Demons of Art

Hartmut Böhme in conversation with Thomas Feuerstein

Hartmut Böhme: When we first met a year ago, on the occasion of your exhibition POEM, which featured a miracle machine and a cabinet with bottles, I asked myself: is this alchemy, technology, science or bio art? The typical means of expression of a fine artist are images, objects, installations, and matter. What’s characteristic about your work, however, are dialogues, stories and tales. Your works have a narrative structure: They refuse completion or determination as statuesque products; rather, they are in a constant state of flux on a processual level. Your work has a relationship to time but also a particular relationship to materiality in which matter acquires voice in the form of chemical reactions and biological processes and thus partakes in authorship. This dialogical quality results in various connections to the discourses in science and cultural studies and a particular aesthetics. And there is also a moment of play and irony that gives rise to a contemporary poetics. A further characteristic of your work is a literariness in which texts and radio plays accompany the pictorial art projects. Your book OUTCAST OF THE UNIVERSE features a travel and science fiction novel entitled “Plus Ultra. The Hercules Project,” which is rife with utopias and melancholic dystopias. Its title is paradigmatic for the whole of Western culture because the departure into the oceanic dimension of history commences with this “plus ultra.” While in antiquity, the columns of Hercules marked the end of the world and symbolized a warning against curiosity and the thirst for knowledge, already in Dante’s Inferno and then with Francis Bacon the prohibitive non plus ultra—no further, not beyond—turned into the imperative of the modern era: plus ultra—go further, go beyond. Hence, the transgression of limits has become the attitude of philosophical intuition, as Ernst Bloch repeatedly emphasized, and it has likewise become an artistic principle. Transgressions of limits and experiments are characteristics of your work. You persistentently transcend genre boundaries between literature, laboratory, and art, and you generate varied aesthetics by combining drawing, painting, installation, and computer as well as bio art. From the late 1980s to the mid-1990s, a critical engagement with the constitution of our late capitalist society in terms of media and technology was at the forefront. While this early phase was contingent on computer science, media, and networks, in the mid-1990s the focus shifted towards biotechnology, that is, the organizational processes of living matter. The phenomena of chemical and biological processes have increasingly attracted interest. Anthropological and philosophical questions have been thought through to the level of molecules and it has become evident that the most significant discourse and the strongest phantasm we are confronted with today is not created by literature or art but by the immense prospects and changes that have been emerging in science, particularly with its technological applications. In this second and still continuing phase, the main approach for artists, designers and critics has been to engage discursively and seek involvement. While this opens up new possibilities for art it also requires new methods, materialities, and processualities.

Thomas Feuerstein: The processual has been important for my work ever since my early digital works. In the beginning of the 1990s, real-time data from stock exchange and news networks combined with algorithms facilitated a fluid nature of work. Thus, artworks were no longer determined by a static condition. Each work gained a life of its own and this dynamics generated images and sounds almost endlessly. In a second and still continuing phase, I began developing artworks in greater ensembles that create among themselves something like semantic nets. They function like correlated communicating vessels that speak with each other: a sculpture, for instance, produces the painting material for a picture; a graphic work becomes the fuel for an installation by releasing energy for further processes. Thus, the works create narrative and performative structures that comprise materials and molecules, living organisms, biological methods and practices as well as texts, investigations and conversations. Our conversation, for instance, is part of such a narrative, and one of its central knots is constituted by the concept of the demon. I am interested in the demon because it takes up diverse threads of discourse and keeps available surprising transformations of meaning. This, it seems to me, makes the demon particularily relevant for the present. At first, the term evokes religious traditions, where the demon represents the evil and the diabolic. But there is also the ancient Greek tradition where, to put it simply, the demon causes both order and chaos and makes people eudaimon (happy) or cacodaimon (unhappy). Daimones were responsible for all that was processual in the psychical and physical worlds, such as the fermentation from sugar to alcohol or from milk to cheese. Today, the demon acts as a medium, catalyst or enzyme and causes translations and transmutations. It is per se neither bad nor good and may be hardware as well as software. It is found in thoughts and ideologies or in matter and artifacts. This notion’s varied meanings, historic transformations and applications for technological processes predestine it for artistic narrations that seek to comprehend and relate one’s own culture in a contingent and polyvalent way.

HB: I’d like to draw on the concept of the demonic. It could be argued that the different variations in meaning share a common feature on an abstract level. Let’s think about the relationship to our conscious selves: when we act as subjects we never know whether we are the masters of our action or if something else exerts power over us. We frequently experience a dependence on processes that we either can’t figure out because they strike us as mysterious, intransparent and obscure, or we are forced to acknowledge that we have no bearing on these processes. The demonic possesses a driving, productive, creative but also destructive force, which shakes the subject’s suggestion of sovereignty.

TF: We suffer a loss of self when we experience possession or control by alien powers. Angels, devils, djinns, or rakshasa incorporate ancient perceptions of demons, which acquire a new social and consumptive dimension with neuroeconomics, marketing, NLP, digital surveillance, genetic control, and biopolitics. The past, the present, and the future overlap in the demon and systems are mixed with categories, enlightenment with myth, technologies with superstition, and autonomy with heteronomy. In this sense, the demon proves to be a dirty term because of its ambiguity: it mixes a magical with a rational conception of the world. Since the end of the 18th century, demons have increasingly emerged in a secular context: We speak of Laplace’s demon or Maxwell’s demon and here mathematicians and physicians come into play in lieu of exorcists. Eventually, demons arrive in computer sciences with AI-research and systems development at MIT, with the result that an email reply of non-delivery is actually sent by a mailer demon. At least since then we have realized that we are not alone, that demons lie dormant everywhere as background system routines. They wait on servers, travel on the Internet as search engine bots, navigate our cars to destination or distribute braking force on all four wheels qua antilock breaking systems. Thus, they support us but keep us under permanent surveillance. This could be mythically paraphrased with circumsessio and obsessio, like in exorcism. Or on a more sober footing, they might be related to a possible etymological meaning of the demon in the sense of daiesthai, which admits to an interpretation of allocator and distributor. Issues of allocation and distribution are indeed crucial questions, which we are all faced with. This holds true for politics, economy, cybernetics, etc., and also for artists and their practices. When, for instance, I face a canvas I’m confronted with basic questions concerning the allocation of color. Various functions and meanings mix and the concept of the demon becomes a knot where traces of the histories of culture, myth and science are condensed in the present, so as to contingently develop them further into the future. This is why I draw up small literary stories for my projects that allow me to speculate and fictitiously expand on the factual. I apply quite a similar approach to my installations and processual sculptures that bear a relation to pataphysical machines. Technology gets processes going and makes growth possible. This entails, for that matter, an engagement with a new conceptualization of material. But this is not yet art nor is it the essence of what I am interested in. In my view, superimposing technological-scientific methods and procedures with artistic narrations is precisely what yields a tension that leads to new outcomes. Technological poiesis, in fact, is the prerequisite for an artistic poetics but is, of course, not to be confused with it.

HB: This takes me to the question of the status of the artist. I have an ambivalent impression especially as regards biological machines: the title MANNA-MACHINE implies a biblical all-purpose fuel that God granted to rain from heaven. This substance is life itself, a gift from the demon who is God. In your manna-machines, floating algae grow and are harvested to further feed two distinct utilizations: On the one hand, pigments can be extracted, and thus the substance of art, or rather painting. On the other hand, food can be produced that the artist lives off. This is specifically the idea of the Bachelor Machine, which permits the artist to autarchically and commandingly liberate herself from all dependences on nature. A machine that provides for both paint and food incorporates the maximum of the idea of the autarchic and autonomous genius. However, this in fact also entails the total subversion of sovereignty because non-human entities contribute to the processes and thus undermine authorship. In accord with Bruno Latour and actor-network theory, we can say that collectives of humans and things, of natural and artificial procedures evolve from the contributions and voices of objects and processes, in which the demonic manifests itself. I would be interested in how far the MANNA-MACHINE expresses the ambivalence of western self-conception as regards the subject but also of the sovereign power to act, which found its paramount formulation in the notion of the artist. The artist, and not the king, is the paradigm of sovereignty. The MANNA-MACHINE evokes and deconstructs this at the same time. How is the artist defined in this context and how is his art related to technological environments and biological processes?

TF: This is an apt description of the ambiguity that allows me to interact with disciplines and cultural codes in an unresolved, dirty in-between – literally in the inter-esse. The way I see it, the role of the artist is shifting from the traditional producer of images to a second-order artist who creates biotopes where works grow autonomously. But functions and discourses also overlap in the works. The MANNA-MACHINE, whose double structure you have just outlined, produces pigment, which I use as painting material, and this would be the symbolic disposition. Also, it grows food with which I feed fruit flies, for instance, and this would be the real function. The algae I harvest—Chlorella vulgaris—and the flies I cultivate—Drosophila melanogaster—are model organisms of biology and thus tell a bit of the history of science. The title MANNA-MACHINE quotes a biblical bioreactor. And yet, not without irony, though, it also refers to contemporary scenarios of a paradise machine. In recent years, all kinds of aspirations have been projected on algae, hopes of producing biofuel, eliminating the food shortage, or halting climate change by carbon dioxide binding. As in the demon, various and diverse threads converge in a tiny plant cell where crisis and desires, scientific and cultural histories, economy, politics and issues of resources and climate converge. All this renders the cell a narrative knot that, among other things, includes the statuses of the subject and the artist as well as the concept of autonomy.

HB: Metamorphoses and transformations play an important role in your work, in both an artistic and a political sense. It mirrors the crises of our time like ecology, food and climate. When Drosophila flies are cultured with algae and the former configure pixel portraits and pictures, this entails a long process replete with material and symbolic transformations. I see this process as an aesthetic and poetic act that ultimately produces actual fly-portraits of Darwin, Marx, Habermas, Luhmann, or Hobbes and the frontispiece of his Leviathan. It is not by accident that the first of the series of fly-paintings depicts the Leviathan and thus the paragon, or the allegory, of the total, the powerful state. It becomes apparent in the genealogy of your fly-paintings how far you include a political dimension in your art beyond the artistic sphere. Here, the tradition of political theory meets with artistic materiality and thus raises the issue of a political ecology and the government of our Earth. How do you see the relation between art and politics in your work?

TF: My work is not political in the everyday sense. It rather poses the age-old question of the conditio humana: What are the current conditions of human existence in the world of today? Where do the varied and partly divergent developments derive from and above all, where do they lead us? What putative necessities and, more importantly, what possibilities, contingencies, and degrees of freedom are potentially conceivable? It is at this very point that the demon again comes into play as allocator and distributor, as both the donor of order and disorder. Democracy and politics are also about the amount of disorder we seek and how much order we need as a society. Since the daimon is etymologically connected to democracy, that is, to the term demos (Greek for people), politics is always a demonic question. Everything that affects society through regulation and is established by law or constitution is a demonic mechanism of order. Particularly today, surveillance, control, and alleged security beg the question of how much order we actually want.

HB: As regards the demonic, the dichotomy of order and chaos could also be linked to the topic of utopia. Utopians from Plato to Bacon through to modernity were always philosophers of order who wanted to produce a kind of eudemonia, a blissful society. Eventually, however, this leads to a terrorist order, which constitutes a mode of ossification and ultimately of death. Your portrait series that is composed of Drosophila flies starts with Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan and ends with the skull of a larder beetle of the kind taxidermists use to dissect carcasses. At the end of this sequence we find the emblem of the facies hippocratica, as Benjamin would say, that is, that allegory of history where it enters into rigor mortis. The catalogue that features these works is entitled OUTCAST OF THE UNIVERSE and this is interesting because the outcast is the pariah, the outsider, the derelict who is also waste and trash. Is there a latent subversive sympathy for the destabilization of order and a turn towards the filth of the outcast?

TF: Regimes are narratives that provide orientation. Settled order leads to dogma or to harsh, immutable narratives, which serve to stabilize us morally, religiously and politically. Too much order and morality, therefore, limits the freedom of thinking. For me, one role of the artist is to challenge putative constraints, necessities, values and social models that construct order, by opening up to heretically different possibilities. Regulations are routines of life that occupy us obsessively. In “Wakefield,” Nathaniel Hawthorne tells the story of a demonic possession in the mode of a parallelization that ends with the words “outcast of the universe.” Wakefield lives in 19th century London. On a day in October he bids goodbye to his wife to go away for a couple of days. In truth, though, he moves into a small room in the vicinity of his house and stays there for the next twenty years. What starts out as a self-experiment, turns into years and years of omniabsence. For his wife and friends he vanishes without a trace and, as a consequence, is declared dead. He observes people for whom he is invisible. Each day he asks himself, what is it that drives me to stay here? I lived a happy life, so why do I vegetate in this parallel universe? Hawthorne describes a stealth phenomenon in the sense of a stealth bomber, but not only does Wakefield vanish for his environment, he also gets into a demonic loop of total self-loss. The story ends when he returns to his wife, as suddenly as he had left her, and resumes his life. This odd, irrational story is an allegory of our lives: in a nutshell, we go to university and then into retirement, what happens in between is somewhat fuzzy. Regardless of whether you dissent or blend in, you are always an outcast of the universe. The outcast is a singular type, but, as individualism has become the conformism of our times, we are all consciously or unconsciously outcasts.

HB: So, the one who leaves for a minute but vanishes for twenty years is the unobserved observer. Looking at your work, this also seems to be the strategy of your artistic interventions. While you are indeed the observer of a great number of social, aesthetic, political and natural processes you do not expose yourself to observation.

TF: I mistrust the concepts of the genius and the subject because above all they serve to construct myths that are induced by the market. I am more interested in creating things in the background that put themselves into effect on their own. The actual work of an artist, to me at least, is not to express myself on the surface; that’s only symptomatic. Rather, it is about building settings, and then something happens in this framework that produces art. This approach is different, of course, to the one of a “painter prince.” The fly pictures, for instance, are painted with transparent sugar water. Flies love sugar, so when feed on it they get stuck. The work of the painter remains invisible while the flies produce the pixels of the motive. In this respect, I construct aesthetic traps that visualize processes.

HB: Could I perhaps return to the flies once again, because flies are my favorite animals, and I have devoted a lot of time to them? In traditional symbolism, the fly is the animal of vanitas. For me, therefore, your cycle of pictures, ranging from Thomas Hobbes Leviathan to the skull, actually alludes to this tradition. The god Baal is the lord of the flies who poses a challenge to the monotheistic system god Jahveh by means of disorder and ecstacy. The fly symbolizes the moment of sin, chaos, and the diabolic. When you create a picture cycle made of flies about the history of philosophers of order this to me constitutes a narrative, or one of our conceptual narrations. Fixed order is broken up in a destructive moment when an ephemeral form of life bursts in. A new virulence of the living emerges out of such an excluded, dirty remains that indeed represent an essential part of life, the ens of entity.

TF: I like organisms such as flies, larder and museum beetles, fungi, and bacteria because they accelerate entropy. The beetles I use are sometimes called pest insects because they can, for instance, devour paintings and sculptures in museums. Of course, there is something morbid about them due to the fact that in the case burial they are the actants that return us to the cycle of life. These destruents are closely linked to the vanitas motif because of their involvement with the aesthetics of putrefaction and entropy. Art has traditionally nothing to do with entropy but, on the contrary, with form and information. Art creates cultural values, or generates, so to say, cultural heritage by accumulating and condensing information in materialized form. Entropy and putrefaction, however, are the nemesis of culture. Hence, we maintain museums and libraries as storages and safes in order to rescue artifacts and information from entropy. We care for our cars because otherwise they would rust. In other words, entropy corrodes our things, it’s a drain on our pockets, it’s the inflation of life. Likewise, biological entropy means aging. With telomeres becoming shorter we acquire wrinkles and eventually we die of old age or cancer. Entropy is the trauma of our existence, and we consider art and culture as our medicine to protect or at least to console us. We wage a fierce battle against entropy with all our industriousness. All that had to do with vanitas and entropy was traditionally deemed bad, poor and devilish. The experience of entropy is the innermost humiliation of the human being because it undermines our aspirations and implicates the condition of the potential for something more complex than us. This frightens us, yet in a mythical sense it would be something divine. By contrast, though, we pray to an orderly God that he make our world and ourselves stable and preserve a paradisical state. Though life is commonly described as a negentropic machine, I would venture the theory that we wouldn’t exist without entropy: would evolution have happened and would proteins have ever developed? Entropy might just create the prerequisites for complexities and higher orders. Artistically, I am interested in the aesthetics of entropy because it causes the other and the strange to invade. This is the reason why I work with destruents such as mushrooms, which secretly spawn miles of mycelia, or microorganisms, which invisibly colonize our bodies. We mustn’t forget that we are colonized: extraneous organisms exceed endogenous cells by the tenfold, which clearly illustrate that we are not ourselves. It would turn out badly for us if the cells and microorganisms in our body were eligible to vote on our identity. We simply wouldn’t be called human beings anymore.

HB: Entropy can be seen as the trajectory of being or, in a Freudian sense, as Thanatos, that is, as the reversion to a state of motionlessness and torpor. The keyboard is the instrument par excellent with which we produce signs, set values and fight against the second law of thermodynamics, the law of entropy. When you use ground meat to form a keyboard and feed it to maggots it lives through a metamorphosis because they transform into beetles. In this respect, we could say that entropy is the precondition for metamorphosis and new life. There wouldn’t be any energetic processes without entropy and death. One presupposes the other. And this is how I regard your approach to vanitas and the imagery of death not only concerning biological processes and matter but also concerning language. For example, your ice sculptures freeze our breath and thus produce an object in space whose condensation water is in turn used to synthesize amino acids, which are the elements of life. The congelation of breath is a hypothermic and thus entropic death of language. Metamorphosis, however, brings into play a semantic articulation that is not available to us except in the form of art, and also constitutes a reflexivity of art. Ultiamely, nothing but ice remains after the mists of discourse have cleared away. In so doing, we witness a play with articulations that on the one hand shows a romantic and vitalizing conception of metamorphosis and on the other involves that linear process of decline, vanitas. An entropic as well as a negatively entropic interpretation becomes apparent and both these lines overlap and form a knot. This might be the reason why you speak of your works as knots because they contain both aspects. At first sight, knots often seem tangled and thus highly disarranged. This stands in opposition to an hierarchic order, as demonstrated by your library pictures that feature registers, collections, systems, archives, arsenals and so on. One might refer to these libraries as vast burial sites or graveyards of cultural semantics. Nevertheless, they are expressions of the mind and their organization is required for a new and animating spirit. The ambivalence and double structure of entropy and information, ossification, and metamorphosis seems to me constitutive of your work. This becomes especially clear in your use of fungi. Fungi build the largest organisms in the world, gigantic hypogean networks. What is described by disoursive theory as rhizome, finds expression in the mycelium of a mushroom. Hence, a different model comes into play in which nature and culture, science and technology, the person and the collective, the micrological and the macroscopic are intertwined.

TF: Rhizomes are clonings of one and the same plant. They can be vast and interconnected but they are genetically redundant. Mushrooms, however, commonly live in symbiosis with other plants or trees. In other words, mycorrhiza provides a linking between different species. So, for me, the mycelium is a biologically far more adequate term for networked thinking. As a metaphor for the Internet, though, it would presumably be too subversive a term for most people because mushrooms are destruents that have decomposing effects. This includes, for instance, that pictures suddenly dissolve from the outside and characters go missing in texts. There is this ancient mythological topic that is also a paradigm of information and biotechnology: letters or general information are consumed and metamorphically transformed, objectified and enfleshed. When maggots consume the ground meat keyboard the tools of poets and philsophers start shapeshifting and crawling away. The German typewriter has only one letter combination that forms a noun: WERT (i.e. value, worth, merit). This is symptomatic because the use of the keyboard and thus of language implicates a positing of values regardless of whether bills, formulae, love letters or novels are written. The transvaluation of values, to freely adapt the words of Nietzsche, sets in motion a different mode of circulation. What occurs is litterally a translation, a transsubstantial objectivication or enfleshment.

HB: We have fungi, mycelia, networks and, of course, knots because without knots a network would be inconceivable. You create overlappings and heterogeneities with different threads that conflate and translate each other. Connections and conduits between the knots are crucial and here I’d like to address a further aesthetic element, the line. The hose, the cable, the line in the meaning of conduit are all pivotal elements of your form vocabulary. Even a glass object like PARLAMENT conflates octopus-like tubes into a knot that is evocative of a crown. Here, material and information flows happen as biological as well as symbolical processes of exchange and amalgamation. The conduit is a continuous and in several aspects connecting motif in your lab experiments, drawings, sculptures, and installations. These formal elements, which are essentially the basic principles of living organisms, visualize the mechanisms of living matter. Do art and science work on the same phenomena in this context—and not just for the first time today? When we look back at the Renaissance, for instance, the intersection of ars and scientia concerned questions of aliveness. Today, with the biological occupying center stage, your art seems to be rooted exactly in this tradition.

TF: I am not a scientist but I’m interested in scientific materials and methods. From the onset of modernity to the present day, materialities have at increasing rate featured prominently in art. It might sound paradoxical but the new molecular age is mobilized precisely by the wedding of the digital - that is, the virtual and immaterial - information age to materialities. In ancient mythology, the spiritual needed matter and body invariably to incarnate, that is, to become flesh. In other words, gods require avatars to log in as if the latter were servers. Historically, fine art ranked low in the hierarchy of the arts because it was tied to matter. Music and literature, however, were considered free arts - rates liberals - because apparently they were not bound by any constraints material or physical and closer to the spirit. Fine art, in contrast, was deemed trapped in matter and thus ascribed to the artes mechanicae, or technical arts. In the present molecular paradigm, this ancient flaw is now affirmed and has therefore turned into a specific quality of fine art. As an artist working today, I’m therefore right on target with fine art because it offers opportunities to work with atoms and molecules and thus dissolve the schism between body and mind, materiality, and information.

HB: Although there are indeed transitions: I’m thinking about your language distillates.

TF: In POEM, and with the distillates, I was interested in the very conjunction between matter and language. For me, each bottle is a molecular sculpture. In the synthesis, chemical processes with amino acids enrich the condensate of breathing air and reactions with gases produce ethanol. For me, these organic molecules are sculptures that link narratives from science, art, literature, myth, and epistemics in their production process. Translations and transmutations happen on a scientific as well as artistic and fictive level. Even today, something spiritual and demonic resonates when we say spiritus or spirit of wine instead of alcohol. And something else speaks from us like glossalia when we are inebriated. Thus, the bottles and their molecules are at the same time sculptures, liquidized literature and information memory. An incorporation takes place when I consume them; when drunk, I perhaps experience a molecular inscription and become a performative item. The work PANCREAS performs this principle on the layer of written language, of writing: the sculpture consists of artificial intestines—a bioreactor containing bacteria—that convert cellulose, which is provided in the form of paper, to sugar or glucose. Books and pages are digested and the glucose obtained feeds human brain cells in a second bioreactor. What I find so fascinating about glucose is that each and every cell of a plant, an animal or a human being lives of it. The human brain in particular squanders glucose so lavishly that up to 75 per cent of it fizzles out in our heads. Translating language, symbols and signs into matter might seem a rather ludicrous notion, otherwise only found in wizardry where things vanish or emerge by the uttering of a magic formula. This can also be found in the tradition of Kabbalism or in Christian transubstantiation, where blood becomes flesh. Technologically speaking, we are currently witnessing a “neokabbalist” era in which by use of 3D-printers computer texts materialize und become real things. My processual sculptures are somewhat pataphysical and ironic but nevertheless reflect a genuineness in the sense that the notion of text is extended by the life sciences today. The extension of the concept of text that we find in Derrida, for example, might undergo what is perhaps an illegitimate bastardisation of immateriality and materiality in my work, but the result is a topical knot. Knots are somewhat transhistorical, as threads from the past converge at present and link to a possible future. For me, artworks act as knots when they operate as thick discriptions, as machines of possibility and translation. Therefore, visual materialization is not contradictory to processes. Materialities are part of visual thought, especially as regards sculptural practice. The idea to realize language sculptures, which freeze humid breathing air to chunks of ice, plays at the same time with physical and symbolic translations as well aggregate states. The more people talk about art in the exhibition space the more hot humid air comes out of their mouths and the faster and bigger the sculpture grows. And the more condensate POEM has available, the more alcohol is distilled that in turn is consumed by the visitors of the exhibition, who thus become more and more talkative: speaking, distilling, drinking. There’s something ironic about this, something serious and yet banal. And even if nothing but empty, warm words were exchanged on art, a work of art comes into being at any rate.

HB: The spirit distilled from words.

Einzelnachweise

• Hartmut Böhme, Thomas Feuerstein, “Dämonen der Kunst” (deutsch)