 Hello everyone, welcome to Moudam. I'm Clémentine Probi, I'm an assistant curator here at the Moudam and I'm very happy to welcome you for Vitzimoneti's lecture which is titled Art, Purocracy and Resistance and which is part of the public program associated with Tsung-Tyu's exhibition which is entitled Civic Floor and still on view in the pavilion here at Moudam. It's an exhibition that considers how ideology applies to design and architecture and especially in the case of carceral spaces and bureaucracy, bureaucratic systems. So Vitz's lecture is very much going to draw on Tsung's work and I invite you to visit the exhibition if you haven't done so yet because I think it will give you a very interesting highlight on Tsung-Tyu's practice. Just a few words about Vitz bio. So Vitzimoneti is a lecturer in philosophy of art at the University of Liverpool where he's also running the MA program in art, philosophy and cultural institutions. In 2021 he was selected as the BBC New Generation thinker and he has also been hosting the Art Against the World podcast in collaboration with the Liverpool Biennial. His book Art Against the World Investigating the Place of Contemporary Art within democratic public sphere is forthcoming with Yale University Press in 2023. So now I leave the floor to you Vitz. Thank you. There we go. I'll try again. Thank you so much Clementine for this really kind introduction. And thank you all for coming, especially on a wintery Sunday like this where you might want to prefer to stay indoors and watch Netflix or something like this. So yes, thank you very much. And I'll conduct this talk in English. I mean my German is sort of passable. My French I can sort of say La Dition in a restaurant and my Luxembourgish is non-existent. So thank you so much for bearing with me in English. So I'll begin with a little anecdote when we speak about bureaucracy and bureaucratic reason. And this was a couple of years ago when I gave a talk not unlike this one at the University of Padua in Italy, which is a beautiful, beautiful town which I completely recommend going to visit. And after I gave my talk, you know, I think it was about art and politics. That's kind of my shtick. It's kind of what I talk about. After I gave my talk, I needed to get my flights reimbursed. You know, I flew with EasyJet from London, I think, to Venice. And I said, you know, now it'd be great to get some money back for the flights. And they said, oh, yes, of course, but we need your boarding pass. And I said, well, I have the receipt. I have the receipt that I used to pay for my flight, but I don't have the boarding pass because the boarding pass was on my app, on my phone. And they said, you know, Dear Dr. Simuniti, that's wonderful that you have the receipt, but we really need the boarding pass because that's the rules. You need the boarding pass, no boarding pass, no reimbursement. And I said, but why do you need the boarding pass? And they said, well, we needed to prove that you were here. And I said, but I was there. I mean, you saw me. I was literally there giving this talk. And they said, yes, but that doesn't count as proof. What counts as proof is the boarding pass. And so I sort of thought about it and I said, OK, well, here's the boarding pass. And I just sent them the boarding pass and they said, thank you very much. And they paid me the money. But if you look very carefully on this boarding pass, you see that on the 12th of January and the 15th of January when I flew, if you look very, very carefully, you see that Saturday, 12th of January is a little bit smaller than Tuesday, the 15th of January. And that's because I actually forged this boarding pass. I didn't have the boarding pass. So I printed off an old boarding pass and I scanned it and I went into Photoshop and I sort of moved things around and I send this off. Please don't share this with the University of Padua or Italy in general because, you know, I might get arrested next time I'm there. But I like to bring this up because I think it's an example of something that we might call the bureaucratic moment. So this is a moment where we encounter a bureaucratic system which is eminently reasonable and we think to ourselves, this was something that was created by human minds, this bureaucratic system in order to make our life a lot easier. But then what the system completely lacks is a different kind of reason. It lacks a certain kind of thoughtfulness, right? It lacks the kind of everyday common sense reason that we recognize in other humans. And sometimes this manifests itself in what we might call completely first world problems, right? A lecturer from Liverpool getting somewhere on EasyJet and getting 200 euros back. I mean, you know, it's not a big deal. It was very annoying, but it's not a life or death situation. And sometimes we encounter these bureaucratic moments in these very everyday scenarios. You know, when you need a form from the city council or when that computer image is asking you to confirm that you're not a robot and you're clicking on different traffic lights to prove to a robot that you're not a robot. But in other situations, it can of course be a life and death kind of scenario. If you're applying for asylum or if you are applying against deportation or perhaps if you're trying to prove in the court of law that you're innocent of a crime that you didn't commit, these kind of bureaucratic moments, this realization that there is a whole entirely rational system which nevertheless cannot speak to you as a human is a difficult and a threatening one indeed. Now, this bureaucratic moment, I think this realization with a system of reason greater than ourselves is central to Song Tiu's work, especially this exhibition that you can see here at Mudam. So I'll just talk a little bit about the exhibition because perhaps not everyone has seen it, but what you see on the first floor as you enter the pavilion are these kind of minimalistic sculptures made out of metal, made out of steel, and what they have inside is earth piled up. And these sculptures, when you look at them at first time, they might look like something that's come out of a spaceship enterprise or something like that. They have this kind of minimalist, cool beauty about them. But when you read up about them and perhaps explore them, you see that the little spaces, little enclosures inside are actually plans, their kind of choruses or floor plans of prisons, of different prisons that Song Tiu has explored in her research practice. So some of them, perhaps the most famous design of a prison is the 19th century radial design, which philosophers like Jeremy Bentham or their later and more critically, Michel Foucault, talked about as the panopticon. So it's just a water bottle. So what you have here in the middle, so you can see the same panopticon there top right, what you have in the middle is a tower. And inside the tower, you have a guard who can survey like the entire prison, which is then spreading out like rays. And the idea of the panopticon, a very well known idea of the panopticon is that at any point, it's not the point that you can be surveyed from the tower, but at no point are you sure whether there's someone in the tower or not. And so there you're always possibly being observed by someone. So this is a very famous example of prison architecture, which has been discussed a lot in 20th century philosophy, but Song Tiu then discusses or rather performs other prison architecture as it develops through the ages. And I'll just show you the very final sculpture, which you can see there, which is a kind of a strange, irregular, triangular structure where one of the points of it seems to be that it allows a different kind of surveillance. It has these acute angles, which are apparently easier to monitor by cameras and the same kind of like acute angles also make it more difficult for a human to orient himself or herself in space. Now, prison architecture is perhaps the most bureaucratic kind of architecture there is, because here a certain kind of ordering reason is ordering not just the way to live, but every single aspect of your life, right? How you live, how you sleep, how you exercise, how you eat. But that's not the only kind of bureaucratic element in Song Tiu's exhibition. So on the same floor going around, you see these forms, these kind of white plaster, plaster of Paris, I think, or plaster cast forms, which have these like little squares and little lines and little boxes inside of them. And what they really are is, well, it is forms, but that is to say what in German you might call cool formula or formulae in French. So there are forms that you're supposed to fill out. And the ones that Song Tiu has taken are forms that are used to make an asylum application or other applications to do with asylum status, like to get your family reunited or to waive certain criminal checks when you do your asylum application. So, you know, you really, I think, with the kind of precision and formality that is so typical of Song Tiu's practice, you have here this sense once you realize this, that here are these squares and the entirety of a complex human life is supposed to be poured into these forms. But the bit that I find like perhaps the most moving or the kind of like the cleverest in this exhibition are these like little plaques that you see here on the left. And these are the ones that really connect the two works. So you can see here it says things like bars, one A and one B, then blocks, then boxes, then cells, then lines. And when you're first looking at this, you kind of think, oh, blocks, cells, lines, she's talking about aspects of prison architecture. But actually what she's talking about is the square millimeter space that you have to write down your life story when you make your asylum application. Right. So something that initially I think when you walk into the room into this like beautiful, sunlit, mudam pavilion, something that initially looks like a piece of minimalist design, you know, something that, you know, a person who's way too rich to shop in IKEA would buy, even though, you know, the static is similarly kind of minimalist actually turns out to have like a much more sinister message and a much more acute commentary on particularly asylum seeker application situation, something that we might speculate also derives from Syng Thieu's personal biography. So as I think you might know from the artist talk that she gave here, she is a German citizen who emigrated to Germany from Vietnam in the 90s. Her father was a contract worker and she has personal experience as a child of detention, of citizenship and permit of residence applications. So, you know, it's something that derives from her personal experience as well. Now, next, what I'd like to do is actually to think a little bit about this in like the broader kind of context of thinking about bureaucracy through art. Like, why is bureaucracy like such a kind of like such a dry topic? Right. What role does it play in art? Now, if we just look sort of at literature, let's say, then I think it is a distinctly modern subject. So even though all civilizations, right, going right back, if you like to the Sumerians have had forms of democracy, sorry, not democracy, have had forms of bureaucracy, bureaucracy as a subject for literature or as a theme in art is definitely something that arises. I think perhaps one of you will correct me, but I think arises with the 19th century. Now, initially, I think a lot of it has to do with a kind of a forms of satire. So you might know the great Ukrainian Russian writer, Nikolai Gogol, and his various stales of bureaucratic life in the overcoat, in the nose, or in this marvelous play, The Government Respector or Revisor in Russian, where an important, well, what seems like an important government inspector comes to a little Russian village and all the bureaucrats, you know, the mayor, the inspector of charities, all the judge, they're all kind of like scattered to hide little corruptions that have been going on in small town Russia. Or you might think even, let's say, of Alice in Wonderland. So you might remember there is a scene in Alice in Wonderland where she stands accused before the court of the heart of the Queen and King of Hearts, and she is in this courtroom and she's growing larger and larger and kind of like filling out this courtroom. And at some point she topples over this box in which the jury is sitting, you know, this typical surrealist situation. And the King of Hearts turns to her and says, everyone who is over eight foot tall, you know, who's over three meters tall has to exit the courtroom now. And she says, well, you know, if he says so, and he says, it's rule number 43, it's the oldest rule in the book. And she says, well, if it's the oldest rule in the book, then why is it not rule number one? Why is it rule number 43, you know? So it's this kind of taking the mickey, making fun of bureaucracy, which is, I think, a feature of someone like Louis Carroll in Alice in Wonderland. But it's really then with the 20th century when we get a bureaucracy to possess this kind of demonic theme where bureaucracy becomes conceptualized as one of the main enemies, if you like, of individual agency of human subjectivity. And there is no one who does that more canonically than, of course, Franz Kafka with his, the trial, their process and his, the castle, the Schloss in, for example, in the trial. We have Josef Kahr, a middling bank manager who suddenly finds himself accused of something. He never finds out what he is being accused of. He's being tried. He's being pushed back and forth by this anonymous bureaucracy. He has no idea what's happening. And in the end, he's being, he's led off and killed with a kitchen knife. In Dutch loss, it's a bit less grim at the end, but there's a similar bureaucratic thing at place. So here I think we really get this idea of modern bureaucracy as something bad in art, right? Where the main enemy of the protagonist is not an evil antagonist, right? It's not the queen of the night or, you know, some kind of evil person. The antagonist is not a person. It's a reason, but it's not a person. It's a kind of a nameless system that we have ourselves created. And you find this theme in different ways. I think in countless works in the later 20th century, you know, you might mention 1984, which creates, which is about bureaucracy from a specifically totalitarian lens, even in some comedies. I'm not going to go into more detail, but I'll just mention maybe a kind of a problem that emerges in contemporary literature, which is a sort of division between those who talk about the bureaucrat. And you might think of someone like Kazuo Ishiguro with the remains of the day where you have a butler who obeys, who does everything that he is told, you know, and then it turns out that his employer is Nazi and so forth. But or you might think of something like the film, The Lives of Others, which is also about a spy in the German Stasi in Germany, right? So those work, which think about, well, how does the bureaucrat think? Who is this, you know, gray presence who signs forms and, you know, acts as the tool of bureaucracy? And on the other hand, you have those who focus on the victims of bureaucracy. And I will just mention here a very recent film from last year, actually Limbo by Ben Sharrock, which is, I think, a very brilliant film about a Syrian asylum seeker in Scotland, you know, in the kind of situation that he undergoes. So you can either look at the problem of bureaucracy from the point of view of the bureaucrat or from the user, if you like. But both of these in 20th century paint quite a grim picture. OK, let's look into a little bit more detail. Just because I really love Kafka, but like, let's have a little bit more detail in a few passages from their process and just compare that for fun with some of his work and see what we can get out of it. So Jozefka is in his room. He gets accosted by these uniformed policemen. And he describes one of these policemen or officials who's arresting him. He was slim, but firmly built. His clothes were black and close fitting with many folds and pockets, buckles and buttons and belt, all of which gave the impression of being very practical, but without making it very clear what they were actually for. So you have this person dressed up in a way that looks like really practical and useful, you know, that's how I think of people who go camping. But, you know, someone who has all of these buckles and all of these things. And so it makes you think, well, the point of bureaucracy is often to make you think that everything has been thought through, that everything is really useful. And just the same, you might think of sunk to use form, right? Everything is really ordered. There's, you know, some some columns on the left or some rows on the right. There are some boxes to take, like it's all perfectly fitting. And you're supposed to put your whole life in here, right? So the first point of this comparison is bureaucracy appears useful. Or projects this kind of appearance of usefulness. Then he says, when these people are resting him, he says, Yousef Khan, what sort of people were these? What were they talking about? What office did they belong to? Ca was living in a free country after all, everywhere was at peace. Laws laws were decent and were upheld. Who were these to accost him in his own home? So bureaucracy only appears to us as a problem. When we ourselves are threatened, right? Most of the time things go pretty smoothly, right? You get reimbursed for your flights. You click on those traffic cones in the sort of thing that computer wants you to click on. So most of the time bureaucracy seems fine, but it's when it's directed against you that you start noticing its cruelty. And finally, I really like this passage. So he's still being arrested. This is all from chapter one. They are talking about things of which they don't have the slightest understanding anyway. It's only because of their stupidity that they are able to be so sure of themselves. I just need a few words with someone of the same social standing as myself and everything will be comparably clearer, much clearer than a conversation with these two can make it. So Yousef Khan, who is a bank official, things to himself. These lowly working class policemen, they don't really know what they're doing. I need to talk to someone like myself, you know? And so all the kind of social distinctions that we think are neutralized by bureaucracy are actually emphasized by bureaucracy, right? When you're faced with a bureaucratic problem, you ask yourself, do I maybe know someone who works in parliament? Do I maybe know someone who's a lawyer? Do I maybe know someone who can help me? I, a respectable middle class person with connections, can surely overcome this problem, right? So bureaucracy, even though it appears neutral here, as it does in Songtu's exhibition, actually emphasizes the differences that already exist between us. OK, so here's so we've said a few things about how bureaucracy appears in 20th century European art and how it might carry over into Songtu's arresting works. But of course, Songtu's work is not a novel, right? It deals with these questions in a very different way from a Kafka novel or a film. So what is gained, or let's put it differently, what is different when we approach these things through art, right? Why are we going to museums to talk about bureaucracy or about politics or about anything at all, if you like? What is it about art, visual art that kind of helps us to have a way into this question? Now, that's a huge question, right? Which maybe Clementine will tell us more about. But it's something that I think everyone working with the arts is wondering about, but what I would like to do now is just to sort of place Songtu's work a little bit in the recent history of art and to think about where her idiom comes from, why is she making the forms in the way that she makes them? So I don't think that a practice like hers would be possible, of course, had we not had the history of what is sometimes very broadly and very contentiously called postmodernism or movements after first modernism and more precisely, perhaps, conceptual art. So let me give an example from United States where a lot of this kind of conceptual work sort of germinated in the 1960s. So, OK, let's think about actually one step back. Let's think about, say, Jackson Pollock, right? The abstract expression is the abstract shapes on the walls in the 1950s. So if you like, very, very simplified, but let's say 1950s, you know, Jackson Pollock's during your everyone's thinking about art as the expression of your innermost being, which you viscerally expressed by putting it out onto the canvas, by splattering it out in some way. Now, you know, there's a lot of art historical debate about this, but let's just take this as a simplification because simplifications are sometimes useful. Now, what then happens with the next generation that partly in contradistinction, partly in trying to differentiate themselves from this unbridled expression? What they do, at least some of them, is to go into purer forms of abstraction, abstraction, which appears to be ruled by an impartial, nonhuman in some way reason. So let's think, for example, about Saul LeWitt, one of the artists of 1960s conceptualism and a work like his serial project. So often these artists would work in series. And here you see on the left hand side his preparatory sketch, right? I mean, these don't look unlike Tsingtu's work in some way. So each of these is supposed to be a kind of a permutation of another form. So you have a square with no square inside, a square with little square inside, a big, sorry, a cube with a rectangular shape inside. You can kind of see a logic, right? When you look at these. But what is the logic, right? There is no preordained reason why this should be the way it is. It is pure, it is a very pure art. It's a very pure joy. It is a joy which you're supposed to feel purely by the ability of witnessing how another mind has formed these things into a kind of like a rational sequence. LeWitt himself thought that his art should give an impression of listening to Bach or someone like this, right? There's no emotion here. It is art of pure permutation, of pure reason. Another artist who worked in this in this manner and who I think bears even closer relation to Song Tiu's work is the American artist Adrian Piper. So here is a very early work. This is actually a picture I took in her archives. So this is a very early work by Piper, which is still, I think, clearly influenced by LeWitt. And we have like similar kind of permutations of shapes happening. But the reason why Piper is interesting is that she later, much like Song Tiu, takes this formal language, this cruel beauty of minimalism and applies it to more political issues. So here, for example, Piper exhibited these questionnaires, questionnaires which are a little bit like forms, like the formularen that Tiu also exhibits. And what you can see here is, for example, on the left-hand side, a question. Do you have at least one black colleague at your place of employment? If yes, in what manner do you socialize in the workplace? A one-on-one dinner, business lunch, coffee break, office party gathering, none of the above. Have you ever had sexual relations with a black person? If yes, what social events did you attend together? Family reunions, dinners, et cetera, with close friends, job-related dinners, parties, or outings, dinners, et cetera, with acquaintances, outside entertainment, movies, sports, et cetera, none of the above. So there is a kind of, you know, Piper herself is here using a very bureaucratic language to kind of poke quite an uncomfortable bone in 1980s New York art world, which you might say, like, you know, outwardly was very, probably very liberal, very civil, but within which she herself as an African-American still noticed various, you know, problems with racism and various kind of structural injustices, if you like. But I don't wanna talk so much about the American context specifically, right, but like the form, right? So here is the very cool, cruel, impersonal address of the formula, which is now being used to ask you something really personal and to actually get you to think about to what extent do you live by your morals? And I think that what perhaps Piper is trying to show her audience is that actually all of these nice people who are going, or many of these nice people, or nice people like us, who are going to, you know, art events in New York or somewhere else and who are living very respectable lives are actually kind of ticking boxes. It's like, do I have a few diverse friends, tick? Do I do a little bit of charity, tick? Do I, am I a good and upstanding citizen, tick, right? So you tick these boxes and you convince yourself that you're a good person, let's say. Now, okay, it's not a, you know, it's not an easy work. It's not a friendly work, if you like, but yeah, it's certainly a bit of a kind of politically damning. Maybe I'll just, yeah, I'll talk a bit about this as a bit of a difficult one, but what we get to, I think like with a lot of these works is not just the form of bureaucracy in the end, but a certain kind of psychology of bureaucracy, right? Like it's actually very hard, I think, for us as human beings to get out of our habits, right? We're constantly ticking boxes where, you know, it would be too much to ask us to be constantly creative, let's say. But as most famously Hannah Arendt has noted in her report on the Eichmann trial in Israel, right? That is precisely the certain kind of mentality to leads to what she has called so influential banality of evil. I'm not going to read out these long extracts, but the basic point that Eichmann wants to, sorry, that Arendt wants to make about Eichmann is this. When you are in a position of power, where evil comes from, or where great transgression comes from, is not from people having these demonic evil desires to kind of destroy others necessarily. Where it comes from is from simply following rules, right? From simply following rules, from applying what has been given to you from above, and then not necessarily questioning it. Now, we can talk a bit more in the Q and A if you like about, you know, the kind of disputes around Arendt's scholarship about what exactly she meant. But I think the key takeaway point here is this. Just as bureaucracy makes us into, just as when we are faced with a bureaucratic moment and we bemoan the situation that we are kind of like victims of bureaucracy, more often than not, we are preceding ourselves in much the same manner, right? We follow these rules, we apply them. And so the great kind of moral quality, which is being sought in the 20th century, is not the ability necessarily to follow rules, but what Arendt said Eichmann, the great Nazi bureaucrat, lacked. So he says here, it was not stupidity that he had, but a curious, quite authentic inability to think. What Eichmann lacked was what Arendt calls thought. It's, I mean, it's a very curious, it's a very philosophical formulation, but what I think she means is that in every step where you are required to follow a rule, you're faced with the option of following it, of executing the rule, or of thinking. And by thinking, I think what she means is constantly questioning, but can we constantly question? So I'd like to, before we kind of move into the Q and A, actually talk about another of Tsung-Tiu's works, also so that you get like a sense a little bit of her other work. So as I said before, her work, as we saw there, is very austere, right? It's very impersonal, there's almost like no remnants of humanity inside. But sometimes you do get a glimpse of humanity in her work. And for example, in this work Tsuktsvank, which was shown at Haus der Kunst in Munich two years ago. And here we have an office. I also thought I would talk about this because we're in Luxembourg and it's quite close to the European Union. And I think there are some interesting connections. So here we have an office of a fictional European bureaucrat called Alfred Stevens, who has worked in various different uptime long and various different offices of the European Union. He's Irish. And we only learn about him really by walking around the space and by finding different aspects of it. And so, okay, we see the office. Then here you see in the middle picture his desk. He has like a funny shark mug. He has a newspaper. He has some pictures. We see that on the pictures he has a Vietnamese family. So he has a Vietnamese wife and a child. This is actually a picture of Tsung Thieu's mother herself. And then there's like a kind of like an article here, an article in a local newspapers, which sings the praises of the local bureau, of the bureaucrat. And it sort of says, you know, we always talk about politicians, but what about all the wonderful people who work in bureaucracy? And he says, for example, he's quoted in this newspaper as saying, quote, it is instrumental that we make humane decisions, he says. He often worked as a case worker for refugees. But sadly, our boat can only hold so many. Stephen's own family has a long history of immigration as so many Irish families do and so forth. Now in another bit he says, now that Stephen's stellar career is coming to a successful close, he's most looking forward to spending more time with his four grandchildren. The hours in Brussels can be grueling. We work until 9 p.m. every night, even Fridays, he says, refuting the often raised accusation of civil servants Dolce Vita. So I think what I really like about Tsung Thieu's work is that she's not hitting you over the head with a hammer off political convictions. We have here like really quite a specific case of someone who really does seem to have led, you know, like a good life according to their morals and probably did a lot of good in some way. But what sort of seeps through the cracks, what you sort of start noticing is like, oh my God, there are like all of these cases, all of these lives that this person had in his hands, all of these let's say asylum applications which a stroke of his pen could throw out of the window or have accepted. So again, we're faced, I think, with this key aspect of modernity, this sense that there's a higher reason, a reason which can rule us, but which itself somehow no longer seems human. You sort of want to go up to this man and say like, yeah, but what did you really think about these asylum seekers? What was your real opinion about them? Why did you let this one in or that one not? But he can't give you that answer because he's working on a completely different level of abstraction. Okay, so what should we say art can tell us about this situation? What can art teach us maybe about the bureaucratic moment with which we find ourselves faced so often in modernity? Well, okay, art has many different options, right? Art can like Kafka create a kind of a dark satire of it, like Ben Sherrock's film. It can tell us the human stories of the people trapped in the bureaucracy. It can give a fine-tuned portrait of the bureaucrat in a way that Kazuy Shiguro's novel where the main character of Remains of the Day is also called Alfred Stevens. So some of you is quoting there. So art can do all of these different things, but what art certainly cannot do, right? It cannot actually solve the problems. If we ask ourselves, well, what should we do day to day? You know, maybe you work in European bureaucracy or I make bureaucratic decisions in a small way as a lecturer. Like when you're faced with these kinds of decisions, well, what should you do? What should you do with this system? And we cannot answer this question in a general way, right? We should reform the systems that are bad. We should uphold the systems that are good to some degree, but we should be aware that in modernity, whatever solution we come up with, we are always going to be creating new systems and we're always going to be creating systems that unfortunately it seems are creating terrible plights. You might of course have a political idea about this and you might think a completely different system would be a better solution. But even then, even if you create, let's say a socialist paradise, you will be faced with bureaucracy and everything that it brings with it. So ultimately, I don't think that this kind of critical stance that art takes towards bureaucracy should lead us towards a thought that we should reject all systems, right? That we should become kind of fashionable anarchists, but rather it shows us something else, that morality or the good life, the good politics is ultimately a systems of rules. But in order to be moral, we mustn't only follow rules, we must also remain human. And to be human, we must ultimately be ready to break rules, to not just embrace bureaucracy, but also to some extent chaos. Okay, I'll leave you with that and thank you very much for your time. And I think Clementine says that there's some, you and I feel free to go if you're very bored, but otherwise, feel free to stay. Yeah, so thank you so much, Vid, for this lecture. It was super interesting, super thought-provoking, I think, and a real highlight on Sumitio's work. I was wondering, maybe I start with a question and please do ask any question or give us any comment that you have afterwards. I was wondering if you could expand a bit more on how art forms, what's their specific role in political discourse as compared to other forms of knowledge, because I know that you've written extensively about that. And I think it would be interesting to know a bit more about your thoughts on this. Yeah, thanks. So I think one thing that I ask myself when I write about art and politics is that it's very easy to say this artist has a really radical political idea, right? This artist is really radically political. They're saying we should tear down all the prisons or something like this. And I always ask myself, well, but why not do that in a different way? Why not just join a protest or a political party or do, if you like, politics within journalism, let's say. Okay, now this is like a big can of worms and a big question. But I think ultimately what art, and I'm speaking not just to visual art but also of novels or literature, it allows us to create like that sense of puzzlement or that sense of kind of questioning, right? With an artwork, you very rarely just get a question. What you get, sorry, what just get a statement. What you get is a process. So for example, with Song Tzu's work, you might initially walk in and ideally, I think, you would walk in, see them only as beautiful objects and then you sort of realize what they really are and you have this moment of shock. And then you look at the forms and then you begin to ask, well, what is my role if all of this, am I upholding this, you know, the system, let's say, is the system bad? So what art can do in a complete nutshell, as opposed to other forms of discourse, is that it suspends you in that moment. One of the things it can do is it suspends you in that moment of uncomfortable questioning, right? Which is very hard to actually sustain. In real life, you brush it aside, right? You say I don't have time for this. That's, I think, in an ideal world, what art can create that space to think. Thank you. Is there any question in the audience? Thank you. I have a question about the evolution of practices with ideas that are political between the 60s and now. What are the major differences? Yeah, so, I mean, there are so many different practices today. You know, it's fair to say, right? I mean, today you have everything from protest art to conceptual art to everything. But maybe what I find super interesting about the 60s is that they are really the birth of the kind of way in which we think about contemporary art now. And we don't often realize that and why. This was made in 1966, right? So you think 60s hippies, sexual revolution, politics, blah, blah, blah, right? All of that is happening. But these guys, conceptual artists in New York were making this kind of work right up until 69, 70. And we're not really thinking about their work in political terms necessarily. Maybe privately they were against the war in Vietnam, but it didn't show, you know, there's no Vietnam in this, right? No war in Vietnam in this. And then you get 1970 and you get exhibitions like the big exhibition in the Museum of Modern Art called Information. And suddenly these two things are forced together. Artists who are conceptualists, who are modernists, who are formalists are simultaneously thought of as the source of political engagement. In 1970, in information, in MoMA, you have works like this and then you have a curatorial text which says, this is sort of somehow anti-establishment or... And so you get this complete paradox, right? There is no political content in this. But you get the beginning of something very interesting, which is that you get the beginning of, I think, like artistic practice that can think about politics by presenting you with these questions with these difficult forms. And I think this ultimately leads down to Songtu's work. So, I mean, in a nutshell, I would say in the 1960s, artists who are perhaps in the late 60s were very torn between formalism and protest, let's say. I think today you have like a much wider variety of expression and I think, I don't know, a lot of work that fills, but the best work is the work that I think sustains that questioning and comfortable moment for me. Thanks. Thank you very much for your inspiring talk. I have a comment and a question. The comment is that apart from Hannah Arendt, this was mainly staying in the realm of art, written art, novels or so, when it comes to criticizing bureaucracy and I thought maybe you don't know the German sociologist Max Weber, who has a wonderful quote, which is the cold skeleton hands of bureaucracy and that they would fit well, I think, in your assemblage there. My question is to the work of Songtu and what role the location actually plays for her installations. So whether she comes with this installation and then places them in whatever museum gives her in terms of space or whether, particularly with the Zeughaus installation, the location, I mean, this was built in 1937 and supervised by Adolf Hitler himself, the location where the installation is in there. I cannot imagine that she would be oblivious of the location itself. So I was just wondering what the, in terms of the artistic process, where does the location come in? Well, I can only answer this question. Thank you very much for the Weber quote. I mean, I think he does absolutely fit into the narrative. With regards to her practice, I know that, for example, when you look at this work, there's a kind of a soil, there's some dirt. You can sort of see that there's some dirt and soil inside the sculpture. And this is taken, I believe, from around the museums, that right, Clementine. So there is a kind of a nod to I think the local in a sense that the forms that constrict us, the bureaucratic forms that, you know, even in carceral architecture and more broadly, can of course be completely international and completely invisible. But the kind of life that is being constrained is always somehow belonging to a particular locale. I mean, that's how I, this is my interpretation rather than her text. I can't answer specifically about to what extent she engages with local contexts, but you're right that, but her practice is certainly incredibly research-driven. She's done also a lot of work with regards to Vietnamese contract workers, for example. And I think in Suk Tsvang, you actually, I don't have the slide, but in the frames there, I think you can see some case studies of Vietnamese contract workers, if I'm not mistaken. Which again, is a situation very much to do with the reunified Germany where the workers were being sent back. And yes, I cannot confirm your hypothesis, but given the kind of artists that she is and how kind of research-driven her practice is, I would not be surprised at all if that figured in her decision to make this work. But to make it even more specific, I would put this in Brussels really, or like in Luxembourg, I think it would work well here as well. Maybe you can bring it here next time. Actually, maybe to complete your answer with the installation that you can see in the pavilion is site-specific. So, Tsvang conceived it, especially for the pavilion of Modem in Luxembourg, and she conducted a lot of research on Luxembourg, on bureaucracy in Luxembourg, and of course, the country being, and the city being also the location for many European institutions, many bureaucratic institutions was played a role in the specific topics that she addresses in the exhibition. Any other question? You identified the 19th century as a sort of moment where bureaucracy became a topic in literature and art. So, I was wondering what you think it was about that time or that moment in history and how we were living. That sort of brought that forward. And then the second question, I'm gonna wrap two into one. In a lot of the examples you cite here, there is a sort of Western element or moment when looking at, I don't know, for example, a variety of communist regimes in Southeast Asia, there is a sort of similar or greater even tyranny of bureaucracy, and have you looked at sort of art from that geography and how it maybe also deals with bureaucracy? So, I was trying to think whether I could give like a specific example which is specifically about bureaucracy. And I mean, maybe you have an example for... So, I haven't. I mean, I know that in terms of some huge work specifically, I mean, she grew up in Germany and so her work, at least the work I'm familiar with mostly deals with that situation, for example. But of course, you're absolutely right that in various... Everywhere there is a modern state whether democratic or utilitarian, right? Like you have a bureaucracy and so you would have that kind of like response. Now, I can't think of specifically Southeast Asian or, you know, in some sense, I mean, in Japan, I guess like you have it in Murakami's novels. You know, I would sort of... He's obviously very Kafkaesque, but I can't give you a very good answer there. I mean, I'll think about it. In terms of the 19th century, yeah, it's a curious one. I mean, I wrote this talk for this presentation specifically and I'd love to do more research if there are any historians here to talk to you about it. But it seems to me that, let's say when Gogol writes the government inspector in Russia in the 1830s, I believe, right? There is this transformation there and elsewhere where you still have essentially an autocratic regime, right? A regime which is ruled by more or less the ruler, but this bureaucratic class becomes increasingly prominent, increasingly powerful as well, but people's lives likewise are becoming like increasingly kind of embroiled in it. I guess more broadly in Europe, you get the Napoleonic Code, right? With Napoleon's conquest of Europe. So like you get like a very kind of firm sense of the law as something that kind of governs the states. But if we then think also like later, kind of in the, if I were to compare Gogol and Kafka, right? Like early 19th and early 20th century, I think one thing that's interesting is that you have empires that in some sense are failing. You know, you still have like a very strong bureaucracy in place, but it's breaking at the seams, right? The Russian bureaucracy, as Gogol describes it, is very inefficient. The bureaucracy of Kafka experiences is of Austro-Hungarian empire, kind of like dilapidating decaying and then defeated of course in the First World War. So you have this like sense of old habits, really strong kind of way of how things are supposed to be done. You know, your life being governed by it, but you're increasingly becoming aware of the pointlessness of it, if you like. Yeah, that's how I would briefly summarize it. Thank you. Any other question from the audience? Maybe one more question, if, no? Okay, so I think we can wrap up here. Thank you so much for this amazing lecture. Thank you. Thank you very much and thank to all of you for listening. Thank you. Thank you.