At the demise of Steve Kurtz of the Critical Art Ensemble

Steve Kurtz died in 2025. He was a founding member of the Critical Art Ensemble.

I conducted an interview with him in 2009 in Berlin, we repost the article below on his practice.

"In the Wedding neighbourhood there is one gallery I think outstanding among the others and that is Art Laboratory Berlin. In one of my former posts I wrote about their exhibition in june 2009 with work of 'Ztohoven', a Czech art collective, which was already very interesting, because of its political intentions.


Art Laboratory Berlin seems to focus on what I prefer to call 'political art'; as one of the curators told me, they are working with themes and theme is now 'Art and Law'. The exhibition of work of Steve Kurtz is the latest one in this serie.


Steve Kurtz is an artist and professor of visual studies at the University at Buffalo in the USA. His 'Seized' is a documentation and installation based on his battle with the American justice department, that sued him for bioterrorism. He was accused of keeping illegal biological samples. For this the prosecutors messed up his house to find 'evidence' to could lead to a 20-year imprisonment, according to new laws on terrorism in the USA. After a long legal battle Kurtz was acquitted on all charges. The exhibition in Art laboratory Berlin is an installation based on these experiences, consisting out of video, sculpture, photography and text.


To understand the nature of the work, as the reader might not have visited the exhibition, it's necessary to know a bit more about the work of Steve Kurtz. I would describe his work as 'public interventions', using performances in the public space (which Kurtz denies to exist) to point out political issues. An important theme in his work is his analysis as Western society as being 'bunkerized', which means that there are institutions, public or 'pseudo public' as Kurtz calls it, where behaviour is strictly disciplined and disguises itself as an open public space, but in reality is strongly managed. Shopping malls are the clearest example of this, in the USA mostly privately owned, a phenomenon disseminating in 'Northern' societies (HK) (contemporary, industrialised, state-capitalist societies). But also the streets, squares and other public places are 'pseudo-public', as there is only space for a certain type of 'disciplined behaviour' (Kurtz doesn't refer to Foucault, but there are similarities in themes). Kurtz gives an example of 'free city' Amsterdam as a completely managed town, you are only welcome if you spend or do not disturb ' the consumer spending process' and this is exactly what is the aim of Kurtz' and his fellow artists. Important for the performances is to 'stay within the realm of the law', while unveiling the hidden strategies of commercial and state institutions.


Photo:Tim Deussen



Kurtz uses the word 'militarization' of the public space to describe the social intervention of state or private 'watchdog' officials, like police or guards, as soon as their strategies to colonize public space are threatened. "If there is more investment, there is more police" is a statement of Kurtz. "Circulation should not be bothered", that's why street musicians (at least in the USA, not in Amsterdam!) are left alone, as long as they attract people and 'enhance the circulation' and for example an artist of Kurtz' collective is banned by the police because of playing with model cars in a boulevard in Daytona Beach, USA.


An interesting example of a project Kurtz did was the one in Halifax, Canada: the 'Sorry project'. All spots in the town which where labeled with stickers to apologize for 'ugliness', like statues and certain buildings and all kind of 'various problems' bothering tourists. Kurtz describes it as a friendly action but still the harbour authorities where alarmed by 'gismo's ' and thought that it were 'suspicious objects'. They informed the police and the the police sealed off the whole area ("it's a bomb!"); this project was initiated just after the new terrorism laws: Kurtz was in trouble, because of the 'suspicious gizmo's' placed by Kurtz and his companions; although harmless, it resulted in a 'little overreaction' of the local police. Many projects of the Critical Art Ensemble, which Kurtz cofounded, end up in these kind of conflicts, that's why Kurtz is on some black lists in the USA now.


The Art Laboratory Berlin shows remnants of the project which bothered Kurtz the most: 'Seized'. The objects are resulting from a seizure of his house and belongings by the local authorities. Kurtz' wife had died and the local police found some suspicious biological samples that Kurtz had in his house for using in a project critically assessing biological research. Now Kurtz had been involved before in some projects concerned with re-enacting artistically 'biological warfare' programs from the sixties and he has earned a name as an artist in this realm; The police research resulted in Kurtz becoming a suspect of 'bio terrorism' and he had to fight for 4 years to prove his innocence. Being a professor at the Department of Visual studies at the University at Buffalo, Kurtz was lucky to get legal and financial support from his university to win this case. Kurtz states that if someone would have been charged without this backing, this person would have been 'in big trouble'; Kurtz sees himself as having been an 'ideal example' in the tensed 'after 911' situation in the USA, so that the governmental institutions tried to show they 'were in control'.


The projects Kurtz does are describable as political, interfering in a, according to Kurtz, non-existent public space, which, as mentioned above, is 'bunkerized', 'militarized' and where authorities structurally are breaking into civilian rights. Kurtz is annoyed by this situation and refuses to accept this. 'Nomadic intervention' is a self-chosen name for his actions; He is against the idea of monumentality in public space, as this blocks certain public spaces. That's why his interventions are temporarily. No artefacts are left, "people are left with the experiments". Bunkers, on the contrary, are described as 'friendly authoritarian space', shopping malls are another example of this. These bunkers are mostly objects of his interventions.


Photo: Tim Deussen


The exhibition is a residu of the actual actions-performances. Kurtz and his Critical Art Ensemble are politically motivated artists that work mainly outside the art institutions like musea and galleries though they exhibit there later on. Next to the actions they have published many books (downloadable via their website) where they lay out their theories."

Hans Kuiper


Steve Kurtz exhibited in Art Laboratory Berlin, till 15/11/09.

Radio special: Tetsuo Kogawa

Tetsuo Kogawa is a radio pioneer in several ways in radio. From micro radio projects, on a very local scale, to technological advice, philosophy and performances.

His websites are referred to elsewhere, in earlier posts on this Radio Neverno blog.

Here is a link to his micro radio manifesto. You can search on that website for more information, technological advice and performance links. 

Below a text written by Kogawa on Trash-art, originally published in 1999.

Trash-art in the age of Digital Ash 

Tetsuo Kogawa

In order to rethink the viability of "trash-art", Walter Benjamin's arguments on 'garbage/trash'(Abfall) and 'rag-picker'(Lumpensammler) are most stimulating. In the past I have called Benjamin's method a "technique of garbage collection"[1]. I dubbed it this considering Benjamin's idiosyncratic materialism that interprets beings as garbage/trash, his historical philosophy which views creation less as output than as rearrangement, and the movements in the methodology of semiotics and deconstruction that developed following Benjamin. In a letter to his friend Gershom Scholem (August 9, 1935), in which Benjamin explains the concept of his later "Passagenarbeiten" treatises, he comments that "this work uses surrealism philosophically and sublimates (aufheben) it, at the same time attempts to capture an image of history in those things that present existence (Dasein) most subtly fixed, in other words in the "garbage/trash" of present existence.[2]

Radical Surrealist montage technique was well-known to Benjamin, but his aim was to develop it into something more profound--a means of historical awareness. In his "Theses on the Philosophy of History," a condensed version of his view of history using montage techniques (or what William Burroughs would describe as "cutup") are the following words: "The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again."[3] That "image never seen again" is not an image from some great event, but an image that appears in the "waste" of no consequence, and those able to bear witness to it are not "heroes" or some class with special privileges, but the "oppressed."

In a review written by Benjamin in 1930 that passed virtually unnoticed, there is a brilliant passage which describes vividly what constituted his "technique of garbage collection." This is a review of "The Employee" (Die Angestellten), one of the early works of Siegfried Kracauer:

A rag-picker who picks up garbage early in the gray morning. Muttering darkly to himself, getting a bit drunk, he spears the remains of speeches and fragments of words with his stick, and throws them into his cart. Occasionally he picks up scraps of these hackneyed phrases like "human beings," "innerness," and "deepen," and flutters them contemptuously in the morning breeze. He is the morning garbage collector, but this morning is the morning of the day of the revolution.[4]

Kracauer, later in exile in New York and battling with extreme hardship and illness, analyzed the details of German film chiefly of the 1920s and 30s--the enormous "garbage of history"--and wrote "From Caligari to Hitler"(1947), which exposed incisively the collective unconsciousness that paved the way for Hitler's rise to prominence and was then flattened by the force of it.

To Benjamin, "garbage/trash" was the trivial part, the detail of enormous things, in other words, the minute. His mode of thinking was called "micrology". His attention to them was a stratagem in response to the movements of an era in which the will for power was still directed toward spatially enormous objects. The latter half of the twentieth century, however, is an era of "posts": "postindustrial," "postmodern," "postcolonial," "postnuclear," "postmassmediatique" . . . each in turn revolves on the axis of time and is sent on its way. Here, trivial things and minute things cease to be alternatives to the will for power, because not only does power itself no longer seek large things, it accepts the trivial and the minute. Therefore, "small is beautiful."

Theodor W. Adorno, while in one aspect having already adopted Benjamin's idea of "only through the details can we hope for a passage to the whole"[5] as his own mode of thought, also indicated to Benjamin his doubts about this method. To Benjamin, "garbage collection" not only gave form to a method of thought, it actually played an "important role" in the debate on the "passages" (arcades) of 19th century Paris. In a 1938 letter to Benjamin from exile in New York, Adorno made the following comment:

The problem is the rag-picker. To my mind the definition of the rag-picker as a marginal character personifying the very lowest level of poverty does not fulfil at all the promise of the term rag-picker when it appears in one of your texts. (abridged) I assume this shortcoming is related to the fact that the capitalist function of the rag-picker, i.e. the function that makes even beggars subordinate to their exchange value, is not made clear. Could I be reading too much into it all[6]?

Adorno, who was eventually to outlive Benjamin, was finally to write: "All post-Auschwitz culture, including its urgent critique, is garbage(Muell),"[7] and this demonstrates the pessimistic perceptions of Adorno in his belief that all "trivia," "details" and "minute things" are ashes and dust, and all that exists is endless ruin. The world would become not a "slum" littered with "garbage/trash" but would resemble a city after a nuclear attack, a ruin in which even the "details" cannot be discerned.

Benjamin's garbage collection technique directly supposes film montage. The reason his technique did not simply remain an application of the film technique known as montage is because he had a firm grasp of several techniques within the basic movements in thought and technology, i.e. the historical threads flowing into film montage--premodern storytelling, the 'rencontre fortuite' of surrealism, and even "quotations" of Berthold Brecht--and understood their meaning at the most basic of levels. However the digital technology that constructs virtually what does not really exist was not within the technological scope of Benjamin. Though things may be broken up, transformed into garbage and lose their wholeness, they do actually exist as extensions of the body. The electronic world of digital technology however, belongs to a level estranged from any extension of the body. This is, so to speak, the virtual "paradise" built on the "waste" and "ruins" of Adorno, and is "Utopia," literally no-place. Adorno's "pessimism" thus reverses itself into a positivism of electronic space.

Cyberspace is a no-place that nothing physical can exist. This is an ultimate form of garbage/trash where no body can survive. Art is an art that something physical flashes up at the instant over the space. Art can continue to exist only in the phase of time. Due to the cyberspace that exterminates physical element, live human body could reactivate itself in the temporal relation with it. Trash-art in the cyberspace will go to live action such as the live streaming.

Notes:
[1] Tetsuo Kogawa, Shutai no Tenkan (Changing the Subject). Tokyo: Miraisha, 1978, pp. 235-8.
[2] Gershom Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno, eds., Walter Benjamin, Briefe 2. Frankfurt am Mine:Suhrkamp Verlag, 1978, p.685.
[3] Hannah Arendt, ed., Walter Benjamin, Illuminations. Translated by Harry Zohm. New York: Schocken Books, 1968, p. 235.
[4] Hella Tiedemann-Bartels, ed., Walter Benjamin Gesammelte Schriften III. Frankfurt am Mine:Suhrkamp Verlag, 1971, p.225.
[5] Theodor W. Adorno, Ueber Walter Benjamin. Frankfurt am Mine: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1990, p.87.
[6] Ibid., pp.159-160.
[7] Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics. Translated by E.B. Ashton. New York: The Seabury Press, 1979, p.367.

(I appreciate Pamela Virgilio Miki for her help totranslate the original Japanese text into English.)

Isaev Alexsei(ed.): The look from the East, Media ArtLab, Moscow, 2000

Surprise! A new exhibition in 411, until August 28th in Haarlem

 

Design flyer/poster Studio van Amsterdam

Deelnemers: Jukka Korkeila, Arjan van Amsterdam, Secil Arda, Lotte Pet, Margo van der Pool, Roger Walschots, Frans Vendel, Lia de Jonghe, Jean-Philippe Rousset, Jak Beemsterboer, Isik Tuzuner, Joop Schrotenboer, Linda Weiss, Lilian Berg, Sari Piek, Gerard Veldman, Sonja Doevendans and Jean-Philippe Paumier.

ENGLISH BELOW

Kunstruimte 411 presenteert in Gebouw het Seinwezen in Haarlem een nieuwe expositie ´Surprise!´ gebaseerd op een ´Open Call´. 

Hierop hebben veel kunstenaars gereageerd, zowel professionele kunstenaars die al eerder bij Kunstruimte 411 geëxposeerd hebben, als nieuwe contacten, het wordt dus voor eenieder een verrassing welke werken er uiteindelijk getoond gaan worden. Media zijn: schilderijen, prints, fotografie, mixed media, tekeningen.

Kunstenaars die meedoen zijn tot nu toe: 

Jukka Korkeila, Arjan van Amsterdam, Secil Arda, Lotte Pet, Margo van der Pool, Roger Walschots, Frans Vendel, Lia de Jonghe, Jean-Philippe Rousset, Jak Beemsterboer, Isik Tuzuner, Joop Schrotenboer, Linda Weiss, Lilian Berg, Sari Piek, Sonja Doevendans and Jean-Philippe Paumier.

De opening was zondag 7 juni van 15.00-18.00 uur.

De expositie loopt tot 28 augustus, 2026.

´Surprise´

Kunstruimte 411 presenteert verrassende kunst in gebouw Het Seinwezen

Kinderhuissingel 1

2013 AS Haarlem (NL)

(Foto: werk van Frans Vendel)

ENGLISH

Surprise! 

...is the name of the coming group show based on an Open Call for professional artists with 2D work, all media, but must be hangable on hooks on the walls in the space. So with construction at the back side of your work.

We got applications nationally and internationally with the following participants as a result:

Jukka Korkeila, Arjan van Amsterdam, Secil Arda, Lotte Pet, Margo van der Pool, Roger Walschots, Frans Vendel, Lia de Jonghe, Jean-Philippe Rousset, Jak Beemsterboer, Isik Tuzuner, Joop Schrotenboer, Linda Weiss, Lilian Berg, Sari Piek, Sonja Doevendans and Jean-Philippe Paumier.

Location: Kinderhuissingel 1, 2013 AS Haarlem (NL)

The OPENING was June 7th, 2026, 3-6pm.

The exhibition runs until August 28th, 2026.

(Image: Secil Arda)

Es singt und spielt noch immer: Neoschlager (VIDEO)

 
Die Neoschlagertour 2026 ist unterwegs entlang viele Orte im Kunstbereich. Mehr Information ueber das Tour dieses Jahres koennen Sie HIER finden.

Sie koennen noch immer buchen:

Kontakt und Buchungen:

  
neoschlager@gmail.com

Tief in der Nacht LIVE (Film von Boudewijn Ruckert):

Die Neoschlagertour 2026 bis jetzt (Selektion):

7. Juni: ´Surprise!´, Haarlem (NL), Kunstruimte 411.

4.April: Amsterdam (NL), ´Tomorrow is Today´, Amstelkerk.

3. Februar: Haarlem (NL), Kunstruimte 411 

28. Januar: Amsterdam (NL), De Thomas.

Selektion von einige Konzerte in 2025:

Dezember, Mixtake, JP & JP, Projektraum 411, Haarlem (NL)

November: Salon Arti et Amicitiae, mit Gaeste Paparonnie & Sina Khani

Oktober, Platforms Project, Athen, Griechenland

September, ´Love as Resistance´, Linda Weiss in Projektraum 411, Haarlem (NL)

Juni, ´Boom Boom Cha´, Internationales Ausstellung, Haarlem (NL)

Februar: Digitales TV/ Fernsehen- Creeps from the Middle East, in The Unsafe House, Amsterdam, 4 Konzerte.

Liebe Gruesse und bis bald.

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Niederlaendische Neoschlager: Oncologie wil endoscopie

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