TABLES - HOW DID IT ALL BEGIN?

Well ... tables have been around for some time. In the beginning, people ate from large boards at feasts, and when they were finished, "the board was cleared away" - echoes of this expression are still found today.

... The table has come to an end? Blueprints for the world are simulated in gigantic experimental arrangements, in specific simulation spaces or in PC's and in cyberspace. This end of a culture-historical form as a ritual, as an altar, as a roundtable or just a profane "instrument of manners" is reason enough to devote an introspective contemplation to it again and again and continuously.

Actually, we don't really want to go quite that far back. Let's stop at where the table is the focal point of our interest, where it is a piece of furniture that stands for a way of living, for culture, because there is much that has always taken place around the table, and much of our culture can be read from this piece of furniture.

The order of rank: Even at our house, the father sat at the "head of the table", meaning at the end of the long side, and he is the one who is still served first. Among the farmers of our region (Upper Austria), everyone used to eat from a common bowl, drink from a common pitcher. Who started - and was thus able to take from plenty - or who came last, was not insignificant. The farmer, who opened the meal, was followed by the first servant (head man), and the children came last, with the smallest ones at the very end. There could not have been much left in the bowl, by the time they got it. So it was certainly not at all insignificant, where you were allowed to - or had to - sit at the table.

... With a certain interest, he noticed that the men at the president's table changed places according to an impenetrable order. Accordingly, at some point it should be his turn, too. At the most, there is only one man at the president's side, who has not moved from there since the beginning. The presidential audience is simultaneously public and secret. The man sawing ham at the end of the table probably hears all the meaningful whispers. Then there are still others in the anteroom carefully observing the course of events. No one pays any attention to the men standing around the prize-winner's table wolfing down meat. This probably means that their rank obligates them to be present, but they are not particularly important otherwise. Everyone is probably wondering if he will get a turn at all. Portions of the huge, greasy ham, on which the white-aproned giant continues to saw away, are only distributed to those who have managed to secure themselves a place at the presidential table ... PÉTER NÁDAS

Table manners: Bourgeois society wanted a distinction, wanted to set themselves apart from the commoners and the farmers, so they adopted and affected aristocratic table comportment.

Table settings, fine porcelain, separate cutlery for the first course, main dish and dessert, glasses for different beverages, etc.; anyone who doesn't know when to use which is made to feel insecure and quickly appears badly brought up in the eyes of the bourgeoisie. This is the reason for wanting good table manners to become part of children's flesh and blood. This kind of education, suppressing spontaneous expressions (burping, smacking), is something that most children still find tormenting. Table manners must be practiced, sometimes drilled to the point of painfulness, until the parents are satisfied that the children conform to "expectations."

... Although food is a basic need, this dialogue can become quite stilted. It depends on where you are. The dialogue can also be shifted to an intercultural plane. At the end of the 20th century in North America, we are experiencing a strong influence from Mexican culture on US American culture. Did you know that more salsa is sold in the US today than ketchup? That would have been unthinkable thirty years ago.

Culture and feeling have much to do with what interests me about food - food is very emotional. You had your first experience with food at your mother's breast. Even the language we use to communicate about food and what we associate with it is very emotional. There are dishes that we all like, but only because we associate certain childhood memories and people, who are important to us, with them. Everyone can remember some favorite dish that his mother used to cook for him. Aside from that, there are certain meals that are highly ritualized, that transport an emotional or social message - such as Christmas dinner, for example - which do not play a great role in terms of our nutrition or eating habits.

Table design: solid wood tables again today, or dilapidated old restaurant tables that have been refurbished, have completely replaced laminated tabletops, the revolution of the late 50's, unless there is still an old Ikea table from university days wobbling around or an old family heirloom adorns the flat; one way or another, we "cocoon" ourselves with sofas, little tables in a tasteful ambiance and stage the self within our own four walls.

Table drawer: there is always something intimate about a glimpse into it; it is a kind of fly for many table owners, with all kinds of odds and ends in it.

When I was a child visiting a farm in the country once, conjuring naked rolls from the table drawer seemed somehow unclean to me. Yet tables are not just for eating from, they are where problems are discussed, where people lay their cards down, where children do homework, which are used for sewing, ironing, crafts. The table is a central piece of furniture, just as it was for the "Knights of the Round Table" or "Jesus at the Last Supper."

...The curator Gachnang's central idea is iconoclasm, realized in the 1989 Cologne show "Bilderstreit" ("Iconoclasm"), which was as controversial at the time as it was historically necessary. Gachnang's reflections on the modern history of finding images always continued to weave the net of ephemeral solutions. Their performative locations were tables for discussion, roundtables, where factious world views were served, carved, portioned out and tasted. Such disparate minds as Fontana, "the fine, elegant gentleman from Milan", and Jorn, "the wild Viking", recognized one another there. Oral communication vanishes in the wind, and yet it is oriented to the body. In the heat of the battle, it is already the repository of the memory of all iconoclastic argumentation. Gachnang's extemporary style originates in this oralness.

The "Journeys with Art" are a long farewell to another time, yet not without perceptible melancholy. In conversation with Matthias Beltz (1997), Gachnang travels once again back and forth all over the old "roads of experience" - with a fabulous partner, because the cabaretist is a specialist in performance and an adept of aphoristic humor, which is in turn related to anecdotal thinking. Both trust in the concatenation of nonsensical connections, whose hidden meaning leaps out of the punch line.

This is reason enough to take a closer look at this piece of furniture, but especially at the way that people deal with it.

When we were supposed to think about identity and whether there is a European identity or not,

..."When I was young, I was scholarly, and especially before I came to theology, I dealt with allegories, tropologies, analogies and made nothing but art. I know that it is nothing but dirt that I threw away. The literal meaning, that is enough, there is life in it and comfort, power, teaching and art. The other is fools' work, even if it shines brightly." Martin Luther in his "Table Talks" (1540)

it was clear that we would have to look at the whole thing on site. Thus we looked for a EU outer border, where it was not immediately evident, whether it would show its borders.

Instead of going to a typical border, such as the Austrian-Czech border, we went to the Italian-Swiss-Austrian border, to see whether the culture of the people there was more influenced by EU borders, nation-state borders, or simply by the specific characteristics of a smaller region. In order to delimit the whole even more, we also included a vertical border and decided that in this Alpine region, we would only more closely examine tables above 2000m above sea level. We hoped to attain authentic results at this airy height. If you climb high enough, you may find good fortune, and so we found a village with fourteen houses directly on both the vertical and the horizontal border: an easily investigated object? Theoretically, yes, practically, so-so. There were many impressions, and Boris Nieslony took a table with him on his back up a high mountain, so that he could even sit at a table at a height of 3000m above sea level.

After this project, it was clear that tables are quite interesting and say much about their owners and their surroundings. Yet how could we convey that to other people? The answer was the table transaction: with this project, it was possible to put into action the criteria of demonstrating to people the significance of their own table and bringing them together with other people at this table. Thus we set out for the first time in Upper Austria during the Festival of the Regions to exchange tables from private homes with one another. We were also interested in achieving a thorough mixture, so a policeman's table landed at a large farmhouse and a table from a students' shared flat ended up in an elegant villa.

... In terms of communication, each medium has a dialectic of its own: it both joins and separates those who communicate through this medium. This dialectic is actually the exact meaning of the term "medium", but there are media whose presence is forgotten during the communicative process (the so-called face-to-face media). For instance, when one conducts a dialogue around a round table, the presence of the table is forgotten, and even more so the presence of the air, through which one speaks. Thus one has the - always false - impression of taking part in unmediated communication, even when the bodies do not touch. This impression is always false, because there is no unmediated communication (except in the mystical union, which eludes analysis), but even though this impression is false, it makes communication satisfactory. (V. Flusser)

Then, as a result of an invitation from the festival "log.in/netz.kunst.werke", 30 days, an entire month was spent exchanging 19 dining tables back and forth among the cities of Nuremberg, Fürth, Erlangen and Schwabach.Visitors could find the telephone numbers of all the table-exchangers in publicly available lists.

Everyone had an opportunity to call one of the Transactionaries between June 25 and July 25, 2000 and request a viewing.

When a date for viewing/visiting was agreed, attentive visitors did not forget to bring a gift for the host - since hospitality is part of table culture.

Resume:

There is much that we will never find out.

..., direct communication and the common focal point associated with it: devoting oneself to overcoming boundaries and inhibitions. When it implodes centrifugally, then it is a negative table that is regarded as the common vanishing point, e.g. the television or a family murder after the lasagna.

Log in - exchange ideas - log out. No Problem.

....... Table Trade

a card from the library

Yes, something is moving

The encounter with myself

(excerpt)

I look forward to new encounters with open-minded people, since I have not been living long in Fürth again and that rather reclusively. It is not only a matter of the number of meetings, but rather of the encounter itself. In being with others, I want to give something of myself and learn something about myself and the others through the exchange and thus to get something as well.

So it is a position of anticipation again, although I would have preferred having given that up.

It so often leads to dis-illusion, cancels an illusion, yet that means that something can move again and become clear in me. It is an action that can be used for many things and has been. I assume that other actors, including "insiders", went into the action with a feeling of anticipation as well, a drive to become active and let something happen. It is a setting that can be used to experience something. To allow oneself ... no, myself to enter (into the game), get to know people, to enter into dealing with sympathy and antipathy while simultaneously observing my projections, allow myself to enter into that.

Communicating intensively with the outside allows the same to happen to me on the inside, confronting myself more profoundly with myself. In various encounters and the way I deal with them, I see where I stand again and again.

In the person opposite me, I recognize what I also carry consciously or unconsciously inside myself - so I don't need to judge from the outside, but rather stay in myself. I go on and look deeper, in order to see clearly what is really there. I want to make room for the new, let go of the old or integrate it, instead of fighting it.

I no longer want to get to know people in order to categorize, to judge, close myself off because of a false need of security and to protect myself. Of course, I also claim that small-talk bores me. Synchronously I want to become independent from others' judgments of me, free myself from them.

>Mercedes Meichinger< (meaning: "... on the mercy of liberation from imprisonment.) - here my own and then afterward really that of others, too.

September 1, 2000

The more mediatized, networked this world appears, the stronger the desire becomes to have something to do with this world, with the people of this world.

... If people are not ready or able to build this new, just order, then God will do it, prophesied Hans Hergot in the "Neue Wandlung" ("New Transformation"): "There were seen three tables in the world, the first overabundant and too much on it. The other middling and pleasingly sparse. The third quite sparse. Then those from the overabundant table came and wanted to take the bread from the table with so little. Thus arises a battle and God will overturn the overabundant table and the sparse table and affirm the middling table." With someone with ideas like that in his mind and capable of writing them down and printing them as well, the authorities at the time probably had no choice but to cut off his head, if they wanted to restore and maintain order after the peasant revolts of the previous years.

As initiators, we sense that we turned ourselves over to a community, a network, with this project, with the success of this project. There is much that happens at and around the exchanged tables that we never find out about. It is good that there are secrets. From the time when guests, observers, people interested in art first come into contact with the project, what happens is up to the guests and the hosts. We created the framework and turned the project over to the hands of "strangers."

... For me - and several others, I hope - there is no balance in unease. Planning is only the antithesis of free barter exchanges. Only the exchange was planned and the mutual sacrifices associated with it. Yet if the term "novelty" is to remain meaningful, then it has to mean repeal here, not just disguise. For the foundation of a new reality, there is no other principle than that of the gift. Despite their errors and limitations, in the historical experience of the councils of workers (1917, 1921, 1934, 1956) and their passionate search for friendship and love, I see the only inspiring reason for not despairing at the current reality. Yet everything has conspired to keep what is positive about that experience a secret. Doubt is maintained about their true significance, i.e. their existence, with objective reasoning. It is just a coincidence that no historian has bothered to investigate the life of people in extremely revolutionary moments. Consequently, the wish to put an end to free barter exchanges in human behavior is evidently on the path to the negative. Doubted unease is crushed under the weight of a yet stronger and more condensed unease.

Based on my own experience, I have no doubt that anyone who has spent only a single hour in the cage of coerced relationships, feels a deep affection for Pierre Francois Lacenaire and the passion for crime. (Raoul Vaneigem)

First letters, faxes and e-mails flew back and forth, then tables traveled, and finally people are on the way to visit one another, following an ancient interest.


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