Considered as one of the more prominent curators who grew up in the German art scene, Nicolaus Schafhausen has been appointed as curator of the German Pavilion at the 53rd Venice Biennale for the second consecutive time. After having worked and studied as an artist, he started his curatorship activity in 1990 with the founding of the Luckas &Hoffmann Gallery in Berlin. During the 90s he organised the first exhibitions of renowned artists such as Kai Althoff, Olafur Eliasson, Carsten Höller and Antje Majewski. Since that moment he worked for several institutions like Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, Frankfurter Kunstverein and since 2006 he has been artistic and managing director of Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam. Toghether with Liam Gillick, the british artist chosen to represent Germany for this Biennale edition, Schafhausen points out the strong relationships between art, social matters, and architecture heritage. Considering the symbolic constitution of the pavilion, such as a product of German National Socialism, the building has not been obscured or hidden. Every room is open. In reference to Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky’s Frankfurt Kitchen, which has long been an important marker of applied modernism, Gillick designed a kitchen-like structure in simple pine wood that occupies the whole exhibition space. In this way, the artist has created a tension between the ideological grandeur of the site and the functional modernism brought from the many reproductions of the kitchen model. The only inhabitant is an animatronics cat that sits on top of one of the kitchen cabinets. The cat fights against the echo in the building and tells us a circular story of misrepresentation, misunderstanding and desire. The questions that arise from visiting the exhibition How are you going to behave? A kitchen cat speaks? reflect the strong connection between social behaviours, ideological sites and national identities. Thanks to a conversation with Nicolaus Schafhausen we could now try to give an answer.

Liam Gillick is the British artist that represents the German Pavilion at the 53° Venice Biennale. A decision that probably hasn't been so well-digested in Germany. Would you like to explain to us the motivations that have carried you to this choice?

I chose Liam Gillick because he focuses on the medium of art as a social practice and the transformation of institutional sites into places that provoke thought and resonate in a specific way. Thinking about who could deal with the history, the past, present and the future of politics and society in Germany and in general, I can only think of Liam Gillick at the moment. I showed Isa Genzken in 2007 for similar reasons. But especially in 2009, the year of German self reflection and the celebration of certain cornerstones in German history I think it is important to admit outside views on the history of the country. 


In reference also to your previous exhibitions like “Nation” or “New Heimat”, do you think that in our global world, the national participations to the Biennale are an outdated criterion?

The Venice Biennale chose to remain faithful to the national representation format. Rather than criticizing that idea or not, I believe it is interesting to work within and relate to the specific context of each Biennale venue. Given this, I don’t believe that national participations are an outdated criterion. What I do believe is that that idea of ‘national representation’ can’t be seen in the strict sense of presenting an artist originating from a country. National representation is a wider concept, more than anything it implies not to present but to challenge an identity, undeniably made of dualities and to try to reflect on the specificities that drive a nation. Given his discursive art practice and his being conversant with what it means to belong to the first ‘art generation’ that grew together with a globalized world, Liam Gillick appeared to me as the perfect question within today’s relevancy of the German Pavilion. 


The 53° Venice Biennale has been baptized by its director Daniel Birnbaum “Making Worlds”, with the clear intention to give a strong emphasis to the creative process of the artist. How have you conceived this aspect?

The national pavilions were not part of that overall theme. Liam Gillick and I did not work on a proposition relating to this topic. But of course, the notion of creative process is important within the artist’s language. Although, the art of Liam Gillick is not concerned with creative process in the traditional sense, it develops an interesting process that could be perceived as an ongoing creative thinking.
Gillick keeps setting up scenarios through writing, lectures, and sculptures etc. that generate new ones. In this sense, it gives an interesting look on what a creative process can be: something far from working on fixed pictures or suggesting descriptions but rather an active process concerned by the production of a narrative potential.

Would you like to talk about the theoretical starting points of “How are you going to behave? A kitchen cat speaks?”
 
One of the largest social housing development programs of the pre-war modernist period was the Ernst May housing estate in Frankfurt am Main built in 1926. The Viennese architect Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky designed the Frankfurt Kitchen for the estate. This kitchen was installed in 10,000 council flats. The Frankfurt Kitchen amalgamates a number of things: the organisation of work along the lines of the Taylorist System of scientific management, an emancipation-like model for domestic activity, a reflection of socially utopian concerns and a design pledged to the ideas of international modernism. Lihotzky’s template for her design was the galley kitchen in the dining car of a train that she duly transformed into the »housewife’s laboratory«, which in turn offered the maximum of comfort and ease in the minimum of space.  

The Frankfurt Kitchen was one of the few achievements of design geared towards social reform that managed to establish itself comprehensively. Originally planned for working-class women, it represents the prototype of the modern fitted kitchen. Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky has remained one of the unsung design heroes of modernism, whereas the Bauhaus and its concomitant design acumen have been enshrined in the museums of the world. The Frankfurt Kitchen represents in exemplary fashion the utopia of a better life by means of better design that has established itself globally without the majority of people knowing where it all began. 

The inhabitant of the kitchen in the German Pavilion - a cat - is a counterpoint to this forgotten modernity. It speaks from the vantage point of the present-day and struggles against the building’s echo. It wants to be fed information but doesn’t reveal much about itself. It is the only talking cat in the world and is conversant with the building’s past in which it is living. The cat is both reassuring and threatening. It is the artist and the witness of many pasts simultaneously. In this installation Liam Gillick has shifted the order of representation and found a voice. A tension between the form of the kitchen and the circling narrative of the cat provides a way to discuss the potential of applied modernism in relation to the question “Who speaks? Who is permitted to speak? And if so, with what authority?”  
 


Besides Liam Gillick’s work for the German Pavilion, there are several other contributions that establish a strong dialogue with architecture. Do you think they are symptoms of a general trend that makes borders between disciplines more evanescent? Or is it just the constitutive essence of contemporary art?

In a context in which the built world is on one hand more visible and encompassing and on the other hand less and less tangible, it is obvious that artists are interested in overall structures. It is almost existential to relate to our position and role towards the environment.
But, to come back to Liam Gillick, his interest in architecture has nothing to do with a trend. It has always been an essential component of his work. He uses architecture as ideological symptoms of a certain time and he questions the influence of architecture on society and vice versa.

In his brand-new essay The Radicant, Nicolas Bourriaud tries to sketch out the role of contemporary artists as: «Semionauts who invent pathways among signs». I find Liam Gillick’s practice very close to this idea of nomadic aesthetic, in which the artist can set new meanings thanks to borrowed vocabularies, paths and contexts. Are these topics part of your curatorial concept?

Liam Gillick’s art and my curatorial concept can be understood in Bourriaud’s sense insofar as they are not committed to the event character of today’s art and to the overproduction of art. Gillick’s work is a combination of emotional and intellectual aspects, it is about ideas rather than about an aesthetical concept, it results from itself.


The relationship between art, memory and physical contexts could be defined as the clou of the exhibition “How are you going to behave? A kitchen cat speaks?” Do you think art could still play an important role on the public interpretation of the past and on the constitution of contemporary identities? 

Yes, but not in a naïve way… I believe one of Gillick’s main concerns is to secure space for re-interpretation within society and this is of capital importance.
His discursive art model allows to work with permanent displacement and the notion of ‘projecting’, in this sense he is constantly fighting against the dominant.
Through his ‘what if’ scenarios, Gillick sets up a kind of ‘social check-point’ and plays a significant role in keeping things active.

Which is in your opinion the current connection between German contemporary art and his historical and political background? Do German artists feel free to re-interpret or de-construct their past?

 German contemporary art doesn’t necessarily have to deal with National Socialism, if that is what you intend. The German Pavilion is different because it is still characterised by the appearance bestowed upon it by the National Socialists after their attempts to convert the original Bavarian Pavilion into a monumental piece of architecture celebrating German supremacy. So the artist has to clearly deal with the architecture. And there are, in fact, some other buildings in Germany from the same era, e.g. Haus der Kunst in Munich. But the main focus of an artist, no matter where, should be the re-interpretation of or a comment on contemporary society and culture. 


You have been curator of the German Pavilion also for the 52° Venice Biennale. In that case you said to have selected Isa Genzken because: «For the German Pavilion it is about fundamental questions of the relationship of space, of location and observation, of insight and view. For the observer it opens up complex and new sensory connections; with her works she is discussing precisely what truly moves and touches us as a society today». Besides the practical results, could you see a continuation line with it?

Yes, although Gillick’s proposition is diametrically different on an aesthetical level, both propositions connect. During Isa Genzken’s exhibition, the building, expressed a certain idea of transition and metamorphosis. She destabilised the space with works that questioned and revealed the transformation of the ideals of modernism affected by everyday culture. In opposition, Gillick’s contribution seems to offer a more secure vision of the building by using and tolerating the ‘soft’ aesthetics of modernism. Gillick decided not to hide the building, because it offers a clear observation to the viewer of what it is. It appears as a clear statement but as Isa Genzken’s proposition it also feels as a set for a further problem.

After a question about the past… what are your upcoming projects?

At Witte de With I am preparing the large scale project “Morality”. It is a nine-month thematic program of exhibitions, debates and events. It will open in October 2009 and will run until June 2010. It will include a series of five exhibitions featuring over fifty international artists, three commissioned interventions on the façade of Witte de With, a symposium, a film cycle, and an ambitious web-based project. A comprehensive publication will be released in the fall of 2010.