TACHLES: Around 44 of your works are in the Kunsthaus collection. The Kunsthaus Zürich reacted to your announcement of the intended repurchase of your works from a purely formal legal point of view: a withdrawal would not be possible at all.
Miriam Cahn: That is probably true, but it is typically exactly the kind of answer that one had to expect. I will now pull this through with my galleries. The assessment of the Kunsthaus is not the final one and shows that they did not understand what it was about. Director Christoph Becker has received my letter and will perhaps deal with the cause of this in more detail.
The reason for your writing was the distortion of history regarding the situation of Jews in Switzerland during the Second World War.
That’s right. That is why the purely formal public appearance of the Kunsthaus Zürich shows that the responsible actors still do not understand what it is actually about. First of all, it is about the basic attitude towards the open questions. However, the protagonists in Zurich do not go into that and make everything worse with every sentence. Now I had to make a point for myself as a Jew and as an artist.
Are there any other artists who would like to join in because a limit has been exceeded for them here?
I hope so. But for me it’s not about that, but about the performance that arises from this demand, i.e. when I try by all means to buy my works back. Other artists need to know for themselves whether they want to join. Of course I would think that would be terrific.
Is your action politics or already a «performance» or is your letter and the public debate part of political art or staging?
In my case, not so much. I don’t care to appear in public anyway – I found the days with all the phone calls quite exhausting. But I’m doing it because I’m an important artist and number 1 on the “balance sheet” list. Of course, I use this weight at such a moment.
For decades, you have been an artist committed to issues such as women and minorities. How do you position yourself in the field of tension between art and politics?
I don’t do political art, but political art – a big difference in my eyes. Political art is applied, there is a topic and you react directly to it. Political art is rather not concrete, not applied.
For example, would you describe your installation from the 1980s at the Kunsthaus Zürich “Female Month” as a political work?
Yeah yeah It begins at the end with the representation of the female menstruation and continues to the beginning of the next one. On the one hand, it is very real. On the other hand, you can of course see what you want in it – that’s what is open about art.
You have been publicly involved for decades. Even back when it came to the Flick Museum in Zurich. Are there parallels to the Bührle debate?
Yes, in connection with the Flick issue, I also took a Jewish position, which, however, I did not emphasize. At the time, I thought the discussion was wrong because it was ignored that Flick had not paid his reparations. And here is a parallel to Bührle: both thought that they could trade in indulgences with a collection of contemporary art.
In their book “Das angry Writing” they write explicitly on Jewish topics, for example in an impressive correspondence with their father.
Yes. I was political early on. The scandal surrounding the planned German premiere of Werner Fassbinder’s play “The Garbage, the City and Death” troubled me in the 1980s. At that time, my father wrote to me in a letter from 1985: “I am delighted that the Jews are fighting back, consistently and without a riot. In this matter it seems completely irrelevant to me whether the author wanted to be anti-Semitic or not. The reactions prove that the piece can be understood as anti-Semitic. And that’s where tolerance ends. The matter is too serious to be decided by a literary schikeria ». I felt reminded of that around the escalation in the Bührle case.
As an artist, it can always happen that you are exhibited in a house in a context that runs counter to you. When are red lines crossed?
Basically, one is happy when a work is sold to a museum; that is an affirmation. But you can’t control what the house does with it. You hand in the work through the sale and hope that it will turn out well. Museums just work that way.
They are established and accepted worldwide. You or Gerhard Richter in Germany publicly question the art market on which the artists depend at the same time.
I agree. It’s a privilege that you have to use – not out of vanity, but because you will actually be heard as it happened now. I actually put it simply, what’s in the air anyway.
You had a lot of reactions to your announcement. Do these refer to the Bührle Causa in general or to the statements of the President of the EG Bührle Foundation Alexander Jolles – some of which were interpreted as anti-Semitic?
Both. Regarding anti-Semitism, I had a few reactions from Jews, but for many other people that is incomprehensible anyway. For the latter, the focus is on the Kunsthaus, Bührle as an arms dealer and the Zurich scene. I have known a lot of people who have long thought that not much is going on with the Kunsthaus Zürich, that it is conservative. For them, the Bührle affair and the building in the middle of the city are still the dot on the i; Most people interested in culture find this uncomfortable mix.
This also shows the strong hand of the establishment, which the right cultural scene cannot penetrate at all.
We’re not dependent on them, because art happens anyway, regardless of whether the rich buy it or not. There is the high-priced art market, but there is also a medium-sized company that is enormously wide and extremely diverse. It is simply suggested that only the rich can still afford art.
They are easy to recognize as Jewish by name. Have you already experienced anti-Semitism as an artist?
Of course, I know that Swiss anti-Semitism that can also happen among friends, for example if someone suddenly says that he or she doesn’t like Jews that much. Depending on the situation, I cannot be bothered by anything so direct, and I had to learn to react directly and immediately in such cases. And what happens then? Exactly the same as now: people say they are not anti-Semites after all. And in the end I have to explain that what you just did not work. But as an artist I haven’t really experienced anything direct so far.
They are permanently exhibited in international museums. A major exhibition will follow in Milan in 2022, in summer you will receive the Rubens Prize in Siegen, followed by exhibitions in the Albertina in Vienna, then the Palais Tokyo in Paris. Is a situation like the one in Zurich also conceivable abroad?
I really only know this form of discussion in Switzerland. This uncomplicated, not historically thinking … In Germany, for example, you don’t know that, there you are rather too embarrassed. Surely the same thing would no longer be said as here. The Swiss always feel that they are out of the game because they were not involved in the murder of the Jews in World War II. So there is already a specific everyday anti-Semitism here that comes across as completely inexperienced and somehow also innocent.
Your request regarding your pictures is now in the room. What do you expect from Mayor Mauch?
Ms. Mauch must now demand absolute transparency, and the loan agreement is just really terrible. I don’t understand that at all. The whole Bührle Collection can be withdrawn after 20 years. How should you run such a museum? I think it’s completely wrong to go into something like that. The future director of the Kunsthaus, Ann Demeester, will have to work and clean up like in a field of rubble.
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