Stefan Wagner Reading
Purity Grade

An orange coloured vehicle, the passion_cleaner is slowly moving among cars and pedestrians, constantly sweeping the curbstones. Instead of the engine's rumbling, some heavy noise resounds, emitted by oversized loudspeakers mounted on top of the road sweeper. Audio recordings telling of justice, of equality and of sufficient wages for all, are broadcast ceaselessly into the night. The passionate slogans were recorded during Labour Day demonstrations on the 1st of May, rearranged and are now played back in loops.
"Was macht den Bürgern Angst - Klassenkampf! Was macht den Bürgern Angst - Klassenkampf! Was macht den Bürgern Angst - Klassenkampf! ..." (engl.: what scares the bourgeois? - class struggle!) The vehicle drives on slowly, heading towards a shopping mall, appropriately named Puls5. The venue arose from the ruins of a former casting house and was developed for an affluent clientele. Beams, free of any grime, endow an impressive ambiance to the romantic idea of hard work. The sweat and dirt are in the past however. The romanticized stage setting is accentuated by red flags. In the middle of the hall, an engineer is erecting a tent. He is tinkering with a zeppelin which he constructed in long, committed hours of work. This vehicle is equipped with a system that allows for autonomous operation. A video camera provides the necessary data for navigation, as well as surveiling the surroundings. Every now and then the engineer steps out of his temporary laboratory to let the silver shining aircraft float through the hall. In the meantime the passion_cleaner arrives at the mall. Slogans resound loudly. However, the pathetic chants of the workers completely lose their power in the halls of consumption. Degenerated to mockery, they are merely reminiscent of former times. Between the passion_cleaner and the engineer, children are running around and joyfully handing out flyers to the public. The leaflets are proposing to download the workers slogans as ringtones for mobile phones. A few minutes later the chanting passion_cleaner exits the mall. Audience, engineer, flags and zeppelin are left behind.

Overriding functionality
Let's follow the passion_cleaner for a while. The appearance of the machine was transformed. By mounting immense loudspeakers on top of the driver's cabin it mutated into a protest machine. Thus it is not only hybrid in design but also in function. It does not cleanse anymore. Although the brooms are sweeping constantly, the brushing is not sucked into the machine. Empty cans and crumpled papers are left behind on the street. However the passion_cleaner modifies their position. By rearranging the rubbish the seemingly useless sweeping mechanism turns the litter into an ornament. As restructured assemblage the waste emerges with a new visibility within public space. Obsolescence by repositioning Artefacts called litter are not inherently worthless. In fact they are only valued as such when dumped on the street. Actually these objects have only lost their functionality. They are not usefully protecting foods or other items anymore. When such dysfunctional objects are dumped, they ultimately become excluded from the sphere of valuables. Consequently the used-up goods shall be forgotten, put away, eliminated. But what actually occurs to them is a shift in their visibility. These objects are rearranged in our patterns of recognition. By repositioning the dumped objects and subsequently leaving them as its own trace, the passion_cleaner renders this process visible.

Purification as a strategy of surveillance
Outside of the intimate sphere of one's home, discarding and cleaning gain a moral and political dimension. Some years ago the municipality of Zurich launched a cleanliness campaign titled "permitted is what does not disturb". Numerous rules of conduct for public space were formulated. The campaign was trying to raise the population's sense of security by increasing the cleanliness of public space. Everybody was prompted to keep the city clean and to dump waste in the appropriate places. Graffiti and tags, signs of an urban society, were supposed to be removed like normal rubbish by a special department. Grey concrete walls ought to remain grey, white ones should be white. Posters presenting the new commandments of cleanliness were put up to increase the efficiency of their propagation. They became constant companions for city walks. However the campaign only achieved that which it was trying to prevent. Due to a lack of resources, some waste and graffiti could not be removed. Consequently the abnormal demand for cleanliness actually lead to a situation in which the sense of security in some areas of the public space has not increased but rather, diminished. In the logic of cleanliness one eventually had to wonder whether such clean spaces were actually uncontrolled territories which could only be crossed with great caution. The strategy to keep all parts of the city clean and secure is based on an extensive claim to surveillance which was supposed to be realised by internalising the commandments of cleanliness. Whoever misbehaves is disturbing and can be corrected immediately. In this way, a society is constructed in which all other values are subordinate to cleanliness and security.

Purification and art
It was one of the crucial concerns of artistic modernity to achieve abstraction by reduction. The principle of attaining a new visibility by removing displeasing elements was at work there as well. Architectural modernity was restricted to simple shapes ruled by the paradigm of functionality. In this respect the "Plan Voisin" by Le Corbusier (1925) was an ambivalent climax in the history of architecture.[1] The idea was to remove an entire quarter. To increase the quality of life, historically valuable urban structures were supposed to be replaced by a formal system. The megalomaniac project was never realised. Some decades later, in 1962 Allan Kaprow took on the subject of purification in his performance "Sweeping". His work was not dealing especially with abstraction which would be attained by purification. More so Kaprow was working on the absurdity of a recurring process of cleaning. In "Sweeping" the audience was requested to clean out an area of the forest with a broom and to build up a heap from the rubbish. Even the thought of sweeping the forest with a broom must have appeared dubious to the American audience of that time. Afterwards red paint was poured on the heap which then served as another element of the performance. Kaprow's excessive use of paint must be related to the techniques of his teacher, the painter Hans Hofmann.[2] In this sense "Sweeping" can be read as a response to modernity which is literally dumped here.

passion_cleaner refuses such a modernistic utopia of purification by means of reduction. It does not aspire to an avantgardistic impetus to reduce every object to its proper shape, as Adolf Loos did. Instead litter is turned into an urban ornament and a stumbling block for the perception of everyday life. Negotiating passion The passion_cleaner is rearranging several layers of meaning and renders them legible in a new way. Its hybrid shape and functionality refers to the culture of political demonstrations, which draws attention to political issues in public. By presenting the slogans as loops and samples, passion_cleaner points out that they have lost their political impact. By preventing the road sweeper from actually cleaning and reducing waste, it is rearranging the litter. On the one hand this process exposes the sociopolitical conditions of the urban space. On the other, it refers to artistic strategies of modernity which are re-interpreted by the passion_cleaner.

Footnotes
[1] FAYET, Roger (2003): Reinigungen: vom Abfall der Moderne zum Kompost der Nachmoderne. Vienna.

[2] URSPRUNG, Philip (2003): Grenzen der Kunst. Allan Kaprow und das Happening. Robert Smithson und die Land Art. München, p. 175f.