CREDIT #1-7 – A Suitcase Travels The World

by Sylwia Lysko, August 2008.

Despite the appearance of being a ready-made, this is no ordinary suitcase. This object with its easily readable inscription CREDIT – derived from the Latin credere (to believe) and creditum (entrusted in good faith) – is an incitement to action. This is not the first time that the Swiss artist Johannes Burr (b. 1972) has engaged in performative field studies, turning bystanders into active agents or even directors of his video performances. Equipped with a CREDIT case, he aims to emit the confidence of a banker as he passes the case onto worthy ‘beneficiaries’. Yet the case does not contain any bills or equity funds, just the necessary equipment for shooting a film: a small camcorder, video tapes, a tripod and an instruction manual, supplemented with forms of agreement and prepaid envelopes. All is secured by the legal formality of a contract. The written agreement serves to safeguard the equipment, the protection of the artist and his idea, but does also hold the beneficiary to account.

Apart from the contractual framework, JB proposes the following with regard to content: the beneficiary is entitled to have seven days for the purpose of shooting a 30-minute video. Herein, four tasks are to be addressed.

  • To shoot a scene together with the creditor.
  • To answer the questions: What is your name? How old are you? What activity/profession are you currently pursuing? What does art mean to you?
  • To portray a location.
  • To hand the CREDIT case on to another beneficiary of one’s choice within a week, to explain the procedure and realise a scene/take as stated in point 1.

The video recordings, now edited into a chain film, can be viewed as gripping insights into private worlds. One may be surprised at how quickly the vis-à-vis is encountered as a distinct image of personalities, creativity and individual views emerge in just a few scenes. The production ranges from documentary portrayal of everyday life (living conditions, work, leisure-time) to dialogue scenes and playfully experimental shots which are staged tentatively yet nonetheless aim at emulating professional film aesthetics. Yet it is always a matter of staging oneself by way of the camcorder, reinventing oneself through one’s own eyes or through a foreign gaze. Whether this staging of everyday life occurs consciously or unconsciously, whether the beneficiaries place themselves in front of or behind the camera, being confronted with the medium’s omnipresence is something that one may use more or less skillfully with regard to the medium’s vocabulary.

Each chain film then becomes the filmic result of seven beneficiaries; 49 days (7 x 7 days) and 210 recorded minutes (7 x 30 minutes) later, the material is edited. The circulation, relying on the significant number seven[1], is interrupted and the CREDIT case is returned from the last (the seventh) beneficiary back to JB, respectively the credit bank.

Cooperation and Co-Production: The Disappearance of the Singular Author

As the liberated characters from a novel, JB allows his protagonists to act freely with no more than a few guidelines, calling for their creativity and leaving the directing of their short films in their own hands.

JB, the “author” of the chain film concept, becomes the “instigator” and “initiator” of the video project. By investing confidence in the process and handing over the idea to a third party, who not only becomes a protagonist but in equal respect a self-responsible author, the question of an original author becomes obsolete. n the process of circulation, each participant becomes an “instigator” and an “author”, who in the sense of the Latin verb “augere”, is allowingl the idea of the chain film to “grow” and “augment”. JB steps back as an artist, multiplying his idea through other independent actors. “The author of the piece does not evaporate in the ether, but resurfaces in a condensed form as a plural author, a multi-author in the artwork itself. From what happens in-between the work not only acquires its form, but also its meaning and reality.”[2] As the liberated characters from a novel, JB allows his protagonists to act freely with no more than a few guidelines, calling for their creativity and leaving, apart from a given framework, the directing of their short films in their own hands. After a cycle of seven times seven days, JB links the singular authorships or “subjective realities”[3] together in a chain film, conceding the right to make a few, subtle changes.[4]

Hence, JB’s direction does not exclude. In order for his “concept of collective authorship”[5] to function and for the piece to circulate, he relies on a vis-à-vis. Yet, the Other is not merely approaching him through the role of a “spectator” or an “agent” in the extended radius of action, but as an active “co-author”, entitled to autonomous influence over the process and the production method of his piece. This self-chosen disappearance of the author can be understood as Michel Foucault’s “disappearance of the artistic authority and the consequent relativisation of the concept of creation”[6] The result – here embodied by the seven sequences of the 30-minute film – could also contradict the intention of the author; after all he must take the loss of control into account. After the dispatch of the CREDIT case JB’s influence on the future progress and success of the project is discontinued, and he will only interfere if silence sets in. “Then I will naturally try to reconstruct the chain […], in order to determine the whereabouts of the CREDIT case.” (JB)

Hence, the function of the author decreases in proportion to the valorisation and activation of the recipient’s role. It increasingly directs itself towards the role of a “translator” or “mediator”, who “creates new, unusual perceptional contexts and as a result […] new, unusual subject matter.”[7]

Dynamically Visualising the Web of Social Relations

JB’s video project is a constant source of communication. It instigates creative action, calls on our confidence and the motivation of each individual to keep the CREDIT project running. The collective production of new ideas requires engagement on behalf of the participants. This web of relations becomes a dynamic, open-ended circuit. “Such participation is based on communication and dedication. To communicate means to open up, to commit oneself to the openness and become permeable.”[8] Each chain film emerges from a temporary encounter between several individuals, over a time period appropriated collectively, and applied ideas; it becomes a web of social relations, supported by friendships, fleeting acquaintances, and the will to become active/creative together.

This art strategy does not target the final result, but the action itself, conceived of as art.

The beneficiaries are a part of an “experiment within the art context” (JB), an artistic action, whose ending remains unknown not only to themselves but also to JB. The video contributions of CREDIT considerably surpass YouTube and other online forums or networks. As part of an artistic action, the individual video piece rises above the overly informal exuberant home-video aesthetics, the overly intimate personal, even though this aspect isn’t and should not be excluded. This art strategy, following up in a certain respect the process art of the 1960s, does not target the final result, but the action itself, conceived of as art. The video tape documents the staging. However, despite the set framework, JB does not exclude spontaneity and coincidence. On the contrary, they remain part of the desired activating engine of the beneficiaries.

The web of beneficiary relationships, reliant on participation, with JB marking the nodal points, is based on mutual trust; through the collective overcoming of tasks the beneficiaries get to know each other and their co-agents in a new context. Since the 60s the predominant aesthetic is a moving away from the piece itself towards action, towards the event, the game, and towards staging (performance and action art, happenings, body art, etc.). In the very spirit of Fluxus, JB’s video performances are oscillating between art and life, suspending the boundaries between the artist and the audience.

Here again, the unnoticed and inconspicuous moves into the focus of attention, as everyday action and processes become artistic Fluxus events. It is not by chance that the CREDIT actions follow a universal notion of art and its beneficiaries respond to Joseph Beuys’ claim that “Everyone is an artist”. Provoked by the question “What is art to you?” an invariably broad definition of art may surprise the participant. To most, art is not a framed canvas or a sculpture, but rather a positive philosophy embedded in life, an ability or human gesture. Beneficiaries thus employ their ability to creative action, engaging in the “constructing” of a possible “social film sculpture”, freely adapted from Emmett Williams’ “life is an artwork, and the artwork is life”.[9]

Even the knowledge that they are part of an artistic action triggers various reactions. Some individuals who are conscious of and trained in the medium stylise themselves as artistic characters, appropriating filmic methods, in order to rewrite their lives in original ways. Some follow a documentary path, so as to immortalise a segment of their own history in a larger context (in the “dignified context of art”). As a part of an artistic action, one becomes an artwork, through one’s own creative input; one may even experience a double revaluation. As soon as the tasks are performed in one’s own mind’s eye, the answer to the question “What is art to me?” is found. Perhaps one is already a member of the chain, a haphazard extra or a conscious teammate in the following chapter, for according to the “Basic Law for social networks”[10] in the Small-World Phenomenon[11], one is acquainted with anyone by 6.6 degrees of separation, rounded up to 7.

From Credit to the Gift: Trust as a Path to ‘Absolute Art’ (Yves Klein)

The first two chain films were set in Berlin, where the artist himself is based, and the particular aesthetics of the city are communicated by the beneficiaries in a self-evident fashion. Two additional circulations of CREDIT originate in a small village in Western Germany and in an asylum-seekers’ hostel. In order to let the case travel beyond national borders, additional starting points were planned in Brazil, Poland and Switzerland. Echoing Timm Ulrich’s text sent on a world trip, JB’s CREDIT case sets out on a global orbit. As the nature of the case transcends the limits of language and currency, its intercultural applicability is facilitated. The credit flow relies on trust, the payment being individual creativity.

Not least, JB ironises the banking industry per se. As with conventional bank credit, the CREDIT case grants the beneficiary a temporary commercial loan. The ambiguity of the concept, at first associated with conventional bank credit, is in a certain respect playing with the notion of legitimate bank credit. As is the case in the banking industry, the CREDIT project is about trust. As a general rule, commercial credits require a product equivalent to the credited product to be returned. Since the beneficiaries are not indebted to return the same product that was received, they may not only use it but proceed with it at will. “Often credit is available in return for payment, so that the beneficiary aside from the bonus of the credited item usually pays an interest.”[12]

The actual counter-value is the chain film itself with the added value of experience derived from the creative labour carried out collectively and individually, that money cannot represent.

According to contractual regulation, JB examines the produced videos, that is to say the generated “credit interest”, which were returned to the credit bank in the form of video recordings. JB exemplifies how credit transactions are able to function even without the employment of money. Only the video equipment requires a monetary investment. The project idea and the content of the video tape remain immaterial values, presenting insights based on the trust of various human beings, investing their time and imagination and allowing it to flow back to the project initiator, respectively the credit bank, as the quintessence of their own “aesthetic experience”. The actual counter-value is the chain film itself with the added value of experience derived from the creative labour carried out collectively and individually, that money cannot represent. In following the notion of a collective, immaterial piece and stressing an alternative conception of credit, JB stipulates that the finished chain film will not be sold but may only be given away. Yves Klein spoke of a culture that remains invisible to the eye, at once universally present: “What is sensibility? That which exists outside of our being, but nonetheless always belongs to us. Life does not belong to us; only with the sensibility, that is ours, may we acquire it. The sensibility is the currency of the universe, of space, of great nature, that allows us to acquire life as a basic commodity. Imagination is the carrier of sensibility! Moved by imagination we may reach life, the actual life, which is the absolute art.”[13]

Translated from German by: Ana-Maria Hadji-Culea
Editing: Julie Ward

About the author

Sylwia Lysko (b. 1977) studied Art History and Romance Languages in Cologne (Germany) and Genoa (Italy). She has worked for institutions including the 4th Berlin Biennale, served as a curatorial assistant at Kunstverein Freiburg, and held a research fellowship at the Neue Galerie in Kassel (both Germany). Currently, she works as an independent curator, writer, and translator of art-historical texts. Jump up ↑

Notes

  1. Jump up ↑ Number 7 is omnipresent (7 beneficiaries, 7 days of production, 7 video tapes per chain film). The artist states that it was initially meant to represent an arbitrary number, which apart from its esoteric, psychological and historical meaning, is simply the number of days in a week. (JB)
  2. Jump up ↑ Paolo Bianchi, “Kunst ohne Werk – aber mit Wirkung. Was ist die Kunst an der Kunst”, Kunstforum, vol. 152, Oct-Dec, 2000, p. 76.
  3. Jump up ↑ Marion Strunk, “Vom Subjekt zum Projekt. Kollaborative Environments”, Kunstforum, vol. 152, Oct-Dec, 2000, p. 121.
  4. Jump up ↑ Despite or precisely because of the manipulative interference of the artist through editing, reduction of scenes, etc., the majority of beneficiaries are curious about the outcome of the filmic attempts by way of artistic intervention.
  5. Jump up ↑ Marion Strunk, “Vom Subjekt zum Projekt. Kollaborative Environments”, Kunstforum, vol. 152, Oct-Dec, 2000, p. 121.
  6. Jump up ↑ Cf. ibid., originally Michel Foucault “Was ist ein Autor?”, in: Foucault Reader, DVA, Stuttgart, 1979.
  7. Jump up ↑ Felix Philipp Ingold, “Nach dem Autor fragen”, in: Neue Züricher Zeitung, 21/22. September 1991, No. 219, p. 69. Same author (publisher): Fragen nach dem Autor and: Dialog mit dem Autor. Both volumes, Universitätsverlag, Konstanz, 1991.
  8. Jump up ↑ Dieter Mersch, “Ereignis und Aura, Radikale Transformation der Kunst vom Werkhaften zum Performativen”, Kunstforum, vol. 152, Oct-Dec, 2000, p. 101.
  9. Jump up ↑ www.kunstwissen.de
  10. Jump up ↑ Definition coined by Stanley Milgram in 1967 to describe a phenomenon, which has recently been reappropriated by American scientists (Holger Dambeck, “Das Jeder-kennt-jeden-Gesetz”).
  11. Jump up ↑ Ibid..
  12. Jump up ↑ Wikipedia.
  13. Jump up ↑ Yves Klein, 1959 from: Hannah Weitermeier, Yves Klein (1928-1962) – International Klein Blue, Benedikt Taschen Verlag, 1994, p. 52.