Alice Creischer's work continuously negotiates the relation between subjects and society (or, more specifically, today's capitalist society), and their ability to act within it. Her central concerns since the mid-1980s have been the examination of political issues by artistic means, and, closely intertwined with this, ethics, which she understands as a moral imperative to strive for enlightenment - for naming, revealing and highlighting the manifold injustices of the world, and for 'having the heart' to be consequent to her unwillingness to accept things as they are.¹ Creischer's projects range from individual works - mostly in performance and installation form - to collaborative productions with other artists and cultural practitioners (first and foremost with her partner, Andreas Siekmann), curatorial projects and critical writing. The multidisciplinary character of her production emerged from the Dusseldorf Art Academy and the Dusseldorf and Cologne art scenes in the 1980s, where political (and feminist) engagement was rare. Creischer's work from that period, such as the text- based installations Alle Tage Jericho, Ich Die Posaune (All Days Jericho/Me the Trombone, 1982) or Der Geburtstag (The Birthday, 1986), were experiments with handcrafted machines, which she installed in the exhibition space or took through the city, transforming them into performative tools. All Days Jericho, for instance, was an apparatus on wheels that Creischer pushed through Dusseldorf on foot whilst reciting a text that discussed this very action and which was amplified via a tube with several membranes. A system of mirrors facilitated navigation for the 'driver', and two cones re-directed sound from the environment back to the pilot. These early experiments with DIY technology examined the relation between text and image, and the viewers' apprehension of the two on equal terms. Such investigation was followed in works like Die Betrachtung (The Contemplation, 1984) and Eine Operette (An Operetta, 1986) in the 1980s, and she still pursues it in current installations, in which text plays a crucial part (see, for example, Apparat zum osmotischen Druckausgleich von Reichtum bei der Betrachtung von Armut, or Apparatus for the Osmotic Compensation of the Pressure of Wealth During the Contemplation of Poverty, 2005-08, which I discuss later).

While her early works concentrated on the individual's relation to the world, Creischer's later works began to deal more explicitly with the search for a meaningful life, the living conditions in a capitalist society, consumerism and the logic of exploitation. For her short play 'Verbrechen aus Leidenschaft' ('Crime out of Passion', 1987), she developed a simple structure reminiscent of Brechtian pedagocial plays: the character Delarue is confronted with a realisation of the 'infinite lack of being'² when he meets his counterpart Pourpaubre, in whom the insignificance and emptiness of his own life is mirrored. Delarue falls into despair and dreams, almost as an escape, of erasing all banknotes, shares and other capitalist values in the world, as well as people's desire to own them.

This critical impulse also led Creischer, in the early 1990s, to temporarily stop making her own work and to collaborate instead with the artists' groups Sammlung Brinkmann, Microstudio surplus and the initiative Park Fiction. With Andreas Siekmann, Birger Hübel, Michaela Odinius and Dierk Schmidt, she organised the alternative art fair Messe2ok. ÖkonoMiese machen in 1995. A self-organised, selffinanced project, Messe2ok took place parallel to Art Cologne, in the empty halls of the former Cologne post-office headquarters, and hosted panel discussions on the art-world economy from a critical perspective in addition to presenting artworks. As Creischer recollects in the project's documentation, the fair brought together all those who 'use the art context for project-based, theoretical and/or collective working methods' and gave them the opportunity to approach 'conventional art practice with a different kind of production and mediation'.³

This project marked a transition from Creischer's critical examination of the subject's (the artist's) position within society by means of texts and artworks to an expanded understanding of her practice as one that intervenes in the mechanisms of the art context. Emblematic of this approach is the project Ex Argentina (2002-04), for which she and Siekmann spent several months in Buenos Aires and collaborated with local artists and political activists. Ex Argentina explored artists' concerns about 'the problems of representing and visualising political and economic realities' in the aftermath of the country's financial breakdown in 2001,⁴ and has resulted in conferences on the relationship between art and politics at the Goethe-Institut Buenos Aires and at Hebbel am Ufer (HAU) Theatre in Berlin, and exhibitions at Museum Ludwig in Cologne and Palais de Glace in Buenos Aires. The curators invited artists, researchers and activist groups from Argentina, Germany and elsewhere to produce and present their work, which dealt with the recent situation in Argentina as well as a corruption scandal in a garbage incinerating plant in Cologne and a Berlin banking society (the Berliner Bankgesellschaft) that had just declared bankruptcy. Within the exhibition, posters by the collective Etcétera were shown alongside installations on the topic of 'doom' by León Ferrari, sculptures by Bernadette Corporation made of consumer packaging waste from Argentina and photographs of the 'Tucumán Arde' exhibition, which addressed the political situation of the city of Rosario in 1968. The works' interrelations within the exhibition created an autonomous and multifaceted argument in space, which then became a counter-image to the ruling public discourse on Argentina.

In order to get a more precise idea of Creischer's conceptions of politics and ethics, perhaps it is of some help to look into the political philosophy of Alain Badiou. In his writings, Badiou maintains that radically innovative thinking not only is possible but also necessary to combat the liberal-humanist, moralising ethics of public discourse, which for him merely serve to justify the 'absolute injustice' of current international politics.⁵ In Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil (1998), Badiou positions himself against the 'almost universally accepted argument that ethics essentially should concern the Other as such (as potential victim of violence or misrecognition)' and instead proposes that it should concern the 'Same'. ⁶ He thus endeavours to reconnect ethics and universalism,⁷ since what is ethical is whatever runs under a name that is valid 'for all'.⁸ This ethics does not define a class, category or concept under which (and so that) particular events, moments or incidents can be subsumed. Rather, in Badiou's ethics the one 'opens into two': while affirming the universality of the same, this conception of ethics simultaneously denotes difference. It is precisely this difference that is introduced into the situation by faithfulness to the universally valid name. This particular relation between 'same' and difference constitutes what Badiou also calls a 'truth procedure': a subjectivising process that splits the given situation and transforms it. Only if we affirm that every individual is essentially the same and, at the same time, that 'differences are what there is'⁹ can we move away from the conservative principle of human rights and its hierarchical assumptions and implications, which defines a particular through the normative power of the supposedly universal class, category or concept. In Badiou's understanding of ethics, what emerges is the understanding of singular acts in given situations that have their ontological place in the sameness of what is not defined in that situation. The connection of these acts to a liberating 'name' is what makes this a 'process of truth' that changes the status quo.¹⁰

In the face of such truth, an 'ethical position' would be to remain faithful to this experience, which is why Badiou maintains that one must 'Keep going!',meaning that one has to follow the principles of clear judgement and discern true from false - that is, to examine what belongs to the event and what does not.¹¹ However difficult, burdensome or dangerous it might be, changing the situation by examining each and every given element of it in the light of the event is the only ethics there is.

Considering Creischer's practice with these notions in mind, we could understand her intention to 'articulate political thoughts' as a way to interrupt the realm of the ordinary and the already established as analogous to Badiou's splitting a situation by giving it a name.¹² The position that Siekmann and Creischer adopt in Ex Argentina epitomises this stance. As curators, Creischer and Siekmann act as organisers of the exhibition and conferences that are part of this project, define their themes and outlines, guide the discussions and the invited artistic productions and arrange the exhibition display at the hosting institutions. Their intention was to initiate broad investigations, to commission new works - often from friends and colleagues they frequently work with - and to create a critical discourse that goes beyond the impact of a singular artistic statement. Their political position here is well-defined: rejecting the idea of 'objectively' collecting facts that are then to be processed as knowledge, or of simply collecting artworks, they instead engage in a medium- or long-term collaborative shaping of a vision that offers an alternative to the common assumption of how to deal with the political, economic and cultural consequences of the crisis in Argentina. In every respect, an urge to act and to adopt a clear position drives their curatorial practice.

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Badiou finds truth in four different fields: love, art, science and politics. Whereas love concerns only the 'two' of the subject of love, politics affects the collective dimension, and art and science could be described as 'mixed spheres', as they are set in motion by individuals but affect the collective - insofar as they have the power to expand what can be thought or done, or as Badiou puts it, to 'punch a "hole" in these [the instituted] knowledges'.¹³ At first glance, the idea that the process of truth takes a different shape in the sphere of politics than in art might seem obvious. But this differentiation is crucial - for Badiou, innovation in the arts lies on the side of form, or precisely in finding new forms for content.¹⁴

Badiou appears indecisive about how to deal with concretely political contents (such as globalisation or post- colonialism, in the specific case of Creischer) in the arts. He does not explicitly 'ban' political topics in art, but he makes one thing very clear: the more explicitly the work of art tries to 'overcome the internal tension of the politics of art' - meaning the more politically explicit the work is on the level of content - the more this very politics is 'reduced to welfare and ethical imprecision'.¹⁵

With this in mind, it is important to look at the ways in which Ex Argentina can be considered political. Creischer sees cooperation as essential to her practice, and she recognises each of her collaborators as an equal partner. For Ex Argentina, for example, she and Siekmann collaborated with the workers of the Brukmann textile factory in Buenos Aires. The result was the series Eight Suits (2003), onto which they drew or embroidered communiqués from the 1999 G8 summit held at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, as well as the story of how the workers took over and transformed the Brukmann factory into a cooperative after it had been abandoned by its owner in 2001. Each of the suits that make up the work is based on a model from Brukmann's product line, and is titled after one protagonist, site or key event in the factory's crisis and subsequent recovery. After proposing the two topics, the artists discussed the ideas for the realisation of the project with the workers, who then stitched, sewed or glued the small cut-out figures, images and slogans.

The workers' successful subjectivisation (in not only preserving their own jobs, but also in actively transforming the given situation and finding artistic expression for it), I would submit, qualifies as an event in Badiou's terms, both in the field of politics proper and in the politics of art. The suits create an image for the workers' actual labour, and the joint investment in its making poetically symbolises the potentials for solidarity in the Brukmann case. However, the way that Creischer and Siekmann set the precondition for the work's content - merely involving the workers in questions of realization - and in their bringing together of the two topics seem to me problematic. Apart from appearing like an imposition, the work's possible impact is undermined by a lack of a compelling internal necessity for the equation of the two on the level of content. Without adding a new perspective on the obvious connection between the breakdown of a country and international politics, the work's two parts remain loose - in terms of content, and in terms of form. The suit as a product and witness of actual labour refers back to the workers and 'their' factory, but it does not establish a connection with G8 politics - any more than any commodity implicitly bears testimony to the conditions under which it has been produced. Speaking in Badiou's terms, Creischer and Siekmann fail to connect the 'singular act' to a 'liberating name' - as the apparent relation between the two issues alone is not sufficient to 'split' a situation (to set in motion a 'process of truth'), but remains in the realm of the status quo.

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As mentioned above, writing is crucial to Creischer's work. The relation between text and image settles somewhere between independent artistic practice and accompanying curatorial statement or mediating text, and can best be observed in her most complex work Apparatus for the Osmotic Compensation of the Pressure of Wealth During the Contemplation of Poverty (2005-08). In this multi-part installation, which was included in her solo exhibition at the Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona in 2008, she combines material from her travels to Argentina (some of which already appeared in the context of Ex Argentina), India and Bolivia. The Apparatus itself consists of a double structure: the visible objects of the installation, which are strung up in the exhibition space like pearls on a chain, and the accompanying legend, based on symbols, imagery and text, running parallel along the wall. Creischer's main intention with the work was to 'repeat a situation that cannot be resolved':¹⁶ a 'history of exploitation indeed exists between these countries, which clearly goes in one direction, and a history of exotic longings and projections going in the other'. She placed a staged photograph of herself as a coloniser in India at the centre of the installation, exposing her 'shameful' condemnation to the position of the 'observer' in the face of poverty.¹⁷ The material and textual levels of the Apparatus are not obviously linked, but require the visitor to make connections between them. The information provided on colonialism and contemporary globalisation addresses the 'potential of consumption' of the Indian middle class today, the debts owed by the Spanish monarchy, the cooperatives running silver mines in Potosí, Bolivia and the history of famines worldwide since the nineteenth century.¹⁸

By means of collage, embroidery, cut-out texts and images, and an elaborate system of symbols interconnecting the text and the objects, Creischer brings together facts, eyewitness testimonies from historical sources, archival and current photographs and her own texts to create a multi-layered portrait of today's world and how it came to be that way. Surprisingly, both her political and artistic positions here differ significantly from those of Ex Argentina. Here she exposes herself as a character within the work along with other exponents of the 'middle class', the 'poor', the 'creditor states', staged by Creischer's partner and friends.¹⁹ With this strategy, Creischer symbolically equates herself with the powerful and the poor - an arrangement that does not break down the hierarchical relation between the protagonists, as Ex Argentina did. Rather, the work's title suggests an uncertainty or even helplessness towards the inequality between the individuals as well as the social groups they stand for, and towards how this inequality might actually be compensated. As the title suggests, only 'wealth' can be compensated through osmosis, while 'poverty' can merely be contemplated. The narrative staged by the installation gives the impression of introspection and self-reflexivity, and, in some way, breathes an air of sadness and melancholy - it is as if Creischer were mourning her incapacity to actively change the course of the world. As Badiou reminds us, however, the politics of art does not consist in actively interfering with reality (as in the realm of politics), but in its new conceptualisation.²⁰ Art can interrupt the given forms that determine what can be seen, said or thought; it is political in its ability to interrupt the given conception of the situation, not political like politics itself, which aims to transform the real of the situation. It cannot and must not mistake the differing internal logics of the two spheres. If we choose to interpret the work as an attempt to tell us about the depressing political reality we live in and are aware of, I would be tempted to interpret her political position as a form of romantic melancholy. But what if the Apparatus this time does not start from a necessity to act politically, but rather intends to find an artistic form for her frustration? In this context the Apparatus inventively and convincingly visualises Creischer's fully subjective rage (which obviously has not decreased in strength since her early practice in the 1980s), helplessness and exhaustion. In the sphere of art, the Apparatus is indeed political; it overcomes a subjective dilemma - that of trying to find ways of being political in art - by exposing its very failure.

There is no easy congruence of form and content in art, and I doubt that Alice Creischer's manifold practice is merely an attempt to achieve that congruence. I would rather say that her work can be defined as an 'ethics' of confrontational interventions into 'objective knowledges' by the means of subjective truths, and that she pushes her need for distinction and precision to the limit by examining different options for how to be political. The options are not necessarily dependent on each other, and this is what I have aimed to show by carving out different modes of articulating internal structures in her practice: for the exhibition project Ex Argentina, she took the role of the curator and also contributed as an artist. On the one hand, her interest was to compose a political counter-image to public discourse by means of an exhibition (whose politicality in the realm of art I could only examine superficially here), and on the other, she acted as an artist-collaborator for the project Eight Suits. This work departed from a political event, but did not succeed in developing an independent politics within the art context. Finally, although taking a melancholic rather than a political stance, with Apparatus - the most recent of the works discussed here - Creischer seems to shift her focus from the need to act in the political realm to finding an expression within her own sphere: thematising the very difficulty to be political as an artist.