VI, VII

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Jochen Schmith

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Exhibition views of Jochen Schmith ‘Present Gifts’ at VI, VII, March 2014

VI, VII

VI, VII | TORDENSKIOLDSGATE 12 N-0160 OSLO NORWAY | www.VIVII.no

Top: Exhibition view of Jochen Schmith ‘Present Gifts’ at VI, VII, March 2014 Bottom: Jochen Schmith, Cigar Ends – Collectors’ Waste, 2010, Cigar ends collected at art fairs, bronze in handmade case. 16 x 9 cm

VI, VII

VI, VII | TORDENSKIOLDSGATE 12 N-0160 OSLO NORWAY | www.VIVII.no

VI, VII

VI, VII | TORDENSKIOLDSGATE 12 N-0160 OSLO NORWAY | www.VIVII.no

Jochen Schmith The Fraud, 2012 Eau de parfum, bronze flask 9.5 x 21 cm Edition: 5+3 AP

VI, VII

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Jochen Schmith Lazy bones, 2014 Embroidery, Silk appliqué on cashmere 130 x 180cm

VI, VII

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Jochen Schmith Chinese Whispers, 2010 Silkscreen printed on front and back 86 x 122 cm

VI, VII

VI, VII | TORDENSKIOLDSGATE 12 N-0160 OSLO NORWAY | www.VIVII.no

Jochen Schmith Chinese Whispers, 2010 Silkscreen printed on front and back 86 x 122 cm

VI, VII

VI, VII | TORDENSKIOLDSGATE 12 N-0160 OSLO NORWAY | www.VIVII.no

Jochen Schmith X, 2010/2014 Scotch tape on glass Variable dimensions

VI, VII

VI, VII | TORDENSKIOLDSGATE 12 N-0160 OSLO NORWAY | www.VIVII.no

VI, VII

VI, VII | TORDENSKIOLDSGATE 12 N-0160 OSLO NORWAY | www.VIVII.no

Jochen Schmith, Mariott Hotel exhibition, 2010 (Ralph Lauren Jeans)

VI, VII

VI, VII | TORDENSKIOLDSGATE 12 N-0160 OSLO NORWAY | www.VIVII.no

Jochen Schmith Copy of a stolen painting of Jan Brueghel ("Fleurs dans un vase de verre"), 2010 Oil on canvas, 44*34cm Unique copy

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Jochen Schmith Munich, Germany Galerie Esther Donatz In the international art market, the figure of the art collector has an ambivalent significance: one that oscillates between the benevolent patron and the ruthlessly calculating business person. This figure’s expenditure is the subject of Cigar Ends – Collectors’ Waste, a work from 2010 by the artist collective Jochen Schmith (Carola Wagenplast, Peter Hoppe, and Peter Steckroth). For this work Jochen Schmith spent some time trailing collectors at art fairs, finding a way into VIP areas. They collected the remnants of smoked cigars which they cast in bronze. In the exhibition at Galerie Esther Donatz entitled ikke kompetanse (No Competence), these cigar stubs lie arranged in almost typological order in an intricate, custom-made box of synthetic, beige snakeskin. Jochen Schmith recycles and valorizes the status symbol trash of the art world, and throws it back onto the same market as artistic production.

Linking questions about economics of the art market with representations of the commodities that cycle within it is typical of the collective’s methods. An expensive brown fabric of silk and cashmere that hung over an antique-looking statue of a clothed female form at an exhibition in the Kunstverein Braunschweig in 2010 appears in Munich as part of the site-specific installation Untitled (2013). The fabric becomes a canvas of sorts for large embroidered blots of colour – specifically for a motif that derives from a men’s trouser print by Dolce & Gabbana. While the allegedly authentic spots of colour on the expensive pants are meant to romanticize the alluringly bohemian style that’s commonly ascribed to painters, the collective undercuts this myth by transferring the pattern back into an art context. By confronting these fantasies with existing sites of display (the gallery), daydreams of a life outside today’s economized world vanish.

A loudspeaker for the audio installation A-Club (2006) hangs on the wall between these works. We hear the female voice of an amateur interpreter translating a text into English, fairly fluidly and seemingly in real time. The text is the transcript of a consultation the collective had at an Employment Bureau but the voice only translates the agency official’s side of the conversation. The official tries to advise future art school graduate Jochen Schmith on the path to a working life, but her efforts are laboured and amusingly unsuccessful. While the collective is the scene’s director, it still finds itself in the agency’s claws. The official, who can’t find any job description within her standardized employment tables that matches the artists’ qualifications, forecloses their receiving benefits from the bureau – or rather, ‘services’ from the ‘agency’ – contrary to the collective’s wishes.

While the consultation might be un-successful in landing the collective jobs, it’s no less striking as an illustration of how such agents of work displace responsibility back onto the job-seeker and thus maintain a system of economic insecurity. Frustration, hope, and inferiority complexes are the currency of these circumstances. In the audio work, however, the situation in the government office takes a bittersweet turn. It’s the charming amateur interpreter – and by that, the official, too – who ultimately wins our affections. This casual and almost humorous approach is characteristic of nearly all of Jochen Schmith’s works from the past eight years. With great precision and without moral entreaties, these market-reflexive and institutionally critical works hold the elementary processes of value production up for inquiry. Translated by Jesse Coburn Jochen Schmith by Gürsoy Do!ta" Frieze D/E, Issue 13, March – April 2014

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The Dance Around Perfume Flasks By Stian Gabrielsen For the record, one can start by mentioning that the artist Jochen Schmith really are three artists, but they will still get to be anonymous, because this is what they implicitly ask for. I mention this because unlike collective artist signatures Superflex, Bernadette Corporation or Bruce High Quality Foundation, Jochen Schmith is the name of a fairly trustworthy person, that could well have passed as the name of a German artist. How is this message colored to communicate pseudoynm status? Brand building works so that a person named personifies and also guarantees quality, since personal reputation is at stake. Here, the choice of name is perhaps based on the logic of branding, since the exhibition ‘Present Gifts’ by Jochen Schmidt at VI, VII largely orbits around the phenomenon of luxury items. On this occasion the street-level gallery is replaced by gallerist Esperanza Rosales' apartment upstairs. Thus, the stage is set for an exploration of the border areas between the art object and the luxury goods industry’s more intimate products such as clothing, perfume etc. and the idea of the gallery as boutique. Still, the exhibition is no didactic staging of the artist-as-producer-of-luxury items. The closest you get to luxury goods is The Fraud, an exclusive perfume displayed in massive conical flasks of bronze (which supposedly weighs 3 kg). The perfume was developed in collaboration with 130 employees at Bundeskunsthalle Bonn, Germany's biggest art institution, which all were asked to describe the ideal fragrance. Schmidt went to a famous nose and had her develop a scent that formed a compromise between these different desires. The series Cigar Ends - Collector's Waste is also close to a gestalt of luxury goods-as-object. The starting point is the cigar butts from the VIP lounge of an art fairs1, which Schmith have had cast in bronze. The half-smoked bronzed cigar is presented in a delicate, custom- made box. Although the presentation form immediately sets up the cigar to function as a status marker, there are also some complicating factors here: bronze is a relatively inexpensive material, associated with large public sculptures. In addition, it involves a cigar stub, i.e. a smelly waste residue. Putting the cigar butt back into circulation by the collector offers an investment in their own waste. Via the attempt to short-circuit the notion of isolation in a luxury atmosphere with an outing, in The Fraud, we recognize "exclusivity" as being composed of a 130 person committee, and based on something as uninspired and bureaucratic as a survey. In both works the wider public ponder the exclusive object's condition and cycle through a shifting of substantive and procedural hierarchies. In Lazy Bones Jochen Schmith has embroidered paint stains on a piece of exclusive cashmere, over a stretcher. So-called nålmalerier (‘needle paintings) were popular in the late 1700s, and the technique was often used to reproduce images by famous artists. In this work, it is not painting that is the model, but the trend of so-called "painter 's pants," designer trousers spattered with paint stains marketed by fashion houses like Ralph Lauren and Dolce & Gabbana. Here Jochen Schmith has reproduced paint stain (it is the same spot systematically repeated) swapping fashion and art materiality, thus pushing the function of art suggested, from object recognition to status marker. At the same time the bohemian lifestyle pants are meant to signal an obscure genealogy about bohemianism, artistic labor, embroidery, where does the paint spray from? Vicissitudes of art and luxury work markers are not new. On the contrary, factor it into a fairly proven critical handling of the art field’s connections to the market. One aspect, often ignored, is that it always involves a temporary, strategic compounding that it completely overlaps: The field of art is, when manufacturing objects like this, one branch of the luxury industry. Criticality based on an idea of distance and ambivalence, but the object is in fact completely enclosed and depending on the system it pretends to

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be critical of. Unlike other more radical ways to question art's commodification in The Fraud and Cigar Ends - Collector's Waste, the smart and witty object- oriented event in Lazy Bones feels delayed. Either the problem is not sufficiently acknowledged, or the loss of autonomy is accepted and accomplice covered. Then it's critical project is better addressed in the works where the object is handled more indirectly. Spinning Object is a series of 53 slides projected from a projector on the floor. Images are descriptions (taken from a list on the European Parliament website), gifts politicians have given at various diplomatic occasions. The title refers, of course, to the show's revolving mechanism, but also the gift of circulating objects. A similar approach is used in There was a time - a sound piece marrating a description for luxury houses in Hong Kong. The property is presented in a language full of emotions and promises of happiness and harmony. The rhetoric is similar to tourist literature that romanticizes a destination. This work builds images of rooms that despite being presented as based in reality, do not exist [for the viewer] other than as fiction. Chinese Whispers are three screen prints showing stone sculptures produced in China, based on two-dimensional reproductions rather than models. They are stored pending orders; primarily from a European market. The title refers to the play of the same name ("Whisper game" in Norwegian) where the original statement changes through an accumulating loss of information, and ends up being unrecognizable. An information loss not unlike the sculptural (wrong) factory interpretation of the two-dimensional representation. The process is repeated with Jochen Schmith photographing the finished sculptures. The dialectic between copy and original is in itself a fairly repeated theme in art and Schmith is hardly looking to re-activate a discourse of originality as an aesthetic problem. Here it is perhaps more about the object's loss of cultural grounding. In the photographs the ‘classical’ sculptures are lined up, surrounded by debris and waste materials which hint at a lack of coherence between the object and its surroundings. The windows of the apartment are taped with markings (X's), as one does on buildings before they will be demolished to ensure that the glass remains stuck in the frame. While the reading prospects in There was a time describes the ideal room—the X's serve as a reminder of the processes taking place during and prior to this luxury: demolition, the planing of glass, stone facades that breed etc. In short: the process of gentrification’s repressed brutality. The subject is not without site-specific anchoring when we find ourselves in a rundown apartment building in Gamlebyen (which literally translates as ‘Old Town’). The nostalgic projection in the title, where the fantasy of a residence beyond the material world is chaos placed in the past, suggests a vulnerability that is transmitted to the concrete room and the house we are in. The exhibition is best here, when instead of reproducing a gestalt of luxury object material is interspersed with a little self-conscious subversion, looking at the condition of the larger system that these objects circulate in. The dance around perfume flasks by Stian Gabrielsen Kunstkritikk.no, 13.03.14

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Luxury critique The old spirit of capitalismYilmaz Dziewior

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The accommodation on the upper storeys of superiorhotels is called the ‘club level’, on which as a rule break-fast is served separately from the guests on the lowerfloors, and pleasantries such as magnificent views andfree refreshments are on offer. A-Club, the title of anearly audio work by Jochen Schmith, vaguely recallsthe supposedly noble aura of such spheres by sound-ing a bit like preferential treatment in the sense of thevenal distinction of an upgrade, just as if there werealso a B or a C Club. Not only the consumers of aclub level, but also other groups distinguishing them-selves by certain patterns of thinking, perceiving andacting – that is, by what the French sociologist, PierreBourdieu, calls ‘habitus’ – form a social field which, forits part, in turn has its effects on its individual mem-bers. However, whereas persons who can afford theapparent luxury of club level are not necessarily alwaysparticularly homogenous in their habitus, the mem-bership in a ‘club’ signals more clearly certain attitudes,preferences, interests and, occasionally, also (finan-cial) potentialities which always possess both inclusiveand exclusive character. The broad spectrum of every-thing that goes under the name of club spans fromsemi-private hobby associations via meeting places for(sub-)cultural communities through to politically andreligiously defined unions. In his well-known book,The Fine Differences, Bourdieu describes how the hege-monic classes assert their tastes and life-style with again in distinction in order to attain or maintain lead-ing social positions. Their success is distinguished ineach case by an interplay between actively shaping con-stantly changing norms of taste and passively adapt-ing themselves to them. Bourdieu compares the inter-actions in everyday life with a game in which indi-viduals act with various potentials. Thus, for instance,economic capital can become a social, symbolic orcultural capital. But also in the opposite direction,there is the potential that by acquiring symbolic cap-ital, for example, an economic advantage can result. In my view, the unfolding of the above-mentionedpower of definition and authority can be made outvery clearly in the figure of the bouncer, that personwho, on the basis of specific codes, grants or deniesaccess to a club. The reference to the culture of going-

out also seems to be justified since the use of the En-glish word ‘club’, in contrast to its German translation,‘Verein’ (association), mobilizes more strongly ideasof an aesthetics of glamour elevated above everydaylife and the scent of eccentric celebrity. These aspectsin post-Fordism, and as part of a neo-liberal under-standing of the world, are no longer transferred onlyto the world of popular culture such as music andfilm, but also penetrate into everyday life as an imper-ative for shaping all areas of social life, including everykind of gainful activity. This fact seems to be not un-important in connection with the work, A-Club, eventhough these references at first glance may seem sur-prising, since profit-optimization and the assertion ofdistinction, wealth and prestige are diametrically op-posed to the subject of A-Club. The work deals withthe less glamorous prospects of many students at anart academy, since A here does not signify the first po-sition in a ranking, but simply Arbeitsamt (Employ-ment Office) and the associated search for a job. A-Club consists of a loudspeaker embedded in the wallfrom which the voice of a somewhat helpless-sound-ing woman can be heard who, in response to the appli-cation by Jochen Schmith, is diligently trying to dis-cuss possible perspectives after graduating with a di-ploma from the Hamburg Fine Arts Academy. Thelady from the Employment Office is slightly out of herdepth because she has not previously come up uponthe profession of freelance artist, and her colleagues,too, from whom she requests assistance during theinterview, cannot give any advice. It also seems of littlehelp that she tries to get by with the vocational classi-fication of ‘art-painter’. The only recommendation shecan give Jochen Schmith is to be input into the ‘sys-tem’ (of employment agencies and their associateddatabases) for only in this way could the EmploymentOffice act in the (improbable) eventuality that a suit-able job-offer turned up. It is noteworthy that thiswork by Jochen Schmith, which is not even five min-utes long, is very entertaining and enjoyable to listento. This may have to do especially with the elements ofestrangement deployed, which include not only thebroken English of the interpreter with its strong Ger-man accent. It is an English spoken by Germans in

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American films that is amusing because of its clumsi-ness. In addition, it makes the audio work more inter-national for reception and refers at the same time tothe (fictitious) surname of the artist-trio Schmith andits relation to English. A further estrangement-effectwhich likewise enhances attentiveness is the Warholianinterview strategy, for only the advice and explana-tions of the female employment office worker can beheard, but not the questions posed by Jochen Schmith,nor their responses. In this way listeners are animatedto imagine for themselves the starting-points for eachstatement by the employee and the trio’s reactions.The translation of the original recordings also gener-ates a certain distancing from the original speaker,the Employment Office worker, and thus avoids herbeing recognized and embarrassingly exposed. A-Club is particularly suitable as an introduction tothe artistic procedures of Jochen Schmith, for al-ready here, some of their essential characteristics canbe demonstrated. One feature is the direct referenceto the concrete exhibition situation. A-Club was pre-sented for the first time in a group exhibition with oth-er students at the academy’s gallery who, like JochenSchmith, were completing their studies. The situationafter gaining one’s diploma treated in the audio workwas therefore immediately relevant to all those takingpart in the exhibition. It also fits the basic practice ofthe trio that it does not contribute any object-worksto an exhibition, but brings itself in on a rather sub-liminal plane of perception, namely, via an audio workwhich one must get close to in order to hear and un-derstand it properly. Their second intervention in theshow of the academy’s gallery, too, operated in a visual-ly very reduced way and avoided making new objects.For Heights of Success, Jochen Schmith adjusted theheights of the neon lights in the exhibition space tothose of various New York galleries in Chelsea. Insteadof the labels usually employed to designate a work inan exhibition, they placed the invitation cards of eachof the New York galleries on which they had notedin handwriting the heights of the lighting used in eachone. In this connection, the focus on galleries in Chel-sea must be underscored, since they are regarded asessential factors in the gentrification of this area and

were often compared by some critics before the finan-cial crisis of 2008 with luxury boutiques, which reallydid spring up there sometime later. Of course, the analysis of the exhibition-context, itsspecific forms of presentation and distribution, is situ-ated in a long tradition of (art) history, which, in asimplifying way, tends to be subsumed under the ru-bric of institutional critique. At the latest since MarcelDuchamp, the determining power of the exhibitioninstitution, its ability to include and exclude and itssovereign power to interpret, can no longer be erad-icated from the discourse on art. In the aftermath,Marcel Broodthaers, Michael Asher and Daniel Burentend to be named who, in the 1960s, continued thistradition, each in his own way. And with the work ofartists such as Hans Haacke it becomes apparent thatnot only the museum is intended by the critique ofinstitutions, but that in addition the others who areinvolved in the art industry (gallery owners, museumboards, artists and collectors) have become objectsof this critical preoccupation. For many artists of the1990s, Haacke played an exemplary role. Like him,artists such as Andrea Fraser and Christian PhilippMüller extended the radius of art to additional circlessuch as business, ethics and politics. Also in the case of Jochen Schmith it is the larger (eco-nomic) context which plays a decisive role in theiranalyses of the art industry. A sentence which revealsthe temporal co-ordinates of A-Club even prior tothe introduction of the so-called Agencies for Employ-ment in Germany says eloquently: “Soon we will bethe Agency for Labour. I don’t know if it is going tobe more modern; usually it doesn’t do that much, justto change the name.” With reference to the fact thatwith Jochen Schmith it is a matter of a group of threepersons, which did not exactly make the EmploymentOffice’s support task any easier, they are told, “In Ger-many venture capital is very difficult to get. I can justbecome self-employed and exploit myself.” Basically, with this description, the situation of manycultural producers, especially at the beginning of theircareer, is put graphically into words. The ambivalenceof the artist-status as a role-model for a neo-liberalsociety oriented toward the (cultural) capital of those

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who are creative and unconventional can be read asone of the several sub-texts of the contribution byJochen Schmith to the exhibition of applicants for theHamburg stipend. Next to a small loudspeaker fixedto the wall from which the audio work, A-Club, couldbe softly heard, hung a C-print and a poster. On theadjacent wall they had mounted a plate of glass withone-way vision film in such a way that the situationon entering the exhibition space was mirrored. Thephoto integrated into their installation of a pair ofjeans smeared with paint (‘artist’s trousers’) in the flag-ship store of D&G in Vilnius referred precisely tothe attractiveness which artists’ Bohemian feeling forlife is supposed to have for the average member ofthe populace seeking some mark of distinction. Thepicture, Decoration at a Petersburg Millionaire’s Party(a masked woman sitting on a chair suspended fromthe ceiling), could also be interpreted in a similardirection. A worked-over copy of a hand-out whichJochen Smith had taken from a workshop held at theFrauenhofer Institute under the title Scenarios for NewWork, which was positioned right next to the photo-graph of the ‘artist’s trousers’, could be read as a kindof commentary. The heading of this diagram saidsignificantly, “How do you really work?” As a subtleanswer to this, as part of their presentation JochenSchmith had removed the dirt accumulated over manyyears on the floor before the exhibition walls allocat-ed to them. By restricting themselves to the clearlydefined rectangular field right in front of their walls,they drew attention not only to the traces of ageingin the art gallery, but also constituted, beyond thisgesture reflecting upon the institution, a floor-piecestanding in the tradition of minimal art and conceptart. Apart from that, a humorous dialogue arose sub-liminally between the soiled trousers and the cleanedfloor. The title of their contribution, We Can Also Be-have Differently, underlined once more the counter-practice neither of subjugating oneself to the myth ofthe wild artist, nor of merging simply into a critical,archaeologically operating stance toward the exhibit-ing institution, for by cleaning the floor with the asso-ciated obligation of diligently removing the dirt fromthe entire rest of the floor after the exhibition, they

practised an exaggerated over-fulfilment of the useful-ness criterion, which immediately again put it intoquestion by virtue of its irrationality. This intentional ignoring of working rationally andeconomically is expressed also in the title of a publica-tion by the French socialist, Paul Lafargue, from 1880,The Right to Be Lazy, which Jochen Schmith mowedinto the lawn behind a museum as a contribution tothe exhibition, Reading the City. In his pamphlet, La-fargue argues against the theories of Marx and Engelswith respect to the influence of capital and makes aplea for counter-productivity. In the museum itselfthat, apart from paintings and sculptures, comprisesalso large inventories of handicraft from the collectionof the wealthy Hunt family, the trio presented an au-dio work with the title, There Was a Time. Wanderingabout, or sitting comfortably on a soft leather bench,visitors could listen to the voice of a man throughheadphones in the museum’s rooms, which were fur-nished in a classical style. The voice described thecomforts and amenities of a luxurious city apartment.Descriptions from advertising brochures for up-mar-ket residences served Jochen Schmith as starting-pointsfor the spoken text. The tone of voice of the trainedspeaker radiated a tired sense of well-being and an old-fashioned nobility when he describes, for instance,how his feet sink into the deep pile of the carpet inthe calm, expansive quiet of his apartment. A strangeintermediate mood prevails here, an atmosphere ofsuspense, of a latent tension that hangs in the air am-bivalently in order to settle in on becoming a littleinert. In this way, almost romantic narrative elementsintermingle with the analytical clarity of their pro-cedure, which is often based on research, such as intheir contribution to the group exhibition, Stray, inHong Kong. Here, too, luxury apartments were thestarting-point and the discovery that inspecting themwas one of the recreational activities of Hong Kongresidents, and this without any concrete plans to pur-chase. In the exhibition one saw on a monitor the trioduring these activities, while on another monitor, thegarish advertising in prospectuses was leafed through.As part of the narrative, an illustration of a colonialbuilding already demolished at the time of exhibition

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was mounted on the window of the exhibition spacewith a one-way vision film. It could only be seen by daybecause of the technique employed, whereas at night,the light in the room prevented this. This installationwas supplemented and given additional referentiallevels by the description of a scene telling the story ofa man who, during the course of his search for a resi-dence, came across an historical building that fascinat-ed him so much that he made a view of this buildinga precondition for his leasing an apartment. The luxury demanded here possesses a patina thathardly can be subsumed under the “new spirit of cap-italism” postulated by Luc Boltanski and Eve Chia-pello. Whereas Boltanski/Chiapello see the supposedsuccess of the current capitalist system in the erosionof established institutions and conventions in favourof mobility, flexibility and innovation, in the work ofJochen Schmith there is a flickering fascination withtraditional ideas of luxury. That they succeed in criti-cally questioning these ideas without exposing them-selves to the danger of being co-opted by new, more‘timely’ counter-proposals from the same system con-stitutes a special quality of their artistic practice.

Translated by Dr Michael Eldred.

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Exhibition view, Certain Arrangements, Kunstverein Braunschweig, Haus Salve Hospes, 2010

CertainArrangementsHilke Wagner

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The exhibition at the Kunstverein Braunschweig consists of small andwell-considered interventions, which initially appear to place the focusof attention upon the building itself, the Villa Salve Hospes, home tothe Kunstverein since 1946. Prior to the exhibition, a great deal of re-search had been undertaken on this historic building, originally builtbetween 1805 and 1808 by Peter Joseph Krahe, as a residence for theBraunschweig businessman Diedrich Wilhelm Krause.01 Jochen Schmithinvestigated the original use of the individual rooms and subsequentlybecame interested in the alterations implemented during the course ofthe nineteenth century, in accordance with its modified usage. Thecustomary perception of this historic, imposing exhibition venue is re-peatedly subverted in the exhibition: for instance, the characteristic vi-sual axes02 of the early classical building have been closed off, disrupt-ed by screens or braided curtains, thereby creating surprising new vis-tas, rendering old passageways visible once more, and opening up newroutes through the house.

In the entrance area, that is to say, the ground floor of the circular, lav-ishly decorated, two-storeyed vestibule, an unusual sight immediatelypresents itself to the visitor: the room is sparsely lit, the four stuccostatues in classical style are covered in drapes, and the entrance area isdeserted. Of the four double doors arranged at right angles to one an-other, the door to the right, leading to the imposing staircase and theMirrored Room, is closed; likewise, the pair of doors leading frontallyto the Garden Room, which normally would already give one an exten-sive view from the rotunda, across the loggia to the garden.The four classical female statues situated in the semicircular alcoves,between the double doors, are draped with a brown fabric and lend theroom an air of abandonment. However, upon closer inspection, thefigurines reveal in the fine manner of their concealment – reminiscentof the art historical figure of the Donna Velata by the Venetian rococosculptor Antonio Corradini – their actual status: representation. Forthe precious, shimmering fabric – a cashmere and silk mix from a hautecouture collection – has been carefully draped and is evidently far morevaluable than the kind of material normally used to cover furniture. Or,to be precise: used to be used, because naturally we are only familiarwith those images from historical films in which the servant protectshis master’s fine furniture from dust during a prolonged period of thelatter’s absence. It is the prologue to a play, whose boards we appear tobe treading when walking through the exhibition.

The space on the left, where normally the cash desk and reception areawould be, is empty; only an oversized portal made from green plywoodboards and glass doors, as well as a holder for copies of Jochen Schmith’s

01 In 1805, the ducal architect Peter Joseph Krahewas commissioned to design a landscape garden (“Krau-sescher Garten”) and a villa, on a plot of land measur-ing eighteen acres situated near the new Augusttor inBraunschweig. The preferred site for construction, ona levelled area of walled enclosures, was freed by demol-ishing the now redundant fortifications. In this way,the site was located directly on the edge of the city, out-side the medieval boundary walls. The work was com-missioned by the wealthy businessman Diedrich Wil-helm Krause (1773-1845). After his death, his adopteddaughter Johanna Helene Hollandt (née Sand) inher-ited the villa and the park, which was henceforwardknown as “Hollandtsgarten”. In keeping with the pro-visions of the original contract, the park was to be acces-sible to the public on designated days during the week.Krause’s granddaughter Marie Hörstel (1846-1921)lived in the house from 1894 until 1921. Her son Eber-hard Hörstel (1870-1932) sold the park and villa in1927, on account of financial hardship, to the City ofBraunschweig-which is still its current owner and, inconsequence, the landlord to Kunstverein Braun-schweig. During the nineteenth century, the Villa SalveHospes was considered to be the centre of the city’ssocial and intellectual life. Preserved lists of invitationsbelonging to the Hollandt family, and dating from 1848and 1849, name leading members of Braunschweig’sministerial bureaucracy, military fraternity, and aristoc-racy. The writer Caroline Schelling (1763-1809) andthe philosopher Friedrich Schelling (1775-1854) areknown to have taken refuge in the villa. Since 1946,the Villa Salve Hospes has been home to the Kunst-verein Braunschweig. A section of the park is used bythe municipal open-air swimming baths, to the south-west of the estate, as a recreational area.

02 P. J. Krahe moved the hallway to the right handside in order to create a direct visual axis from the en-trance to the garden side (of the property) and further-more developed two orthogonal visual axes.

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thematic floor plan, lead the visitor into the area traditionally reservedfor private use in the nineteenth century.

The first act of the drama begins with the crossing of this threshold. Inthe empty, former “living” room, the windows have been gently dark-ened by blue coloured foil, scarcely noticeable, and yet the room is suf-fused with a special, soft, private, and perhaps almost crepuscular atmo-sphere. And once again, the attention is focused upon a door, in thiscase an absent one: a rectangular projection of light shaped like a dooron the right-hand wall, marks out, almost phantasmagorically, a nowconcealed tradesman’s entrance, which, in the nineteenth century, al-lowed the villa’s personnel to move unobtrusively around the building,away from the main entrance.

In the next room, the boudoir, which was formerly reserved for the ladyof the house, there is a delicate, rather lost-looking piece of furnituremade from similar green chipboard, standing in an alcove, and reminis-cent in its shape and construction of a classical repertory of form; fourdoorknobs from a luxury Hamburg boutique have been arranged in aline upon it. By virtue of their auratic staging, the doorknobs shine likeprecious pearls, and yet, upon closer inspection, it is possible to noticemyriad tiny scratches that bear witness to decades of traffic, caused per-haps by rings on the fingers of the boutique’s affluent clientele. GuterGeschmack ist eine kalte Sache und eine unsaubere dazu (“Good taste isa cold affair and a filthy one as well”): the work’s title has been takenfrom ideas in Jun’ichiro Tanizaki’s In Praise of Shadows.03 The Japaneseauthor Tanizaki (1886-1965) recognises that “what is referred to asbeautiful generally derives from the practice of everyday life”, duly coun-tering the electrically illuminated western world with a more tenebrousJapanese ideal of beauty, with its awareness of patina: occasionally itis precisely the patina, that is to say the traces of use and the physicalmaterialisation of time in objects, that has the ability to make themappear beautiful. This room is also carefully staged in its simplicity.The sparse slickness and play of light in the semidarkness is seeminglyindicative of a Far Eastern aesthetic. The floor in this small room iscarpeted in white, upon which the tracks of visitors are clearly visible,for, at the behest of the artists, it is not to be cleaned for the durationof the exhibition.

The next room is the former Picture Room. Here too, the windowshave been darkened with foil in order to immerse the space in a softlight. An erstwhile door to the servants’ stairs is picked out as a dif-fusely translucent reflection in the half-light, almost like a paper shoji.To the left, there is a small, solitary still-life painting of some flowers:

03 In this book, Tanizaki reflects upon the origin ofJapanese aesthetics. Starting from the observation thatthere can be no beauty without the effect of shadow, hehones the sensibility to the differences between easternand western aesthetics in the use of light and colour.He states here among other things: “Of course this“sheen of antiquity” of which we hear so much is in factthe glow of grime. In both Chinese and Japanese thewords denoting this glow describe a polish that comesof being touched over and over again, a sheen produc-ed by the oils that naturally permeate an object overlong years of handling – which is to say grime. If indeed‘elegance is frigid’, it can as well be described as filthy.There is no denying, at any rate, that among the ele-ments of the elegance in which we take such delight isa measure of the unclean, the insanitary. I suppose Ishall sound terribly defensive if I say the Westerners at-tempt to expose every speck of grime and eradicate it,while we Orientals carefully preserve and even idealizeit. Yet for better or for worse we do love things thatbear the marks of grime, soot, and weather, and we lovethe colors and the sheen that call to mind the past thatmade them. Jun’ichiro Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows(London: Vintage Books, 2001), p. 20.

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painted at Jochen Schmith’s request, in the artist village of Dafen nearShenzhen in China, where artists mass-produce copies of the great mas-ters or other special commissions, as though on an assembly line. Inthis particular case, the original was painted by “Flower Brueghel”, orJan Brueghel the Elder (1568-1625) as he was also known: Flowersin a Glass Vase, a painting no longer available for critical study since itwas stolen in Switzerland, is now regarded as lost and has become aprominent feature on Interpol’s list of most wanted artworks. For itspart, Southern China is meanwhile regarded globally as one of the mar-ket leaders in the mass production of artworks. Dafen, one artist vil-lage among many, annually exports about 5,000,000 paintings of well-known masterpieces, produced in factorylike plants or private housesin what amounts to mass production. There is a sculpture at the en-trance to the village: a gigantic hand holds aloft an enormous paint-brush: it leaves no doubt as to what the inhabitants of Dafen – a sub-urb of the metropolis Shenzhen, with a population of 10,000,000 – dofor a living. As an artist village, Dafen has achieved an unexpected de-gree of renown and relative affluence. In a space covering four squarekilometres, 9,000 painters produce sixty percent of all cheap imitationsworldwide. Sales to private individuals or large intermediaries, suchas the American Walmart chain, generate about 28,000,000 Euro turn-over per annum. Competition is fierce, as new factories are openingup all the time in search of big money. Each year about one hundredpainters join the ranks: trained copyists with a low level of education,who are nonetheless graduates from Chinese art academies. The copieswere delivered on time, three weeks after their commission and fol-lowing Jochen Schmith’s dispatch to Shenzhen of the images of bothworks to be reproduced. At Jochen Schmith’s behest, and for a modestsurcharge, the paintings were completed by “senior artists” at an over-all cost of 150 dollars. According to an article in Der Spiegel,04 in 2006these artists earned about thirty cents per finished painting, whichamounts to a monthly salary of between one hundred and three hun-dred Euro. Jan Brueghel’s work, which also served as Jochen Schmith’s templatefor the photograph used for both the invitation and the poster motif, isconsidered to be characteristic of sixteenth and seventeenth centuryDutch painting. An earlier sponsor and patron of the Flemish painter,the Archbishop of Milan Federico Borromeo, recognised the struc-ture of God’s creation in the painting, in the elaborate arrangementand myriad diversity of species, and prized the aesthetic presence of theflowers over and above their prevalent associations with a particularseason or the transience of existence. In the Calvinistic Netherlands thevaluable tulip was simultaneously a symbol of God’s blessing and of‘vanitas’.05 More about the tulip later.

04 Cf. Martin Paetsch, “Van Gogh from the Sweat-shop”, Spiegel online, 23.08.2006. This author accessedthe online version: //www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,433134,00.html

05 After its introduction to the Netherlands, the tulipquickly found its way into still-life painting, which hadalready witnessed its motif of flowers in a vase becomea central theme around 1600. According to the under-standing of the Calvinist Dutch of the baroque period,luxury is the just reward of the righteous and the pious:an external sign of God’s blessing that was readily puton show. The wealth of the God-fearing is at the sametime an obligation to lead a virtuous life, in full con-sciousness of the transience of all earthly things. Wealthcould then be proudly displayed as a memento mori orsymbol of vanitas, and therefore be played down assomething ephemeral and nugatory. Not only expen-sive bowls, glass goblets, metal drinking vessels, but alsomoney, jewellery, or exotic foodstuffs, such as citrusfruit, represent luxury and the human striving for ma-terial affluence. Flowers in particular, especially cutflowers, were considered to be a memento mori parexcellence: eye-wateringly expensive, extremely beau-tiful, yet condemned to wilt and die. Wilting or dam-aged flowers were frequently placed alongside the freshblooms within the bouquet in order to accentuate theaspect of transience. However, after the crash in thetulip market, there is a marked shift in significance: asa result, they also increasingly came, within Dutch still-life painting, to represent decadence, frivolity, and anirresponsible attitude to money as a symbol of divinebeneficence. Cf. here also André van der Goes, ed.,Tulpomanie. Die Tulpe in der Kunst des 16. und 17.Jahrhunderts (Dresden, 2004).

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In the next room, a small room leading between two others and abun-dantly decorated with moulding, the viewing axis from the PictureRoom via the Garden Room to the Ballroom is dislocated by a screenin three sections covered with one-way vision foil. This kind of foil isfamiliar to us, for example, in its use in advertisements on the outsideof bus windows, which nevertheless remain transparent from insidethe bus. Two layers of foil have been affixed, giving rise to an attractivemoiré pattern. And yet the delicate impression is an illusion: the realintention is one of exclusion and demarcation. Pleasant words andphrases, which one automatically associates with a romantic idea oflandscape, emanate from a loudspeaker in whispered tones. However,the words derive from a podcast advertising “Arcadia”, Germany’s firstgated community situated in Potsdam. The Arcadian dream of thebucolic landscape actually tempted buyers, despite their initial reluc-tance to respond to an offer of absolute security. The slogans cleverlyrefer to the primordial dream of an idyllic landscape. It is a controlledview of idealised nature; indeed, this impression is already conveyedby Brueghel’s painting which brings together, in one picture, roses andtulips, flowers that never actually blossom at the same time. From themid-1990s onwards, around forty-five apartments and a number ofvillas were planned and built on land not far from the Glienicker Brü-cke, on the edge of Berlin’s south western boundary. The price persquare metre was between 3,000 and 4,000 Euro, and the propertiesboasted limited access, added security, and an additional services pack-age crammed with a host of feel-good provisions. And yet in early 2004,not even half the apartments had been sold. This was because, at thattime in Germany, living behind fences and walls was still considered anunattractive proposition.06 Class segregation of this kind was undesir-able. Only after four years of sustained property management and thecommitment of the estate agents was the announcement finally madein May 2008 that the last apartment had indeed been sold. Accordingto EH Estate Management, something which had once been ridicul-ed by critics as a “bad investment by the region around the capital”had, within the space of four years, turned into a real estate jewel. Re-sponsible for this turnabout in image was the specialist Berlin agencyurbanPR with its rechristening of the controversial project with the na-me Arcadia.07 Its aerial photograph on the company’s home page mighthave been taken from a travel brochure: a small, riparian residentialestate surrounded by trees and meadows – very idyllic, very close to na-ture. This was a place where like-minded people could live togetherharmoniously, isolated from a criminal underclass – an artificial idealthat humans have always desired, presumably long before Virgil.And yet the name Arcadia originally stood for an ideal landscape inwhich people might coexist without the divisive intrusion of ‘mine’

06 “Are you still just living or are you already keepingwatch?” So ran the title of an article in the SüddeutscheZeitung in 2006, as Germany’s first gated community,comprising apartments and villas with a view of theHavel and Babelsberg Palace, was ready for occupation,yet with a good number of the “exclusive properties inthis sought-after location” still remaining vacant. Thearticle states that “the fear of being in close proximity toa supposed criminal underclass has given rise to a ‘cul-ture of no touching’”. The article goes on to say: “Moreand more people in Spain, Portugal, Greece, France,Great Britain, Poland, the Ukraine, and Russia wouldprefer to live in gated communities and protect them-selves from the perceived danger of a society that isdrifting further and further apart. In the USA, therewere a total of 20,000 properties of this sort, and todaymore and more are being built, predominantly on thewest coast. In California, forty percent of the popula-tion live in private, secure, residential areas. Most of theinhabitants are white and belong to the middle or up-per classes, they cherish the value of property owner-ship, and do not feel sufficiently protected by the state.Writers, such as T.C. Boyle, have long since got thenumber of this immured middle class: “[ … ] in recentdecades, urban space in America has become a projec-tion surface for existential fear and insecurity, a fear ofthe Moloch ‘city’ that existed in the nineteenth centu-ry. Incarceration in suburban gated communities hascontributed to the extensive dissolution of race andclass segregation. [ … ] The result is a residential de-segregation which also has had manifest tendencies inEurope in recent years. Where this social polarisation,this secession of the successful, can lead could be clear-ly seen during the autumn in the banlieues in France,where the underprivileged set fire to their districts. Theaverage citizen of Paris, who, as it would seem, respond-ed to the unrest unfolding beyond the Périphériquewith a shake of the head, has long since protected him-self against people from the suburbs, by installing ac-cess codes on virtually every apartment building. “It isa matter of satisfying a feeling of insecurity that in gen-eral doesn’t correlate to any real threat.” In France ofall places, where the imitation of American patternsmeets with scant enthusiasm, the résidence clôturée orgated community model, has spread with lighteningspeed. What used to be restricted to the Paris conur-bation and the Côte d’Azur, can now be observed ineighteen of the twenty-two regions: the privatisation ofpublic (living) space. [ … ] The buyers and tenants ofthese résidences clôturées were identified a long time agoas a middle class that fears nothing greater than the de-cline in its social standing. Ever since they are beingtempted to take up residence in auspicious soundingplaces such as “Les portes du soleil” to the north ofMontpellier, and “Les Terrasses de Louxor” [ … ].” Cf.Annabel Dillig, “Wohnst Du noch oder wachst Duschon? Sicherheit als Statussymbol”, Süddeutsche Zei-tung, January 13, 2006.

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and ‘thine’. “Let our Bliss be free like Arcadia!”, as Faust declaims inGoethe’s Faust II, for after all, the Arcadian dream is primarily aboutfreedom!

Ever since the Hellenist era, Arcadia, originally a rough, upland area onthe Greek Peloponnesian peninsula, had been attributed with mytho-logical significance as a rural idyll, the veritable physical location of thegolden age. The utopian idea of an area in which men could live in anidyllic natural landscape, as fulfilled and happy shepherds unencum-bered by the burdens of labour and society’s pressures to conform, wasof the essence. Correspondingly, this was the perfect theme for clas-sical bucolic literature, such as Virgil’s pastoral poetry. The myth hasbeen adopted and varied innumerable times since then in literature,art, music, and drama08 – for example, in the bucolic literature of theEuropean Renaissance and the Baroque, as well as in several paintingsfrom the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Since the eighteenthcentury if not before, Arcadia itself became the ideal preferred destina-tion for the educated classes travelling in southern climes, and was toexert considerable influence on the efforts to develop landscape garden-ing in Europe.09

Even before Virgil’s poetic creation of Arcadia as an artistic and spiri-tual landscape, there was a poetry of the aesthetically well-apportioned,harmonious environment, beyond the hustle and bustle of the city, thelocus amoenus or “pleasant place”. Mention is already made of it, in thissense, in Plato’s Phaedrus. Socrates states here: “By Here, a fair restingplace, full of summer sounds and scents. Here is this lofty and spread-ing plane tree, and the agnus castus high and clustering, in the fullestblossom and the greatest fragrance; and the stream which flows be-neath the plane tree is deliciously cold to the feet. Judging from the or-naments and images, this must be a spot sacred to Achelous and theNymphs. How delightful is the breeze – so very sweet; and there is asound in the air shrill and summerlike which makes answer to the cho-rus of the cicadae. But the greatest charm of all is the grass, like a pillowgently sloping to the head. My dear Phaedrus, you have been an admi-rable guide”.10 In classical Latin literature, the original Greek locationwas transposed to Sicily; affluent, educated Romans had their villasbuilt in landscape gardens near Rome or Naples, in accordance with theGreek model, in order to emulate the site described by Socrates (i.e.Plato) as closely as possible. Streams, paths, trees, acclivities, and sub-lime vistas were part and parcel of this vision. Here, politicians andmerchants could regale themselves with indolent and protracted dis-courses on the merits of Greek sophistication. The same model in-spired the architect of the classical, Palladianesque Villa Salve Hospes

07 Cf. Sascha Buchbinder, “Schöner Wohnen mitWachmann”, Tages-Anzeiger, October 15, 2008.

08 The Arcadia myth gave rise to notions in early mo-dernity that it was possible to live a life beyond socialrestrictions. Most authors assume that these ideas “wereessentially political fantasies promulgated, above all,by the higher nobility who were coming under increas-ing political pressure emanating from the early mo-dern State-an entity undergoing a burgeoning stabili-sation process at this time-to exercise a considerablygreater degree of discipline. From beneath the surfaceof this aristocratic escapism, the idea of individual free-dom emerged and consolidated itself, which, it is true,meant freedom for the nobility, but this idea had al-ready been espoused by the middle classes in the seven-teenth century in the Netherlands and then in the eigh-teenth century in France and Germany. According tothese ideas, the nobles fled to the countryside to eludesociety’s unbearable strictures and dressed themselvesup as shepherds when they got there. At first seeming-ly an instance of pure masquerade, the symbolic self-presentation of the aristocracy itself became a pictorialprogramme: aristocrats had their portraits paintedwearing shepherd and shepherdess costumes or alterna-tively, they posed as herdsmen. This was the symboli-cally inflated form with which the archaic notion thatthe ruler is also the shepherd of his people endured andwas actualised within modernity as a component ofan aristocratic hegemony and legitimation of power”.Cf. http://www.embassy-of-arcadia.de/Arkadien.html

09 Virgil’s Arcadia, an imaginary landscape, which isat the same time the utopian vision of an ideal form oflife on earth, is an idea that can be traced through manyepochs-for example, as a “Seelenlandschaft” or spiritu-al landscape in Germany- but one that was also widelyused in the Romantic period. However, at the sametime Arcadia also connotes an ideal way of living onearth. “In our cultural memory, the classical Romanmyth of ‘Arcadia’ (named after a tract of land in thePeloponnese) forms a counterworld to the restlessnessof our society, to war and oppression, and the restric-tions of culture.” Reinhard Brand, Arkadien in Kunst,Philosophie und Dichtung (Freiburg im Breisgau/Berlin,2006), p. 11.

10 Plato, Phaedrus, trans. by Benjamin Jowett,http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1636/1636-h/1636-h.htm

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and the plans for the accompanying park that now falls into view, inits modern, levelled aspect, through the windowed wall of the squareGarden Room, which we now enter.

It was a landscape garden based on the English model: idyllic, withgentle hills, and meandering brooks with small Palladioesque bridges.Within the history of garden art, this model was conceived as a con-scious contrast to the hitherto dominant baroque garden of the charac-teristically French mould, which forced nature into geometrically exactparameters. The aim of the English garden was to eliminate the previ-ous, strict mathematical aspect of the precisely arranged garden bedsand tonsured hedges, and to use what nature had to offer by way ofvistas, as an orientation in garden design. It was supposed to reflect theprinciple of a natural landscape that would engender an uplifting spiritof joy in the observer, by virtue of the different and diversified paint-erly impressions, in keeping with the ideal of a “landscape painting onemight walk around”. In place of the linear canals, round basins, andcascades one might admire in a baroque garden, with its geometricallyexact paths, the English garden was replete with meandering pathways,rivulets, and natural-looking ponds and lakes.

Passing by the screens, the visitor now enters the Garden Room, bathedin light. It is the first room of the tour in which the windows have notbeen covered with foil, and from this vantage point one is afforded agenerous view of the former Hollandtsgarten, which is no longer theoriginal landscape garden, but rather the recreational area of an open-air public swimming pool. In the nineteenth century, everything hereabounded with “fragrance and flowers”, according to a visitor to Braun-schweig in 1831, the Danish poet Hans Christian Andersen, whonoted in a letter: “There is a pretty garden near the city gate, privatelyowned and yet accessible to everyone. It is possible to read the inscrip-tion ‘Salve Hospes’ on the building’s façade! A veritable forest of flow-ers and large fruit trees from southern climes, standing in large tubsplaced here and there around the house. Fragrance and flowers every-where!”

On the walls of the Garden Room there are three large-format silk-screen prints: the template for these was a series of photographs of arow of quasi-classical statues, produced for placement in the garden oftheir manufacture. Copies of this kind are likewise produced en massein China: in this case, in Hebei near Peking. A sharp eye will notice aclue to their provenance in the right-hand print: towards the edge ofthe picture there is a bust of Mao on the ground and a can of Chinesefast food in the detritus.

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The next room is the Mirrored Room – after the vestibule, perhaps themost representative, but also the most public room of Villa Salve Hos-pes; it was used frequently as a ballroom, for the Villa was regarded asthe hub of Braunschweig’s intellectual life and society during the nine-teenth century, thanks to its enlightened owner (incidentally, also thefounder of the Kunstverein, in 1832). This is the largest room, usedby artists chiefly for elaborate, large-format installations, but JochenSchmith has left it (almost) empty. The artist collective has transport-ed the reception furniture, comprising an assemblage of chairs, tables,and a reception desk with a mirrored frontal panel, all designed byHeimo Zobernig in 1999 especially for the Kunstverein, including thecash register, from its normal position in the entrance area: as a result,the admission fee is charged here, halfway through the exhibition. A display shelf for Kunstverein publications has also been construct-ed, using the exhibition’s ubiquitous green chipboard. There is a ran-dom video loop running on a monitor – midges circling around a lightsource – (an image for our desires?), and a bunch of red and whiteflamed tulips on the mirrored reception desk. However, their signifi-cance only becomes clear to the viewer on the way upstairs.

On the wall of the staircase, there is another replica of a Dutch mastercopied in China: it is Jan Brueghel the Younger’s painting Satire onTulip Mania, from circa 1640.11 Jochen Schmith uses the bouquet oftulips on the reception desk to allude to the first speculation bubblein economic history, so-called tulip mania. When the then unknowntulip bulb arrived in Holland during the sixteenth century,12 the exot-ic plant unleashed a veritable mania among the Dutch. Rare and ex-pensive, the tulip rapidly became a status symbol. In keeping with theItalian model, splendid gardens were created, and at social gatheringsupper class ladies wore the tulip as jewellery in the hair or at the cleav-age. In consequence, the tulip found its way, as both a status symbolor ‘vanitas’ emblem, into Dutch still-life painting. The demand rapidlyoutstripped the supply and prices shot up markedly. Tulip bulbs werenow being offered at auction, with auctions often being conducted intaverns.13 During the 1630s, the price for bulbs skyrocketed so thatbetween 1634 to1637 the price climbed to fifty times its previous highpoint. Around 1635, in Amsterdam, a whole house was sold for theprice of three bulbs.14 The bubble burst in 1637: in the Netherlands,the price plummeted literally overnight by ninety-five percent andthe entire tulip market crashed. The variety of tulip selected by JochenSchmith for the reception bouquet resembles the so-called SemperAugustus, which notched up a record price in the seventeenth century.15

11 Jan Brueghel (1601-1678, who lived and died inAntwerp), Satire op de Tulpomania, 1640, oil on can-vas, 31 x 49 cm. The original is held in the Frans HalsMuseum in Harlem.

12 The tulip, which originally came from Asia, arriv-ed in Vienna around 1560 via Constantinople. It wasgift from the Sultan Suleiman and was brought byGhislain de Busbecq, Vienna’s envoy in Constantino-ple at that time. Its introduction marks the beginningof the so-called oriental period in the history of Euro-pean landscape design and garden art, in which-alongwith tulips-hyacinths and narcissi, as well lilacs andhorse chestnuts, were introduced. The horticulturalistCarolus Clusius, director of the imperial medical gar-dens in Vienna, cultivated the tulip, in grand style, onEuropean soil for the first time in 1573 in the imperialgarden. In 1593, when Clusius was appointed profes-sor at the University in Leiden, he introduced the tulipto the Netherlands.13 Initially, the bulbs were only traded when in season.However, as demand spread across the whole year, thepractice of selling bulbs that were still in the grounddeveloped. As a consequence, the tulip trade became aforward transaction, since nobody knew what the tulipreally looked like, and concomitantly an object of spec-ulation inasmuch as bulbs were occasionally bought inorder to produce a profit when sold on. As a result,options were even traded on tulip bulb shares.

14 Other sources name a house in Hoorn, that is tosay, a brewery in Utrecht, in this connection.

15 The highest price paid for an individual bulb ofthe Semper Augustus variety, at the beginning of 1637,was in the region of 10,000 guilders, at a time when theannual income for a carpenter was around 250 guilders.The so-called Vice-Queen variety, approximately halfthe value of the Semper Augustus, managed to fetch anequivalent price in kind of twenty-four cartloads ofcorn, eight suckling pigs, four cows, four barrels of beer,two barrels of wine, 500 kg of cheese, a silver cup, a bed,and a suit. Cf. Mike Dash, Tulpenwahn - Die verrück-teste Spekulation der Geschichte (Berlin, 2008), p. 10;after scientists discovered that its characteristic red andwhite colouration was brought about by a virus con-tracted from aphids, the Semper Augustus has not beencultivated since 1924, in order to prevent other varie-ties of tulip from being infected.

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In an empty alcove of the gallery, which runs around the circumfer-ence of the upper vestibule, a video is presented, restating the Asiancontext: a sleeping man in Hong Kong, motionless in front of the lim-ousines he is guarding. The sound of traffic penetrates down to theground floor.

Behind, there is a completely empty cabinet, with crosses made fromtransparent adhesive tape on the window, only visible to the more ob-servant visitor. In the next room, there are snapshots taken from luxuryapartments in Hong Kong by Jochen Schmith, when viewing the pro-perties, posing as a prospective buyer during work scholarships there.However cramped “luxury” might turn out to be, the view, preferab-ly of Victoria Harbour, ultimately determines the price. The higherthe vantage point, the more expensive the property; contact with theground not sought after: for a long time, utopian fantasies have beenin circulation envisaging the aerially connection of these skyscrapers.A parallel city emerges above the metropolis, elevated above real exis-tence. Generally too expensive for the indigenous population – theprice per sq metre, ranging from 15,000 to 18,000 Euro, is normal,despite the housing market crisis – these apartments attract mainly for-eign investors.16

And yet, China is paying too high a price in its race to catch up with themodern world. It would appear that decades worth of urban develop-ment is being implemented in Chinese cities at a fast rate, as though intime-lapse photography. Cranes are everywhere; no sooner is one build-ing complex complete than a new one is started. The building boomprovides the motor for economic recovery in the People’s Republic.17

Entire suburbs change within a few years, as the original fabric of a citygives way to the need for luxury and comfort, a phenomenon impres-sively referenced by Ai Wei Wei, with his installation for documenta 13(in which he piled up wooden doors from demolished flats into a tow-er that ultimately collapsed on itself ).

Officially, The Urban Renewal Authority (URA)18 in Hong Kong hasbeen regulating constructional modernisation and declared itself re-sponsible for “an accelerated redevelopment of a better environment forliving, infrastructure, and road networks”. The aim is to counter HongKong’s “urban decay” through demolition: for, as the URA points out,there are “circa 9,300 private buildings/dwellings about thirty yearsold or older”. In ten years – what fruitful prospect – the “number ofbuildings will have increased by fifty percent”. To list these building isof little or no use in this context. Renewal and redevelopment are thewatchwords, not restoration and conservation. On a daily basis, the

16 In 2008, Asia’s most expensive apartment was soldin Hong Kong for €18,500,000; on the 80th floor,511 sq m in area, with panoramic views of VictoriaHarbour. The asking price for a flat in the Kowloondistrict is €36,000 per sq m.

17 And yet in China fears of a new bubble are moun-ting: in the capital Peking alone the real estate priceshave risen by thirty percent in the first half of 2009.

18 The Urban Renewal Authority, a statutory bodyunder public law, replaced the Land Development Cor-poration founded in 1988.

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cities of China are systematically losing parts of their cultural identity,a topic that Jochen Schmith alludes to with this small, unobtrusive,transparent strip of sticky tape on the aforementioned window on thelisted and historic Villa Salve Hospes, because this is the way in whichThe Urban Renewal Authority – albeit in a less subtle manner, usingwide, crossed masking tape – designates buildings due for demolition.This is followed by a room in which plates of glass hanging from theceiling form a tour within a tour: a game of transparencies and reflec-tions that are immediately reminiscent of reflective façades and inte-riors. The variable lighting is guided by a soundtrack, audible in theformer guest room. This sound installation refers to the luxury apart-ments springing up in place of the demolished buildings. A speaker re-cites narrative sentences in reverential tones that initially sound like thelofty words of highbrow literature, but in reality have been taken frombrochures advertising the apartments, quoting comments made by es-tate agents or the artist collective’s impressions while viewing the prop-erties. The visitor listens to them while sitting on a chipboard Conver-sation Chair that promises intimacy and at one time afforded an exclu-sive view from the Villa’s former guest room, across what would havebeen pasturelands, in the nineteenth century, towards the south eastand Schloss Richmond, all the way to the Harz Mountains.19

Suspended in the hallway of the upper floor, the chandelier, which hasbeen moved from the ballroom, seems disproportionately large and dis-placed. The mirror at the end of this corridor couldn’t make the chan-delier look any larger and directs the visitor – the door to the uppervestibule and thus to the stairs being locked – to an alternative “exit”:indeed, Jochen Schmith’s mise en scène has something theatrical aboutit, as the visitors move from room to room, as if through stage settings.Not unlike the opening and closing doors in a farce, visitors tend topop up from unexpected corners, as the normal routes are blocked.And here, from the hall, the visitor literally has a glimpse behind thescenes, negotiating the low, narrow, and well-worn servants’ staircase atthe heart of the Villa, the “postscenium” as it were, back down to theground floor, back to the point of departure, the rotunda with the cov-ered, classical statues that suddenly receive more attention that theynormally would.

19 Cf. Reinhard Dorn, Peter Joseph Krahe. Bd. II,Bauten und Projekte in Düsseldorf, Koblenz, Hannoverund Braunschweig, 1787-1806 (Munich, 1971), p. 116.

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JO C H E N S C H M I T H

Peter Steckroth (*1977) Peter Hoppe (*1975) Carola Wagenplast (*1978)

All three members of Jochen Schmith live and work in Hamburg.

EXH I BI T I O N S

2014 “Present Gifts,” VI, VII, Oslo (Solo)

2013 "ikke kompetanse", (E) Galerie Esther Donatz (Solo) "Utopie beginnt im Kleinen" (G), 12. Triennale Kleinplastik Fellbach "Sanssouci#1", Italian Embassy during FIAC

2012 "Hector-Förderpreis" Gruppenausstellung, Kunsthalle Mannheim "An_Eignungen" (G), Kunstverein Langenhagen "Andere Räume" (G), Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn "Bleibender Wert?" (G), Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria

2011 “Grand Opening,” MATHEW Galerie (G), Berlin "DOCUMENT" (G), Congrès Station Brussels "abwesend (absent)" (G), Galerie Desaga, Cologne "From a Distance IV" (S), Marriott Hotel Brussels "It's Only Rock 'n Roll - but we like it" (G), W139, Amsterdam "Text-Werke" (G), Kunstverein Heidelberg

2010 "News from Nowhere" (S), WCW-Gallery Hamburg "Jochen Schmith" (S), Kunstverein Langenhagen "Regionale11" (G), Kunsthaus Baselland, Schweiz "the frayed ends of perception" (G), forgotten bar project Berlin "raumsichten / vorzeichen" (G), Städtische Galerie Nordhorn "Certain Arrangements" (S), Haus Salve Hospes, Kunstverein Braunschweig

2009 "P is for poodle" (S), Golden Pudel Club Hamburg Ausstellungsdisplay für "PROJEKTRAUM KUNSTHALLE MANNHEIM", in Zusammenarbeit mir Mirjam Thomann, Kunsthalle Mannheim "Ein Traum ist alles Leben und die Träume selbst ein Traum" (G), Kunsthalle Lingen “Reading the city” (G), OPEN ev+a 2009, Limerick, Ireland

2008 “Auftakt” (S), Kunstverein in Hamburg “Wir nennen es Hamburg” (G), Kunstverein Hamburg Jahresgaben, Halle für Kunst, Lüneburg “Arbeitsstipendium für bildende Kunst” (G), Kunsthaus Hamburg “Mobile Archive” (G), Halle für Kunst Lüneburg “Manual CC” (G), UQbar, Berlin

VI, VII

VI, VII | OSLO GATE 20 N-0192 OSLO NORWAY | www.VIVII.no

2007 “GELD” (S), Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof Hamburg Pudelkollektion (G), Golden Pudel Club Hamburg “Deutsche Realitäten” (G), Römer 9, Frankfurt / Main “DISPLAY” (G), Halle für Kunst Lüneburg Arthur Boskamp-Stiftung M1 (G), Hohenlockstedt

2006 “Jochen Schmith” (S), Hedah Maastricht, Netherlands “STRAY” (G), Para/Site Hong Kong, China “Academy – learning from art” (G), MUHKA Antwerp, Belgium “Die neue Filmschau”, cinema ARSENAL, Berlin “Art in the service of lefties” (G), Kronika, Bytom, Poland Group Show, Galerie Karin Günther / Nina Borgmann Hamburg

2005 “met zonder kop” (G), ARTIS, s’Hertogenbosch, Netherlands “Gala Night of the Cannibals” (G), BMW IX Baltic Triennial of International Art, CAC Vilnius, Lithuania, in cooperation with Hinrich Sachs “Nur hier? IM BILD SEIN” (G), Galerie der HGB Leipzig “POST-DOUBLE-SUPER-HIGH-OPENING” (G), Galerie der HfbK Hamburg “Akademie – Kunst lehren und lernen” (G), Kunstverein in Hamburg

REV I EW S – PR E S S E

Gürsoy Doğ taş, Jochen Schmith, Frieze D/E, Issue 13, March – April 2014

Stian Gabrielson, “The Dance Around Perfume Flasks,” Kunstkritikk.no, 13.03.14 Michael Stoeber: "Zigarren in Bronze", in: Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung, 05.11.2010 Bettina Maria Brosowsky: "Ästhetisches mit Hintersinn", in: TAZ Nord, 30./31.10.2010 Christoph Braun: "Drei Tulpen - wertvoll wie ein Haus", in: Braunschweiger Zeitung, 02.03.2010 Hajo Schiff: “Forschendes Interesse”, in: TAZ, 11.10.2008 Hans-Christian Dany: “Jochen Schmith”, in: Springerin Heft 1/08, Remapping Critique, Januar 2008 Yilmaz Dziewior: "Draußen vor der Tür. Über die Ausstellung Post-Double-Super-High-Opening", in: Texte zur Kunst, Heft 59, September 2005 Rainer Unruh, "Akademie. Kunst lehren und lernen.", in: Kunstforum Bd. 175, April - Mai 2005

RESIDENCIES - FE L L O W S H I PS

2015/16 Villa Concordia Fellowship 2012 Hector Förderpreis – Gruppenausstellung, Kunsthalle Mannheim 2011 WIELS residency Brussels (nominated by Willem Oorebeek / Simon Thompson) 2009/10 Shortlist blau-orange, Kunstpreis der Volks- und Raiffeisenbanken

Kunstzeitraum / Südhausbau und Freunde der Pinakothek der Moderne München

2007 Hamburger Arbeitsstipendium fuer bildende Kunst Arbeitsstipendium Stiftung Kunstfond