we immediately open up. We drift off into other spaces of our own and of society or into those which are created through the perception of the painting in relation to it. This is quite complex. Of course, I’m not producing paintings here. Neither do I believe this is a thematic work. I attempt to produce a situation in which I’m not the only participant. Many temporalities and economies play a role in this. What is an issue for me is the surface I’m playing on. Who does it belong to? Is it still a surface? Those are the questions I’m dealing with. And in this assumed surface I make a tear which can hopefully never be repaired. Is this political art? Does art not fundamentally have a political aspect, since it always has a relationship with society? Then again, I would personally label myself apolitical since I don’t participate in actionism.

 

RS: There would need to be some coercion and I don’t think there is coercion here. The mad thing is that this is not art in situ. You go into a kind of public space like a parking space next to the road. People who don’t have a ‘coded’ point of view pass it by and think it’s just Frankfurt normality. Are you interested in such a question; are you concerned with the attention effect that somehow has to be forced? The word pathos was used earlier. What do you think about that? Isn’t a certain emotive formulation necessary to draw attention to certain things?

 

IR: I have a difficult relationship with pathos, I think, which I would like to avoid. I enter a space full of conditions. Clear logical events, technical problems, human capacities, and local regulations are all given. I see the conditions of time, space and, above all, economy, and work with them. Through this postponement of a process I create a space, which, in fact, is not site-specific, and into which I can bring my own conditions, such as the stopover in a parking space in city traffic and the loading of light. These, then, in confusing the economy for a short period, subvert and transgress the preconditions and create a space of potentiality. I can’t and don’t want to force people’s attention onto this point. I prefer to think of a perception that sees too much or too little, that rises and falls or stutters and branches off. For that you need time.

 

RS: To what extent does the semantic coding of the final material that you use interest you? It was said, with some justification, of the Info Box that it was more interesting than what was emerging at the Potsdamer Platz or the Westhafen site. If you look at it closely, the Info Box suggests a certain variability, as if you could take it apart and put it together again in a different way. We can now see that this is not true, that it has to be destroyed. You can’t build it any other way. These aren’t modules, it’s only a suggestion. From this perspective it is architecture with a component of simulation, with an interface for information or communication, but it doesn’t ring true as a whole. It is not as flexible as it pretends to be.

 

IR: I don’t worry about whether it rings true or not. I think: what happens in this situation? The Info Box is a promise, just as many things, everything in fact, is a promise, which it can never be held to.

 

RS: Or a slip of the tongue.

 

IR: Yes, that does suggest itself, of course. Through this whole process I’ve learned a lot about the mobility and immobility of the Info Box, above all as it relates to the weight-bearing structure.

RS: Your Hempels Hütte project had a different aspect. That was a real house, a prefab house, which could be assembled from individual functional components. And showing these elements in separation says simply: here are component parts which in some near future will signify a functional house. And that is a qualitatively different event.

IR: The Info Box is loaded in this sense, it has a past. That could make my work more difficult. I was interested in the fact that the Info Box promises information. In a way it was the trailer for the Westhafen development.

RS: Trailer, that’s a kind of simulation, too. Material is being used that professes to have a completely different function. And that affects the concept of the image. The Info Box is an image, an image in a city space. Do you isolate this image in your installation or does this aspect not interest you so much?

 

IR: I thought it made sense just to work with the façade of the Info Box. It is largely the modular component, visually, but also materially. I was interested also because it presents a surface and more specifically because this surface promises information, which it, as you said, does as a simulated image. My question was: can I work out a form in the moment – not when I dismantle the structure, but when it is dismantled and the parts are in flux – can I create a form which doesn’t want to indicate information or promise information but which will behave like information. I’m therefore not doing a deconstruction but rather a transposition.

 

A4: There are different intentions in the two projects. The Info Box was previously a building and has now been dismantled. It had fulfilled its original purpose. In Hempels Hütte it’s basically the other way round, the component parts are already there which then have to be assembled in order to fulfill its purpose.

 

IR: Of course, the Hempels Hütte project, which is now called als ob die Hütte Hütte wäre, is another project. By the way, I’m carrying on with it even after the initial failure and looking for a collector who is interested in an inhabitable house as well as a disappearing artwork. I work with different spaces, economic flows and events in time. What interests me in this project is that the Hütte doesn’t yet exist, but is already available before its construction in the form of its components, that it doesn’t exist in my economy but it does in someone else’s, that it doesn’t have a location yet but already signifies one in the future. I postpone the house before it exists as such, and it can then go on to become the house it always wanted to be, an inhabitable house. Those movements are quite different from those I’m carrying out with the façade of the Info Box.

 

A2: I personally find the approach of Hempels Hütte more exciting from an art history viewpoint. The photos of the Info Box and the low loader work (Ex Box) make me think of Gordon Matta Clark. The aspect of the untouchable virginity out of which someone makes something without destroying it – the parts may not be broken, so that the building can be reassembled later – that’s an extremely exciting approach because you wonder whether the person who goes on to receive the house will allow anything to be done with it. I mean, I would certainly have the feeling: what’s going on with my house beforehand? With the Info Box, it’s already over. So it’s not so serious if a corner of the sheet metal is dented. It wasn’t dismantled, either. I have the feeling it was kind of torn down, destroyed, and that brings me back to Matta Clark, who did the same thing. He was more interested in the process of breaking something up, he drilled holes in the houses himself because he was interested in that. That’s not what you’re interested in.

 

IR: The Hütte (Shed) would then be the Immaculate Conception and the low loader the prostitute. Both interesting models – a moment in time in which you wonder whether something is over or still to come or whether you can maintain this moment of suspense. I think it’s important that works which have been completed, such as the wonderful work of Gordon Matta Clark, are able to find their continuation, also in conscious redirection. GMC was concerned with splits in a much more concrete sense and with the newly-created relationships of light, both internally and externally, which are created by the splits, a kind of exposure. I didn’t derive my work from GMC, but you can ask how this work relates to that of GMC. I became involved in the Info Box project at a time when it was to be sold in order to reappear somewhere else. A buyer was sought and several times a contract was almost signed, but it never happened. The decision was finally taken to destroy the Info Box. I had to ask myself whether I could continue with my project. I don’t think it makes such a big difference. The Info Box will continue on its way, one way or another. It will simply be in another combination. Now I know that part of it is to be used again, i.e. half of the Info Box will be reassembled in a new and different form. Some parts may be used in allotments and someone might use one of the planks as a table top, or the staircase will be used to connect different floors. It goes on. There is this entropy which always also means transformation.

 

A2: I would like to add on that point that I think it’s great that GMC’s idea or thought is being developed further. I don’t think his work is finished because was finished, but because he simply died. He would certainly have continued working. For a long time there’s been nothing which develops or changes this idea.

 

IR: Perhaps I’m lucky not to be strong enough to make material incisions, with my own hands.

 

RS: That was a nice last word.

 

IR: But there is no end, of course not

 

 

 

This conversation was held in public, during the project EX BOX / Time Construction 3, in the Atelierhaus Frankfurt, 25.11.2005

AUXILIARY, a Situation as real as fictional

Normally people consider space as something functional or utilitarian: In fact space can be a very strong mental or conceptual vehicle. An interesting element in the work of Ilona Ruegg, and specially in the project she made in the empty Central Tower in Brussels, is exactly the combination and the integration of space, as both a functional and a mental given. The Loterie National had just moved out. The conciergerie was almost never used as such, and since 1992, a number game had been drawn there. A large glass window-screen overlooking the entrance hall was covered by a dark curtain during the six years of the number game. In this particular space, which was made like a box within

the framework of the office Tower, Ruegg inserted a temporary platform of plywood with a small gap following the shape of the room. Holes where cut in the platform in order to put a series of chairs with their four legs on the original floor. – In this space, during a period of 14 days, every day from 3 p.m. until 8 p.m. Ruegg took care of the empty place of the caretaker, and invited people to come there to talk, to sit, to read a newspaper, just t wait as a stand-in for the caretaker. - Calling so called calling, a new project in preparation, explores again the mental and symbolic meanings of a place. The project is planned to be installed in a former agency of Wagon Lits, and will be an investigation on displacement and communication. Six telephones on two floors, with internal and external connections invite people to talk with others in different places and on different levels.

 

Koen Van Synghel: You live and work in Brussels. How do you read and live this city as a foreigner?

 

Ilona Ruegg: I like Brussels for its diversity. There is no finishing layer of correctness and aesthetics over the city that would make invisible the difficulty of living together of one million people in an urban place. – It seems to me that the city has a structure of grown incoherence, it seems to be split in many different parts.

 

KVS: Why did you choose the Loterie Tower?

 

IR: I was looking for a busy place in the city, a place that people frequent with great repetition, a place they go for, for their money, the money they have or they don’t have, where they go for their dreams. The Loterie Nationale occured to me to be a good place to respond to that notion. But I was looking also for a place that would not exactly offer the fullfillment of one’s dreams, but offer a certain void, a certain boredom, a situation of an absence.

 

KVS: You made a so-called “site specifique“ project. The site is not only the former Loterie Tower which was first designed as a hotel, and will be now rebuilt as an office building, but also the city of Brussels.

 

IR: I chose the location for precise reasons, because it is a complete and already existing situation which generates an absence. I neither wanted to make an exhibition in this place, nor do I want to make a work about the place, nor to appropriate this architecture of the 60’s, just to have an extra value for my work. The situation is complete as it is, I don’t want to add something. I like to take place in my work, much like others can take a place in my work. I look for a situation with the least possible alienation, but with the greatest artificiality. In this sense I like to open an existing urban situation, a situation we don’t have to be introduced to, because we have already an experience with it, or a memory of it. This conciergerie in the Central tower extists, it is a serving place par exelence. The role of the caretaker is always deferring to somebody else. He takes care for somebody else, just like one can try to care for this place in his place. – the situation reflects the place of the single person in the cityscape, which is always related to all the other single places.

 

KVS: One of the objectives of your project „ In Your Place“ is to do a series of activities in empty, unused situations in which you want to hold open “the void“. Why “the void“ is so important? Has it to do with the unrevealed meaning of urban conditions, with melancholy, with time?

 

IR: I intend to do a series of Situation Projects, but I don’t think that all of them will happen in an empty place. In this first situation of „And if you came only to take care of the caretaker, who would take care of you in your place?“, however it is important. The Loterie Nationale is at present time not anymore in the building, but the notion of the game is still there, together with the notion of a hughe working place for a lot of people. And the place of the caretaker is empty. This void gives a situation of nonsaturation and therefore a possibility to think it, always to open it, not to close it. – I try to work on towards other situations where I can be in a twofold sense, where I can hold open a place that doesn’t necessarily exist, but is generated.

 

KVS: You sent invitations for the project out with question: „ And if you came only to take care of the caretaker, who would take care of you in your place?“ ... and further on: „Mrs Dewitte, if you please“. You adress your question very directly to your invités. Do you want the people to play an important role in your project?

 

IR: Yes, on some invitations the name of the invited person is in the most prominent place of the invitation. That’s how it is, I think. I try to take care in the place of the caretaker, but invite others to take a seat in his place too. The question is, if everybody does so, I mean to take care in the place of somebody, then it should be true that everybody is related elsewhere and so on. It’s a human condition, isn’t it?

 

KVS: Are the people the project?

 

IR: It is an important question to me: the question where is the work, can it be located?
Is it the seats, is it the large glass window, is it myself, is it the participants, is it the building, is it the story? Each of these elements take part in the situation, but none of them alone would make it. It is maybe more like in mathematics, that the elements of an operation are looking for a new problem. The only element I introduce in the existing situation is an inserted platform, which doesn’t touch the walls. The 10 seats are fixed in their place by standing them in four holes, cut in the platform. It is a little bit puzzeling to consider where you are, because you walk on a double floor that doesn’t touch the building, but you take place on a seat that stands on the original floor.

 

KVS: In this project you work in a conceptual way. How did you develop it? From a concept of: space? Human actions or from socio-cultural-antropological concepts?

 

IR: I think it happens much simpler in the process towards a work. There is no such preconceived grid of theory or conceptual construct to direct me. It’s rather something that insists for a long time as a unformulated question, nothing very new, somewhere always related to space, to human activities, to time. Trying to construct around these terms never helped. It seems that through the years I was working always on the same questions. I was e.g. interested in something almost flat and extended, and in the repetition of one and the same.
For the last 3 years I was intreaged by an auxiliary situation comparable to the space we used when we added numbers and carried the decimals to the next stage. The numbers remain only shortly there and wait to be taken further on. These things happen also in memory facilities. I was searching for an Auxiliary Quality in existing urban situations, in the ongoing process of every day life.
The conciergerie in the Loterie Nastionale building responds to this quality. The place is ready to take function to care for something, that is not itsself. The place of the caretaker, who always cares for somebodyelse, is empty, he is not there.

 

KVS: What’s the importance of language(s) in your work? It seems to me that you want to underline, to repeat even, the meaning of things, and in the same time, by repeating your language, your messages become a kind of poeatry.

 

IR: I am myself in a situation to be almost always outside of my mothertongue, often jumping from one language to another, which I speak all of them uncomplete, but I speak. I learnt a lot from the missgivings I am able to produce with funny or not so funny consequences. I became interested more and more in how language moves and what it produces in the difference from one word to almost similar one, or what happens when the same word takes another place. – Sometimes a word is completely present by not coming to my mind. – As my work moved towards situations, where people are involved, it seemed natural that I started to work with words. I started with simple phrases, repeating them, overlapping them – not so much to produce meaning, but rather to open a movement towards a sense of language itself.

 

KVS: You say „I tend towards a doublefilling of an already existing situation..“ Do you think that one can draw a line from „Doublefilling“ over „doubling“ – dédoubler - , the effect of mirroring, the real and the representation, to the ideas of Plato of the real thing and the shadow.? What I want to know is, if this project is a product of philosopy, of a philosophy and esthetic theory? Or has it to do with a negation of, or critics on the ruling system of galeries, musea within the world of art?

 

IR: A lot of questions – Yes. What I want to do is to cross the existing situation with a doublefilling. In the way like an apron doubles the outline of the body with almost nothing and alters the situation completely. – Or you take two sheets of paper and make a cut half through each of them, insert one cut in the other. Where they cross, there would be left no shadow.
To stand-in for the caretaker, whilest he is not there, makes present the people who are there to hold open his place, but also the absence of the caretaker. I don’t want to make philosophy to deliver me a product. But I am interested in the place where something happens, this place is sometimes wider than we often think. Possibly the fictional is in the real or in fact the real could be the fiction.
I realise this project outside the system of art institutions, but I don’t want to indicate with it, that it is not possible within that system. I would just have other impications. One day I will have to deal with that too.

 

KVS: This project is not an isolated project. You want to go on with this type of „replacement“

 

IR: Yes, I try to work on towards other situations where I can take the place unnecessarily twice, where I can hold open a place that doesn’t necesarily exist, but is generated.