Lone Haugaard Madsen — À propos — Slash Paris

What does work mean to us today? Are we talking about production, the provision of services, freelancing, paid or unpaid work, disenfranchised work, the abolition or omnipresence of work? In her artistic examination of the concept of work, Lone Haugaard Madsen establishes cross-references between the subjective and the public, socio-political sphere.

When LHM came to Vienna in 2001 to study Textual Sculpture with Heimo Zobernig, she founded an academy within the Academy. She invited museum people and artists with the aim of initiating conversations. With her work on constellations, the meeting of people and objects, she began to provoke situations in which questions of production and representation were put up for discussion.

For the artist, the studio and the exhibition comprise two closely related forms of working. Ideas and objects come together in the studio; the step into the exhibition space adds public, institutional conditions. They stake out not only the discursive, but also the political field. One could say that LHM uses art production as means to ‘unlock social experience,’ as Alexander Kluge put it.

Kluge speaks of the ‘realistic method.’ He takes this to mean constructive work that develops out of the ‘resistance of the senses’ and requires both ‘radical fiction’ and ‘radically authentic observation.’ It is within this tension between fiction and observation that LHM arrives at her decisions; she permits things, finds them, or commits herself to the right moment. The artistic act is not a postponement, not speculation, but work on life—hic et nunc.

Eva Maria Stadler