Eat a sausage, chop down trees, saw off hair: Thomas Schütte talks to Ulrich Loock about four decades of art making and the Rhineland

Today the choice between ‘opacity’ and ‘transparency’ has become the subject of increasing critical engagement in the realms of both contemporary art and politics. Should art works reveal their cultural origins and references or should they hide them? Do political claims still depend upon making identities visible?

In his last collection of essays Philosophie de la Relation (Philosophy of the Relation, 2009), the late Martiniquan writer and poet Édouard Glissant presented his final statement on opacity. A response to the text by the critic and curator Ulrich Loock.