In the figure of the bohemian life was to be turned into art…

Interviewee: Christoph Schäfer

My interpretation of poetry in connection with Henri Lefebvre takes as its starting point how he was moulded artistically and politically by his time with the Surrealists and was thus influenced by the figure of the French bohemian, as well as idleness and the refusal to work. In short: a cool bohemian type at the end of the 19th century, someone like Rimbaud, had practically no need of any means of production. Unlike a sculptor working in the same period. In my view, someone like Rimbaud remains a cool figure even today, particularly when one is in his early twenties. After all, what you need is just a café, and there you can get a slip of paper, borrow a pen from the waiter and jot down your poetry. Otherwise, you have to transform your whole life into art and in the end you no longer produce anything in the sense of work. And there’s something tragic about this today, for instance when I see you sitting there opposite me with your smart phone, the work disappearing into this little device, disguising itself either as leisure time and fun or as something artistic. People who organise things no longer need an apparatus of working devices, they probably don’t even need an office any more. A danger lurks here I think, namely that these devices ensure that one is constantly working, and so work extends its grasp to encompass all of our time, seeping into every space of leisure time. And at the same time this is masked as fun. The bohemian is the model for this, but this model is currently being put into practice, albeit in reverse. As an artist one does not principally draw a line demarcating where work ceases and leisure begins. That would be almost silly. But we’ve landed quite far away from revolution…