Samuel Herzog Samuel Herzog

«Mission Kaki»: A spy story as an attempt to formulate cultural criticism under new conditions.

 

44th AICA Congress, Asunción, Paraguay, 19.10.11

 

 

 

 

There are few fields in which people travel as much as in the arts – not only artists and their galerists, but also critics, art historians and after all curators are constantly on the move. We usually have good, which means professional reasons why we need to travel to this or that spot on earth. Also it is very important for us that we are not traveling as tourists, but as professionals, with a mission so to speak. Whether one could really tell the difference from the outside, is not an issue here. I personally have nothing against the term «tourist». It describes someone who makes a «tour», a «detour» perhaps – and for my case at least, this suits quite  well. Traveling also brings me a lot of joy, it upsets me, it scares me, it puts me in extraordinary states of mind – all things that would not happen to a true professional with a golden frequent flyer card. In addition sometimes I catch myself having a camera dangling from my belly – and we all know that this is ultimately, what makes a tourist out of you. But enough of such awkward confessions.

So let’s return to the statement that traveling in the realm of art plays an important role, that travel and art is linked together in multiple ways – and this not just since yesterday. What would have become of the Renaissance, if Michelangelo had spent all his live in Arezzo, and if Dürer never had come out of Nuremberg? How would Modern Art have developed if Macke had never traveled to Tunis, if Kirchner had never painted in the Swiss Alps, and if Picasso had never left Malaga? And what would be our own concept of art, if we never had seen an exhibition in Paris, nor the Sao Paolo Biennal, nor a art fair in New York and certainly no museum in China?

As art critics and art historians, we reflect on all possible areas of art and culture, we like to get lost in details and to move forwards to the most remote border areas of our profession. We don’t reflect that much about traveling though, about something we do so often and in such self-evident ways.

So much about our starting position.

In order to understand the following, one must probably know that I run some kind of double life. For ten years I am working as a staff editor in the cultural department of a venerable Swiss daily newspaper called «Neue Zürcher Zeitung», where I am responsible for covering visual arts. Even a bit longer than that I simultaneously run an import-company called HOIO, that deals with spices from the the island of Santa Lemusa. Santa Lemusa is a fictional island – and dealing with it’s spices is of course far from being big business.

«Lemusa» is a kind of anagram of my first name «Samuel». My psychoanalyst some years ago has established the argument, that I have made of myself a female saint – he was probably right, only the pope has not yet understood.

But back to my situation. Text has always fascinated me and I see the letter until today as my main form of expression. But also I have always been interested in formulating certain things with the help of pictures. And, besides that, there is a passion for everything connected to food that has shaped me since my childhood – even if I have always been a little bit more interested in the images and ideas conveyed trough a dish than in the concrete taste it has. Santa Lemusa is all about these three things: texts,  images and food. The construction has cost me some thousands of hours of work in the last few years  – and it is far from complete. Whether one calls this project art or literature or a gentle kind of nonsense – does not really matter to me.

Of course such a double life will not go unpunished. The situation has produced particular, let’s call it hybrid forms of reflection that affect both, my art-critical texts and my «artistic» work. And of course when I travel, I do so simultaneously as an art critic and as a kind of artist.

When four years ago, I received  an invitation to contribute to a research project, which focused on the relation between new media and space (www.beam-me.net), I took this as an opportunity to tackle a project in which traveling stood in the center – not only traveling in real space, but also in the virtual space of the world wide web. Anyway it has become impossible to clearly separate the one from the other. Computers and increasingly mobile devices with Internet access are so omnipresent today that on any trip in real space, we simultaneously travel in the virtual space too. Probably one has already booked the ticket to Dakar online, and maybe one uses Wikipedia-maps, in order not to get lost in Tokyo. One may quickly get a few gastronomical hints from the net to find the best chefs in Lyon, if one can afford, some may send electronic postcards home or maybe they even write a travel blog. In short, many of us, for example me, now travel parallel in to the real and in the virtual world. Of course, this also means that the image we have of the world, is equally determined by both, real and virtual elements. We like to understand our movements in the Internet as a kind of journey. And the term is also the most popular metaphors for our lives, that we like to call a «journey».

Out of this situation, there are many questions that we need to point out when traveling in the real and the virtual space. For example: What does it mean to be on the road, to fly, to ride on boats or to surf in the internet?  As what are we traveling in which reality? How does the real space find its way into internet? And vice versa. What traces does the net leave in the real space? How does one reality affect the other, and how conscious is that? How do we connect the foreign worlds we meet (in internet or real live) with the more familiar world of our homes? And how are both worlds affected by each other? What does it mean to understand something? Can we understand without knowing? Is it fruitful or dangerous to misunderstand? How do we deal with the fact that the more we travel the more the world expands – but our knowledge can not follow (as airplanes seem much faster than brains, the internet too)? How can we look at something without knowing much about it? Without knowing the context? And how can we talk, formulate sentences about worlds we don’t know much about? How can we deal with this crisis of our increasing ignorance?

«Mission Kaki» – the project I briefly want to introduce here, does not formulate any central theory about traveling – but it takes several very differently structured attempts to deal with individual issues. I did not bother to check certain theories about travelling, but to take serious the questions that arise on the road – regardless of whether they seem to fit or not. So the project does not address the issue directly, but is dancing around the object in varying distances.

For my little dance around the theme «travel» I have chosen the medium of the criminal story, more precisely the spy story. To this corresponds the title of the project: «Mission Kaki – Hektor Maille tracks Dr. Hing».

Maybe we have a quick look at the general trailer of the mission.

The story is quickly sketched: Physicist Jenadi Koslow is kidnapped, the island of Santa Lemusa is blackmailed by gangster Dr Hing and his malicious henchmen. The Secret Service sends its crack secret agent to track down and rescue the scientist: Hektor Maille. That is the beginning of a adventerous hunt over the half globe, from Senegals coast trough the Kreml in Moscow onto the Chinese Wall, from the dark waters of a Swedish forrest-lake trough the ray-market of Mokpo into the shining desert of Sharjah. After a while only Hektor Maille learns that much more depends on the success of «Mission Kaki» than merely the well-being of the kidnapped professor.

So far the official summary.

The project consists of 20 episodes that, through a period of three years, have been successively developed and published online. Each episode is made up of in average 10 to 20 scenes, each scene is a brief movie clip and a text. That’s the main thing. In addition, each episode has its own trailer and a menu with recipes that are closely related to the story. One can watch and read «Mission Kaki» from A to Z, probably only then one will really understand all of the criminal contexts. This plot, however, only plays the role of a carrier, on which are developed other narratives. So, one can also click back and forth through history, enter it from the recipes etc.

«Mission Kaki» has its most compact form as a spice blend that can be put into the kitchen shelf: Each of the 20 ingredients of this «Maille Masala» is in direct connection with a specific scene from one of the episodes. The hero of our story finds these ingredients in the episode 17 – of course in India, where else?

Fabrication of Maille-Masala within the framework of an exhibition presenting Mission Kaki in the Kunsthalle of Mulhouse. (Picture Lena Eriksson)

The fastest way trough the story is provided by a different tool, called «Maille-Mobile». In each episode Hektor Maille once surfaces from some water – usually in a bathtub. Maille believes that one can travel under water from one basin to another, if only one holds his air long enough. What in his travels in the real world is never achieved, is quite easily possible in the parallel world of the www. And so all these out-of-the-water-scenes are directly linked together. For contemporaries with very little time there is even a clip of 95 seconds, that summarizes all these scenes.

In life and on trips as well it is often the case that one would prefer to be in a different place. This also is easily possible in the internet  – and so Hektor Maille only needs to wish that he would rather be elsewhere, and bang, he’s already there, for a brief moment in any case. Receiving nothing but some Malaria-medecine and some poor food in Dakar for instance, Hektor Maille wishes nothing more than to sit in Paris on a large plate of seafood – and boom, he sits at «Bistro de Ecailler» at Rue Paul Berte. These little hot cross trips are called escapades and are another way to move through the story.

To give you an idea of the project, I want to present you some extracts of scenes from two episodes: I have chosen a bit randomly the episodes 6 an 14. In the footsteps of Dr. Hing, Hektor Maille travels from  Santa Lemusa to the Senegal and to Moscow, then to  Beijing and to Sweden, to ultimately end up in South Korea, where we meet him in the City of Gwangju.

 

Episode 6 – Scene 5

After the meal which is, as is often the case in Asian restaurants, gone by in a flash, Maille wandered through downtown Gwangju: shoe shops and fast food joints, telephone booths, cosmetic stores, bon-bon bazaars and Cappuccino meeting points, pulsating rhythms and the smell of pastries baked in fat – like everywhere in the world. Young families, girls with naked, terribly white limbs, skinny, shy boys greedily puffing cigarette smoke into their skinny bodies, almost as if they wanted it to pave a path for them in real life. Among them were a few weather-beaten faces, probably farmers, selling apples, boiled corn and candied octopus or piling paperboxes onto rusty handcarts.

There were no tourists around here. Maille noticed the looks he received with every step he took. They were neither hostile nor dangerous, just a quick once-over that could make one feel like a giant-eared weasel in a zoo – a being that God’s mighty force had turned into a unique entity. Here, there were children who stared at him as though he had fallen out of a television – and girls who looked through their seductive eyelashes at the foreigner, giggling, elated by the tiny triumph of receiving a glance in return. Only the old people looked through him, perhaps on account of their Confucian reserve, or because they assumed that he had no interest in candied octopus.

 

Episode 6 – Scene 6

Maille felt lonesome and alien – but he was peculiarly familiar with this feeling. Over the years of travelling on assignment in service of the Republic of Santa Lemusa, this feeling of being alien had increasingly become a form of home, like a unique landless nationality – quite as if one felt connected with a place where there was nothing, a reference without an object.

Questiones about his origins, Maille sometimes wished to answer as if it could be a simple matter-of-factly: «From abroad» – quite as if «abroad» was a concrete place, such as a vaguely known star. Sometimes he thought of inventing a land – one that one could be incredibly proud of and never be disappointed in. Santa Lemusa was certainly not the badest spot on earth, but there must surely be better places. Mostly it was the inner-existence, with its rules and automatism, its repetitions and implicitness that demoralised one. Why shouldn’t one want to come from a land that is seen only from the outer perspective: from a foreign land without an inland?

 

Episode 6 – Scene 9

On the following morning, Maille continued his kimchi research in a tiny market quarter. He found a shop that sold fresh cabbage and allowed the saleswoman to explain to him how the Korean national dish had come into being.

When his profession and social background could not be kept under wraps, Maille posed in a foreign land as a food inspector who was divorced and childless – unfortunately. The second part held the truth that, with regard to the vexed issue of progeny, Maille – unfortunately – harboured no desire to have children. And the first part of his portrayal of himself had at least a bit to do with his longstanding dream of travelling through the world as a culinary spy – if not less dangerous, it was definitely more exciting.

From Korea Maille’s journey brings him to the Emirates, to Bangkok, Cambodia, Vietnam, Tokyo, Australia, Syria Argentina and from there the Antarctic, where we find our agent wandering trough the ice.

 

Episode 14 – Scene 1

Ice was omnipresent here – and forever. That there could be a landmass below the ice-blocks seemed, to Hektor Maille’s mind, to be quite a bold claim. From this, however, resulted that this frozen water claimed to be a continent, exactly like Africa, America or Asia. The melt down of the Poles would one day reveal the truth, thought Maille. And if, indeed, there was firm ground below the ice, then, working on pure theory, there must also be something growing on it – at least some sort of lichen. An earth ball with the curve of its bottom sporting a gigantic patch of moss would, without doubt, cut a unique figure in the otherwise serious-looking expanse of the universe – to some extent like a planet with pubic hair. This image alone was reason enough to not take the issue of global warming too far. It almost seemed as if he could already smell the first lichen.

 

Episode 14 – Scene 5

An awesome silence prevailed over this snow-white world. A calm in which the sounds, swishes, buzzes and rings in his ears increasingly took on importance – the operating noise, the traffic in his head. As well as the black threads, which the eye doctor had given the beautiful name «Mouches volantes», that swam here through the ice like primitive worms through a moise Petri dish.

Maille was unprepared for so much purity. He did not wish for his own functioning with all its little disturbances to be thrown back at him. It was for the same reason that he usually gave abstract art a wide berth. Given that it was not pure decoration, it seemed to aim at pushing the person back toward himself, to not be a counterpart to him, to refuse him the opportunity of a dialogue, a story, a distraction. What a demand, what an aspiration. And this, when someone such as Maille stood there, a person whose ears occasionally heard only disturbing sounds and whose eyes found only optical mistakes? The Antarctic was a gigantic monochrome, a veritable continent, akin to a painting by Robert Ryman.

 

Episode 14 – Scene 6

In this Antarctic landscape step and stride were the same. Whether man stood still or took a stride, what role could it play? Movement, for Maille, was characterised by change, via new landscapes that seemed to roll open in a manner as though they had previously been hidden away. Here, however, everything remained the same: quite like on one of those treadmills that he knew from the fitness centre at the headquarters of the Lemusan Secret Service. Progress here meant merely a step – man did not really go forward. When one searches for the Antarctic on a globe, one finds it, as a rule, burrowing deep under the curve of the great planet fruit – which gives one something of a right to call the place an underworld. But perhaps this here was not truly the Antarctic; perhaps it was just the décor of a heroic feat or an over-exposed dream.

So far some extracts from the story. I leave it up to you to decide if this was really the Antarctic or not. After that Hektor Mailles travels in to Democratic Republic of Congo, to Jerusalem and into the South of the United States, to India, Paris and finally back to Santa Lemusa.

Of course our hero does not succeed in averting the calamity of his island. Although he finally can free the kidnapped professor – he can not prevent his home Santa Lemusa from getting beamed out of the Caribbean and into the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. The new coordinates are, since June 23 this year, 44 degrees North and 33 degrees West. That might sound somehow arbitrary. Of course it is absolutely not. Although I won’t tell you at this point why 44/33 is the perfect intersection of fiction and reality.

Finally, I quickly want to show you the last trailer, it’s the last time Hektor Maille looks into the camera, apparently in search of something that lies in a different reality. The agent appears on a Caribbean beach and quits the scene on a Atlantic shore. A similar thing happens to me with many questions that occur to me while traveling: I approach them from one end – and slide eventually out of them at the other end. I does not bother me that I don’t find really some answers. The important thing is for me, that I have been for a moment in the question.

 

© Samuel Herzog

 

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