From the Grass-Roots to the Sky

Under a flimsy spring sun on the Markt square in Frankfurt, Lars Bang Larsen talked to the artist group Henry VIII’s Wives about the work they did for the Populism exhibitions. Populism opened (almost) simultaneously in Vilnius, Oslo, Amsterdam and Frankfurt during April and May 2005. Henry VIII’s Wives (Rachell Dagnall, Lucy Skaer, Per Sander, Sirko Knüpfer, Simon Polli and Robert Grieve ) produce three different yet interrelated projects for the four venues: a piece of Tatlin’s tower; a video installation realised on the road between the four openings; and a ten meters long organ pipe in oak that made more fervent believers of the exhibition guests at the CAC in Vilnius.

Lars Bang Larsen: The organ pipe (The Lowest Note of An Organ = The Length of A Fingernail Grown Since 1730 = 8Hz) makes a sound that is barely audible to the human ear. Instead the brain tries to tune in to the subsonic vibes, which makes you queasy and dizzy and if you listen to it for long enough it supposedly makes you hallucinate - and maybe even see God! I guess you could say that the organ is a kind of proto-populist medium. Why were you interested in doing this in Lithuania?

Henry 8's Wives: It is a fervently Catholic country that is densely populated with churches. The tradition of the organ does that it is an ingrained and established form of reality. In this sense our organ pipe goes beyond religion and comments on expression as well as repression. So there is a play-off between the church and the Soviet history of Lithuania that we were interested in mapping. And of course the fact that it plays the lowest note in the register points towards the realms of the paranormal and the extrasensory; this is also a sort of pun on populism, which goes for the lowest common denominator. It is a kind of fair ground ride or spectacle. It also reflects on its own production: the builder created a network to figure out how to do it because it has never been built on this scale before. The organ builder community is fairly small in Europe but now the whole network knows about it because they have been taken into advice!

LBL: With your Tatlin’s Tower project you propose to finally construct the tower that Vladimir Tatlin proposed for the 3rd Communist International in 1920 but never was built. You figure that it will take you about a decade to realise it in full scale, bit by bit, as installations and public sculptures. How did people in Vilnius respond to this revision of Bolshevik art history?

H8W: It wasn’t received as politically as we thought. We talked to the state secretary in the cultural ministry who responded in terms of the 1991 TV tower killings in Vilnius. He saw in it a public sculpture that could beautify some problem spots in the city. In general we want to use the project to highlight the relationship between art and the state. The next stage is to launch a website and present posters of the project in the London Underground, and to involve technical universities to detail how it could be done. With this knowledge we want to build a substantial chunk of the tower soon. So we figure we will end up with a fragmented and corporate looking version of Tatlin’s Tower that could fit into every nation’s 1% rule! In this sense it will document and reflect contemporary funding strategies. Hopefully the TT project can also develop to become a hub for exchange of people‚s comments and critiques. When you do something like this you are also forced to remember ˆ whether you like it or not ˆ that there was a dream of an international, that there was a utopia that was being nurtured. Why is there no such dream now? So the TT project is at the same time a romantisation and a de-romantisation of the artist‚s role in society, because it has this grass-rooty idealism to it at the same time as it will lay bare what people will put up with, and what technical, bureaucratic, economical barriers we will come up against trying to realise it.

LBL: In your video installation Mr Hysteria you are applying the psychiatric definition of hysteria to the political reality of populism.

H8W: We talked about how you might define the antithesis to populism - how or when are you not a populist? This brought up the issue of what is defined as reality and as the other of reality. This got us onto themes such as madness and criminality and the changing definitions of hysteria: for the ancient Greeks, Hysteria was up there among the other goddesses, and to 19th century medical science it became a female illness with the woman basically defined as a wandering, irrational womb. Its contemporary incarnation could be said to be symptoms without a cause or a gap between consensus and individual perception. So the locations that Mr Hysteria is filmed in the editorial office of a newspaper in Berlin, a police station in Vilnius, a maternity clinic in Berlin and the Berlin stock exchange all concern a certain flexibility in reality. They are places that live on a soft reality, such as the mass media reality or, on the stock exchange, the part of capitalism that speculates on the value of things. The police station is perhaps not a particularly soft reality, but rather the opposite - a place for reinforcement of dogma the maternity clinic is about a shift in reality between generations; about somebody appearing without a reality. It is basically the place you see first.

LBL: All three projects seem to revolve around themes such as faith and conviction. On more level than one I mean, also in relation to your own practice?

H8W: We use art to try to do things out of the ordinary, to make things that are not ordinarily there. And (hopefully without being too tacky) you could also say that we look for the humanity within institutions, for how much leeway they can give to do other things.

LBL curated the Populism exhibition together with Cristina Ricupero and Nicolaus Schafhausen