Interview with Vít Havránek, published in BC21 Art Award (Vienna: 21er Haus, 2013), pp. 21–24, on the occasion of the exhibition, in which Marlene Haring exhibited the installation History Replacement, or why it’s better not to mention Freud in Vienna ...

Vít HavránekWhy do you say your work is “situation-specific and performative”? Is that different from “site-specific”? Can we call what you do “performance”?

Marlene HaringYou can call it performance if you like. The terms “performance” and “site-specific” have a history and a certain currency in the language of art, and are apt enough. If I describe my work in a slightly different way, I don’t mean to make it obscure. I’m just hinting that a place is not only conditioned spatially, but also socially. “Performative” also has a history that interests me. In linguistics, an utterance is called performative when it does what it says, when it alters or creates a situation.

VHYou say: “My work interprets and produces situations”. How would you define a “situation”?

MHA situation is transient, it might last a long time or just a second, but it passes. It might be created by accident or on purpose. It might be connected with a particular place or with many places. It may have effects that persist even when the situation is gone, or it may have none. Most art works come into the world as objects. A situation consists of an object and a subject and something in between. A situation consists of relationships.

VHGuy Debord says in his situationist manifesto that constructing situations calls for “an organized collective work aimed at a unitary use of all the means of revolutionizing everyday life.” Do you sympathize with Debord’s call for “revolutionary action within culture” to change the world? He wrote the Report on the Construction of Situations in 1957. Do you think we can have similar ambitions today?

MHThe world still needs to be changed, but I’m not one for grandiloquent talk about revolutions. The idea of revolution also has a history and a certain currency in the language of art. It is associated with the desire for something new, for transformation, for freedom; and in turn with the idea of the artist as creator, magician, someone already free, or somehow exempt, from society’s – or even reality’s – laws. The brutal political revolutions and the struggles for liberation from colonial rule of the twentieth century seem only to have inflamed the romantic revolutionary’s dreams. If the idea of revolution survives today only in the realm of culture, that would be a disappointment for Debord, but mixing up art and revolution results in political self-deception. For me, making revolutionary claims would be a distraction. I could talk about making a difference, offering shifts of position or perspective, exploiting loopholes in the norms of society and art, opening things up, maybe just for 15 minutes, as in Secret Service. A situation like that is an experience for me and for my client and its effect may be permanent. It may spread, but not by proclamations. Once, someone who’d come into my Show Me Yours, I’ll Show You Mine wardrobe came back the next day with a thank-you gift, with the words, “Thank you for my freedom.”

VHYour work is formed from everyday things and actions: taking your pants down, having a drink, queuing up, letting your hair grow, putting on Nivea. What do you think of Erving Goffman’s idea of the dramaturgy of everyday life? Does it help to look at society as if it were a stage play?

MHI don’t know about Goffman’s ideas, but I would have thought the point of a stage play would be to make us look at reality differently. The notion, “All the world’s a stage ...” is trite – we are reminded all the time that society imposes roles on us which we are supposed to act out – whereas when Shakespeare inserts a play within a play, that’s his manifesto for making a difference. Besides, theatre isn’t really my thing. I may take certain situations or behaviours and isolate or displace them, but I’m not staging them in a theatrical way. I’m not acting, or not acting differently from how I do in everyday life. Usually, I deal with my audience one at a time and I don’t impose a boundary, as the stage does, between performer and audience. For instance, in my bar for one person at a time, Solo Show, there is still a boundary, the bar, and, yes, I have the role of bar tender and the guest is drinking alone, but the frame works both ways and you have to ask: who is performing for whom?

VHYour practice is fundamentally – theoretically and practically – feminist. Where does that come from? What would be your feminist autobiography?

MHI was born with a vagina. At the age of five, I stuck a key into it. It hurt. As a child, I rejected girly things like wearing pink, wearing skirts, liking horses. At the same time, I couldn't wait for my tits to grow. As a teenager, I thought I was not a feminist, because I didn’t hate men. I was for equality, not for hate. I was open and critical, but only in my late teens did I realize I didn't actually have a clue what feminism is. No one had told me what feminism could mean and it seems odd now that I was so sure that wasn’t for me. As a girl and adolescent, I don’t recall a single conversation, talk, media programme or newspaper article informing me about feminism. It was not discussed at home or in the wider circle of family and friends. When I looked back, I realized that if feminism was ever mentioned, it was always with a negative connotation directed against women. I’d seen that women in my extended family were treated badly, that men could torture women psychologically, and women and girls were meant to conform to the roles they were given. I rejected all that very early and I had learned to stand my ground, but I was not aware or made aware of structural inequality and violence against women, in other words, what makes feminism political and not just sticking up for oneself. The privileges I enjoy as an artist, as an educated woman, might give me some advantages over other women, but don’t compensate for women’s inequality in wider society or the sexism that I have to deal with every day on the street, in the media and in my own professional environment. In 2003, when I was working together with Catrin Bolt as Halt+Boring, we spent our whole exhibition budget on sex with male prostitutes and we showed what we got for our money. The show, entitled In Front of Your Broken Nose, quickly revealed the inequalities and prejudices prevalent in our cultured surroundings. We also heard that a woman who had visited the show, soon came back again with her female friends and later they all came with their daughters. For a long time, I’ve compared the number of female artists represented by galleries and institutions in group shows with the number of male artists in those shows. There are usually two or three times as many male artists represented. My piece Door Policy for the 2010 Berlin Biennale stems from my experience of being gradually pushed out of the exhibition for which I’d been invited to develop a piece – that happens when one doesn’t show up with an object – and it brought that imbalance out into the open. At the opening of Biennale, I applied the exhibition policy to the door and, with the help of a security team, let in 33 male visitors for every 12 female visitors, the same gender proportion as in the show. As the female queue became longer and longer, it became clear that the only thing that would make a difference would be a radical change in policy.

VHYou were actually standing in the doorway, in that case backed up by a team of security guards. I keep seeing you standing in doorways, at the Secession in Vienna, Closed Because of Pubic Hair, or when your giant banner was Growing Outside, or in various places holding up mirrors.

MHActually, I like thresholds. The doorway is neither inside or outside, is in between public and private, it’s a place of transition and, potentially, transgression. The entrance to a building is usually designed to instruct you how to behave or assign a certain status to the person entering or exiting. I can work with that, or rather against it. The Secession was Closed Because of Pubic Hair (in German it’s Schambeharung – hair of shame) when I was supposed to give a talk on “the situation of artists in times of economic crisis” as part of a series on the idea of freedom. No one could get in because of the hair. Instead everyone was invited for zwanglose Gespräch (informal discussion, literally: unforced speech) in a nearby café. When my banner Letting My Hair Grow (Growing Outside) hung in front of the entrance, visitors had to lift up the bottom of it, the towel hanging between my legs, to enter. With the Mirror Holdings, most people entering or passing by didn’t notice I was standing behind the mirror, and I didn’t directly observe their interactions with their own reflections. In Marlene Hairy or in My Bathtub I am the Captain, my audience followed as I crawled on all fours, wearing a full-body blond-haired suit, from the Academy of Fine Art, through a park, a funfair and a residential area – at that time also a “red light” district – to my home. Each transition altered the meaning of the body in front of them and, as long as they continued to follow, altered their relation to that body as well as their relation to the environment.

VHWhat seems important to me is the experience, like the smell of Nivea that hits you when you thought you were coming up to some kind of minimalist monochrome painting, and how it resonates. An experience is provoked again by the scenarios and protocols, the narratives your work produces. For all the conceptual rigor and the precise social and political analysis that’s behind it, that experience – or re-imagined experience – brings me to a new confrontation with what I think I know about politics and aesthetics, the economic situation and all that stuff I spend my time discussing and thinking about.

MHYeah, that’s what makes a difference.