vienna, 2023
collage in the back
history was written by losers
paris, 2022
In the Western Middle Ages, when wakes were held, owls were considered an omen for the dead; in Greek mythology, they symbolized wisdom through the goddess Athena; in Native American cultures, they stood for spiritual guidance and foresight; and in Japanese folklore, they were associated with protection and good fortune. In today's Western libraries, the owl stands as the guardian of Western knowledge gained from the horrors of colonial history as cultures around the globe were eliminated, suppressed and sucked up. The transfer of knowledge from imperial institutions takes place within the framework of strictly patriarchal forms of organization that coexist to this day in the ivory tower mentality of our Western society. I have associated My Owl with the concept of property. In the owl's belly, a ring with a precious stone is locked, which the owl's large and penetrating eyes conceal.
In this installation, Jürgen Münzer has compiled fragments of materials, stories, ideas and texts that he has collected on trips to Ukraine over the past two years.
If Kim Kardashian walks down the street in Paris wearing a diamond necklace worth millions of dollars, she is not only showing off her wealth, she is also flaunting her power over violence, since everyone assumes she would not be able to do so without the existence, visible or not, of an armed personal security detail, trained to deal with potential thieves. Property rights of all sorts are ultimately backed up by what legal theorists like von Ihering euphemistically called ‘force’. But let us imagine, for a moment, what would happen if everyone on earth were suddenly to become physically invulnerable. Say they all drank a potion which made it impossible for anyone to harm anyone else. Could Kim Kardashian still maintain exclusive rights over her jewellery?
Well, perhaps not if she showed it off too regularly, since someone would presumably snatch it; but she certainly could if she normally kept it hidden in a safe, the combination of which she alone knew and only revealed to trusted audiences at events which were not announced in advance. So there is a second way of ensuring that one has access to rights others do not have: the control of information. Only Kim and her closest confidants know where the diamonds are normally kept, or when she is likely to appear wearing them. This obviously applies to all forms of property that are ultimately backed up by the ‘threat of force’ – landed property, wares in stores, and so forth. If humans were incapable of hurting each other, no one would be able to declare something absolutely sacred to themselves or to defend it against ‘all the world’. They could only exclude those who agreed to be excluded.
Still, let us take the experiment a step further and imagine everyone on earth drank another potion which rendered them all incapable of keeping a secret, but still unable to harm one another physically as well. Access to information, as well as force, has now been equalized. Can Kim still keep her diamonds? Possibly. But only if she manages to convince absolutely everyone that, being Kim Kardashian, she is such a unique and extraordinary human being that she actually deserves to have things no one else can.
We would like to suggest that these three principles – call them control of violence, control of information, and individual charisma – are also the three possible bases of social power. The threat of violence tends to be the most dependable, which is why it has become the basis for uniform systems of law everywhere; charisma tends to be the most ephemeral. Usually, all three coexist to some degree. Even in societies where interpersonal violence is rare, one may well find hierarchies based on knowledge. It doesn’t even particularly matter what that knowledge is about: maybe some sort of technical know-how (say, of smelting copper, or using herbal medicines); or maybe something we consider total mumbo jumbo (the names of the twenty-seven hells and thirty-nine heavens, and what creatures one would be likely to meet if one travelled there).
Text excerpt from “The dawn of everything. A new history of humanity”, David Graeber, David Wengrow, 2021