Feeling Numbers: KP Brehmer and
the Supermarket, on the Occasion of
To refuse / To wait / To sleep
Jamie Hilder

The cashiers at the supermarket by my
apartment have recently started calling
me Jeremy. It is uncomfortable. They do
this because I signed up for a membership card under a false name and phone
number. I signed up for the card because
I was tired of paying extortionate prices
for groceries. I refuse to carry a supermarket member’s rewards card on me,
though, so when the cashiers ask me if
I have my rewards card on me, I offer
them a phone number instead. I then
recite a defunct phone number of a close
friend, and they ask, “Jeremy?” as they
look me in the face and slightly raise
their eyebrows, and I lower my eyes away
and mumble, “Yes.” When they finish
bagging my groceries they often say
something like, “There you go, Jeremy,
have a nice day,” and I say, “Thanks, you
too.” Then I pick up the bag and leave the
store feeling an angry kind of sad.
It’s easy to forget where economy lives.
Giving a false name and phone number
to a supermarket was a spontaneous
gesture of resistance that backfired.
Fed up with being treated like a walking
sack of numbers, I tried to cheat big data
by detaching my supermarket shopping habits from my name and phone
number. I realized they would be able to
track my purchases, but they wouldn’t
be able to track me. But I didn’t count on
their policy requiring the use of that data
in the personal contact between consumer and cashier. I can glean from the
scripted regularity of my interactions
with the cashiers and my experience
working in similar service jobs that they
are required to use the customer’s name
at least once, and perhaps are encouraged to use it twice.

1.

Harry Braverman,
“Scientific
Management,” in Labor
and Monopoly Capital:
The Degradation of Work
in the Twentieth Century
(New York: Monthly
Review Press, 1998
[1974]), 66.

65

The feeling of being a set of numbers
is difficult to quantify, because it
is a feeling. This difficulty is at the
foreground of several works by the
German artist KP Brehmer (1938–1997),
who in the 1960s and 1970s addressed
the emergent subjectivities of the
statistical citizen. Loosely affiliated
with the capitalist realists in Germany
(Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter, Konrad
Lueg and Wolf Vostell), Brehmer took
as his material not so much the images
that circulated within contemporary
consumer capitalism as the images
that produced the images: the bar
graphs and diagrams that argued for
the rational organization of human
behaviours on various levels, from
opinion polls to production metrics,
from market data to state data. In
Brehmer’s 1978 work Seele und Gefühl
eines Arbeiters, Whitechapel Version (Soul
and Feelings of a Worker, Whitechapel
Version), for example, he provides a
large-scale display of two workers’
emotions based on the economic
psychologist Rexford B. Hersey’s 1932
study Workers’ Emotions in Shop and
Home. For his analysis, Hersey tracked
the emotions of a group of workers
within the Pennsylvania Railroad
company, applying a methodology
similar to that of Frederick Winslow
Taylor during his development of
scientific management (“Taylorism”),
but preserving the lustre of sociohistoricity. Instead of measuring the
speed of tasks in pursuit of a definition
of a fair day’s work, though, Hersey
aimed to “check in” with workers, to
address conditions of alienation on
the job that might contribute to larger
structures of feeling while off the clock.1

Feeling Numbers: KP Brehmer and
the Supermarket, on the Occasion of
To refuse / To wait / To sleep
Jamie Hilder

The cashiers at the supermarket by my
apartment have recently started calling
me Jeremy. It is uncomfortable. They do
this because I signed up for a membership card under a false name and phone
number. I signed up for the card because
I was tired of paying extortionate prices
for groceries. I refuse to carry a supermarket member’s rewards card on me,
though, so when the cashiers ask me if
I have my rewards card on me, I offer
them a phone number instead. I then
recite a defunct phone number of a close
friend, and they ask, “Jeremy?” as they
look me in the face and slightly raise
their eyebrows, and I lower my eyes away
and mumble, “Yes.” When they finish
bagging my groceries they often say
something like, “There you go, Jeremy,
have a nice day,” and I say, “Thanks, you
too.” Then I pick up the bag and leave the
store feeling an angry kind of sad.
It’s easy to forget where economy lives.
Giving a false name and phone number
to a supermarket was a spontaneous
gesture of resistance that backfired.
Fed up with being treated like a walking
sack of numbers, I tried to cheat big data
by detaching my supermarket shopping habits from my name and phone
number. I realized they would be able to
track my purchases, but they wouldn’t
be able to track me. But I didn’t count on
their policy requiring the use of that data
in the personal contact between consumer and cashier. I can glean from the
scripted regularity of my interactions
with the cashiers and my experience
working in similar service jobs that they
are required to use the customer’s name
at least once, and perhaps are encouraged to use it twice.

1.

Harry Braverman,
“Scientific
Management,” in Labor
and Monopoly Capital:
The Degradation of Work
in the Twentieth Century
(New York: Monthly
Review Press, 1998
[1974]), 66.

65

The feeling of being a set of numbers
is difficult to quantify, because it
is a feeling. This difficulty is at the
foreground of several works by the
German artist KP Brehmer (1938–1997),
who in the 1960s and 1970s addressed
the emergent subjectivities of the
statistical citizen. Loosely affiliated
with the capitalist realists in Germany
(Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter, Konrad
Lueg and Wolf Vostell), Brehmer took
as his material not so much the images
that circulated within contemporary
consumer capitalism as the images
that produced the images: the bar
graphs and diagrams that argued for
the rational organization of human
behaviours on various levels, from
opinion polls to production metrics,
from market data to state data. In
Brehmer’s 1978 work Seele und Gefühl
eines Arbeiters, Whitechapel Version (Soul
and Feelings of a Worker, Whitechapel
Version), for example, he provides a
large-scale display of two workers’
emotions based on the economic
psychologist Rexford B. Hersey’s 1932
study Workers’ Emotions in Shop and
Home. For his analysis, Hersey tracked
the emotions of a group of workers
within the Pennsylvania Railroad
company, applying a methodology
similar to that of Frederick Winslow
Taylor during his development of
scientific management (“Taylorism”),
but preserving the lustre of sociohistoricity. Instead of measuring the
speed of tasks in pursuit of a definition
of a fair day’s work, though, Hersey
aimed to “check in” with workers, to
address conditions of alienation on
the job that might contribute to larger
structures of feeling while off the clock.1

image reproduction technician before
joining the faculty at the Hochschule
für bildende Künste Hamburg in 1971.2
But disrupting the objective appearance
of truth in the display of scientifically
gathered material—one assumes that
Hersey adhered to the strictures of
sociological research, whatever they
might have been in the 1930s—is the
absurdity of both the experiment (tracking the emotions of workers only while
at work) and the necessarily inadequate
descriptions of feelings, as if workers
could identify a single feeling that lasted
throughout the day, or that anyone could
truly feel a category such as “Neutral
Plus,” or that “Hopeful” and “Happy,”
or “Happy” and “Very Happy” have
distinct boundaries.

Brehmer’s fascination with the study
emerges out of the range of emotional
states Hersey offered his subjects,
which Brehmer lists on the side of his
image: Very Happy, Happy, Hopeful,
Interested, Neutral Plus, Neutral,
Neutral Minus, Nervous, Angry, Sad,
Uneasy and Fearful. Brehmer repeats
the days of the week along the top, and
then blocks out portions of the graph

KP Brehmer
Seele und Gefühl eines Arbeiters,
Whitechapel Version (Soul and
Feelings of a Worker, Whitechapel
Version), 1978
Estate of KP Brehmer, Berlin
Photo: Marcus J. Leith

to represent a particular feeling. The
overall impression given the viewer
is one of rational data collection, the
kind one might encounter on a worker’s
punch card. Though painted by hand,
the information is meticulously presented. It reads as if it were industrially
printed, an aesthetic Brehmer would
have a particularly intimate relationship
with, considering that he worked as an

2.

Jamie Hilder

66

Georg Jappe, “Interview:
KP Brehmer,” Studio
International 191 (March
1976): 141.

KP Brehmer
Whitechapel Project I, 1978
From the catalogue for the exhibition
Thirteen Degrees East: Eleven
artists working in Berlin, held at
the Whitechapel Gallery, London,
November 10–December 22, 1978
Courtesy of the Whitechapel Gallery,
Whitechapel Gallery Archives
Estate of KP Brehmer, Berlin

67

The humour in Brehmer’s work often
rises from identifying the failures of
the brackets we use when thinking
about the social, whether those are
emotional categories or statistics in
general. In Fields of Meaning of the
Concepts Prohibition, Police, Judgement,
Punishment, Law (1978), groups of
lawyers, social workers and young
people were invited to respond to the
listed concepts. Brehmer coded and
translated their responses into visual
representation using drawings and wallmounted sculptural forms that appear
as a kind of warbled logarithmic spiral.
The charts are unlabelled, though, a
formal gesture that implies the overall
uselessness of particular modes of data
collection and analysis. The shapes
represent a relationship between the
different groups’ perspectives that
we do not actually need evidence of.
Presumably, police will have more
positive connotations for lawyers than
they will for young people. Social
workers will likely fall somewhere in
between. The absence of a legend that
would reveal the meaning of the chart
prevents the viewer from seeing the
graphic elements either as representative
of particular correspondences or as
simple shapes. The same absence
forces them to imagine the shapes in
relationship to one another as well
as in dialogue with the visual data
techniques of scientific, economic and
social discourse. In this way Brehmer’s
work departs from that of his more
internationally known contemporary
Hans Haacke. While Haacke’s MoMA
Poll (1970) was meant to humiliate the
Museum of Modern Art by tying New
York Governor Nelson Rockefeller to

image reproduction technician before
joining the faculty at the Hochschule
für bildende Künste Hamburg in 1971.2
But disrupting the objective appearance
of truth in the display of scientifically
gathered material—one assumes that
Hersey adhered to the strictures of
sociological research, whatever they
might have been in the 1930s—is the
absurdity of both the experiment (tracking the emotions of workers only while
at work) and the necessarily inadequate
descriptions of feelings, as if workers
could identify a single feeling that lasted
throughout the day, or that anyone could
truly feel a category such as “Neutral
Plus,” or that “Hopeful” and “Happy,”
or “Happy” and “Very Happy” have
distinct boundaries.

Brehmer’s fascination with the study
emerges out of the range of emotional
states Hersey offered his subjects,
which Brehmer lists on the side of his
image: Very Happy, Happy, Hopeful,
Interested, Neutral Plus, Neutral,
Neutral Minus, Nervous, Angry, Sad,
Uneasy and Fearful. Brehmer repeats
the days of the week along the top, and
then blocks out portions of the graph

KP Brehmer
Seele und Gefühl eines Arbeiters,
Whitechapel Version (Soul and
Feelings of a Worker, Whitechapel
Version), 1978
Estate of KP Brehmer, Berlin
Photo: Marcus J. Leith

to represent a particular feeling. The
overall impression given the viewer
is one of rational data collection, the
kind one might encounter on a worker’s
punch card. Though painted by hand,
the information is meticulously presented. It reads as if it were industrially
printed, an aesthetic Brehmer would
have a particularly intimate relationship
with, considering that he worked as an

2.

Jamie Hilder

66

Georg Jappe, “Interview:
KP Brehmer,” Studio
International 191 (March
1976): 141.

KP Brehmer
Whitechapel Project I, 1978
From the catalogue for the exhibition
Thirteen Degrees East: Eleven
artists working in Berlin, held at
the Whitechapel Gallery, London,
November 10–December 22, 1978
Courtesy of the Whitechapel Gallery,
Whitechapel Gallery Archives
Estate of KP Brehmer, Berlin

67

The humour in Brehmer’s work often
rises from identifying the failures of
the brackets we use when thinking
about the social, whether those are
emotional categories or statistics in
general. In Fields of Meaning of the
Concepts Prohibition, Police, Judgement,
Punishment, Law (1978), groups of
lawyers, social workers and young
people were invited to respond to the
listed concepts. Brehmer coded and
translated their responses into visual
representation using drawings and wallmounted sculptural forms that appear
as a kind of warbled logarithmic spiral.
The charts are unlabelled, though, a
formal gesture that implies the overall
uselessness of particular modes of data
collection and analysis. The shapes
represent a relationship between the
different groups’ perspectives that
we do not actually need evidence of.
Presumably, police will have more
positive connotations for lawyers than
they will for young people. Social
workers will likely fall somewhere in
between. The absence of a legend that
would reveal the meaning of the chart
prevents the viewer from seeing the
graphic elements either as representative
of particular correspondences or as
simple shapes. The same absence
forces them to imagine the shapes in
relationship to one another as well
as in dialogue with the visual data
techniques of scientific, economic and
social discourse. In this way Brehmer’s
work departs from that of his more
internationally known contemporary
Hans Haacke. While Haacke’s MoMA
Poll (1970) was meant to humiliate the
Museum of Modern Art by tying New
York Governor Nelson Rockefeller to

Nixon’s disastrous military policies
in Vietnam (Rockefeller was a board
member of MoMA at the time, as well as
a candidate for president of the United
States), his method was to expose the
democratic process by displaying a
clear ballot box. In this way, Haacke not
only mocked the fantasy of transparent
democracy in the United States, and
in its cultural institutions especially,
but also propped up the concept of
the rational political participation of
contemporary subjects through their
responses to narrowly defined poll
questions. The fact that he withheld
the question used in his piece until
the night before the exhibition only
strengthens the idea that the limited
and narrow questions people are able
to vote on are at the root of political
apathy and alienation. Brehmer’s work,
alternatively, points to a more expansive
critique of economic subjectivity as it
is produced by image reproduction,
where the images are data: statistics
in graph form that convince viewers
they are living rationally or irrationally,
efficiently or inefficiently. This is the
difference between Haacke’s poll
boxes, where we imagine that visitors
to MoMA are interested in ending the
US aggression in Southeast Asia, and
Brehmer’s unlabelled information
works. Brehmer is interested not in
showing whether or not we are effective
or ineffective managers of our lives,
but rather in asking questions of what
capacities we have for imagining our
relationship to an increasingly quantified
world in the first place. A ballot box full
of folded votes under a wall text about
war is still only an image of democracy. It
is a different kind of capitalist realism.

Jamie Hilder

The contemporary technologies of
representation—not simply the material
technologies Brehmer was familiar
with professionally as technician and
artist, but the organization, expression
and distribution of particular data as a
technology—were constituting subjects
who believed in accuracy and who
found comfort in measurement. What
becomes uncomfortable, then, becomes
a threat, and the lessons of the past
forty years of ordo- and neoliberalism
have shown how ideas of publicness or
co-operation or shared property have
been consistently discouraged and
eliminated in favour of the individual
owner, small-scale businessperson and
current hero: the entrepreneur.

Hans Haacke
MoMA Poll, 1970
two transparent ballot boxes with
automatic counters and colour-coded
ballots
© Hans Haacke / Artist Rights
Society, New York
Courtesy of the artist and Paula
Cooper Gallery, New York

In 1971, Brehmer wrote that he believed
“the only progress of art consists in
shifting all the intensity from I to
we.”3 This position seems all the more
challenging considering the social environment of postwar Germany, where
the state-supported ordoliberalism—a
West German political philosophy that
emphasized personal responsibility
and competition between rational
actors4—served as a bulwark against
conceptions of the collective, a
concept that was rooted in the viable
communist states and parties of Europe
as well as in Germany’s own Nazi past.

68

3.

Quoted in Kerstin
Stakemeier, “KP
Brehmer’s Kleptomania:
A Productivism of
Expropriation,” in KP
Brehmer: Real CapitalProduction. [Exhibition
Pamphlet] (London:
Raven Row, 2014), n.p.

4.

Pierre Dardot and
Christian Laval
provide a definition
of ordoliberalism:
“Ordo-liberalism aims
to ground a social
and political order in
a determinate type
of social relation:
free, fair competition
between individuals
who are completely
sovereign over their
own existence. Any
distortion of competition
betrays the illegitimate
domination either of
the state or of a group
of private interests
over the individual. It is
comparable to tyranny
and exploitation.” Pierre
Dardot and Christian
Laval, The New Way of
the World: On Neoliberal
Society, trans. Gregory
Elliott (London: Verso,
2013), 224–27.

5.

Miranda Joseph,
“Accounting for Debt:
Toward a Methodology
of Critical Abstraction,”
in Debt to Society:
Accounting for Life
under Capitalism
(Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press,
2014), 1.

6.

Quoted in Doreen
Mende, “KP Brehmer:
A Foreign Agent from a
Place Called ‘Art,’” in KP
Brehmer Visual Agitation
(London: Raven Row and
Koenig Books, 2017
[forthcoming]), n.p.

7.

Doreen Mende, “KP
Brehmer: A Foreign
Agent from a Place
Called ‘Art’,” in KP
Brehmer Visual Agitation
(London: Raven Row and
Koenig Books, 2017
[forthcoming]), n.p.

The critique of data at the core of
Brehmer’s work is not meant to condemn the field of statistics or to suggest
that we return to some pre-lapsarian
economy where everybody knows and
trusts their creditors, or to demand
some anarchic future utopia where communities rule and private property and
hierarchy have been eradicated (even if
some of us are still obliquely aiming for
that). But it does require us to become
aware of how our subjectivity on various
levels—personal, national, global, financial—is affected through processes of
information organization and display.
In her book Debt to Society: Accounting
for Life under Capitalism, Miranda
Joseph cites the rallying cry from Strike
Debt, an offshoot from the Occupy
movement: “You are not a loan.”5 She
points to this phrase in order to frame
a discussion of the ways in which we
are, in fact, our loans, and our accounts,
and our constantly shifting calculation

69

of our human capital. She makes this
argument not to sound the alarm of
the end of hope, but rather to advocate
for thinking through our financialized,
mathematicized subjectivities as generative, and to approach our condition
dialectically. I think a similar impulse
can be read in KP Brehmer’s work, and
is perhaps why I find it so resonant with
current strategies in artmaking.
In an interview he gave in relation to the
1974 exhibition Art into Society—Society
into Art at the ICA in London, Brehmer
spoke about his work and that of the
other artists in the show as an “agitation
of the ways of seeing” (Sichtagitation).6
In her essay for the catalogue of the
exhibition of Brehmer’s work at Raven
Row in 2014, curator Doreen Mende
expands on that position and describes
his project as one that aims to “abuse
capitalism’s means of articulation.”7 It
is that same mode of articulation that
I was reacting against when I provided
a fake name and a defunct number to
my neighbourhood supermarket. I am
still uncomfortable with all of the ways I
am enumerated. But my error comes in
believing that there is still a me outside
of data, in holding on to a liberal dream
of self instead of simply ceding terrain
that has already been lost. Locating
economies of pleasure, play and laughter
and insisting on living in those numbers
seems to be a more promising strategy.

Nixon’s disastrous military policies
in Vietnam (Rockefeller was a board
member of MoMA at the time, as well as
a candidate for president of the United
States), his method was to expose the
democratic process by displaying a
clear ballot box. In this way, Haacke not
only mocked the fantasy of transparent
democracy in the United States, and
in its cultural institutions especially,
but also propped up the concept of
the rational political participation of
contemporary subjects through their
responses to narrowly defined poll
questions. The fact that he withheld
the question used in his piece until
the night before the exhibition only
strengthens the idea that the limited
and narrow questions people are able
to vote on are at the root of political
apathy and alienation. Brehmer’s work,
alternatively, points to a more expansive
critique of economic subjectivity as it
is produced by image reproduction,
where the images are data: statistics
in graph form that convince viewers
they are living rationally or irrationally,
efficiently or inefficiently. This is the
difference between Haacke’s poll
boxes, where we imagine that visitors
to MoMA are interested in ending the
US aggression in Southeast Asia, and
Brehmer’s unlabelled information
works. Brehmer is interested not in
showing whether or not we are effective
or ineffective managers of our lives,
but rather in asking questions of what
capacities we have for imagining our
relationship to an increasingly quantified
world in the first place. A ballot box full
of folded votes under a wall text about
war is still only an image of democracy. It
is a different kind of capitalist realism.

Jamie Hilder

The contemporary technologies of
representation—not simply the material
technologies Brehmer was familiar
with professionally as technician and
artist, but the organization, expression
and distribution of particular data as a
technology—were constituting subjects
who believed in accuracy and who
found comfort in measurement. What
becomes uncomfortable, then, becomes
a threat, and the lessons of the past
forty years of ordo- and neoliberalism
have shown how ideas of publicness or
co-operation or shared property have
been consistently discouraged and
eliminated in favour of the individual
owner, small-scale businessperson and
current hero: the entrepreneur.

Hans Haacke
MoMA Poll, 1970
two transparent ballot boxes with
automatic counters and colour-coded
ballots
© Hans Haacke / Artist Rights
Society, New York
Courtesy of the artist and Paula
Cooper Gallery, New York

In 1971, Brehmer wrote that he believed
“the only progress of art consists in
shifting all the intensity from I to
we.”3 This position seems all the more
challenging considering the social environment of postwar Germany, where
the state-supported ordoliberalism—a
West German political philosophy that
emphasized personal responsibility
and competition between rational
actors4—served as a bulwark against
conceptions of the collective, a
concept that was rooted in the viable
communist states and parties of Europe
as well as in Germany’s own Nazi past.

68

3.

Quoted in Kerstin
Stakemeier, “KP
Brehmer’s Kleptomania:
A Productivism of
Expropriation,” in KP
Brehmer: Real CapitalProduction. [Exhibition
Pamphlet] (London:
Raven Row, 2014), n.p.

4.

Pierre Dardot and
Christian Laval
provide a definition
of ordoliberalism:
“Ordo-liberalism aims
to ground a social
and political order in
a determinate type
of social relation:
free, fair competition
between individuals
who are completely
sovereign over their
own existence. Any
distortion of competition
betrays the illegitimate
domination either of
the state or of a group
of private interests
over the individual. It is
comparable to tyranny
and exploitation.” Pierre
Dardot and Christian
Laval, The New Way of
the World: On Neoliberal
Society, trans. Gregory
Elliott (London: Verso,
2013), 224–27.

5.

Miranda Joseph,
“Accounting for Debt:
Toward a Methodology
of Critical Abstraction,”
in Debt to Society:
Accounting for Life
under Capitalism
(Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press,
2014), 1.

6.

Quoted in Doreen
Mende, “KP Brehmer:
A Foreign Agent from a
Place Called ‘Art,’” in KP
Brehmer Visual Agitation
(London: Raven Row and
Koenig Books, 2017
[forthcoming]), n.p.

7.

Doreen Mende, “KP
Brehmer: A Foreign
Agent from a Place
Called ‘Art’,” in KP
Brehmer Visual Agitation
(London: Raven Row and
Koenig Books, 2017
[forthcoming]), n.p.

The critique of data at the core of
Brehmer’s work is not meant to condemn the field of statistics or to suggest
that we return to some pre-lapsarian
economy where everybody knows and
trusts their creditors, or to demand
some anarchic future utopia where communities rule and private property and
hierarchy have been eradicated (even if
some of us are still obliquely aiming for
that). But it does require us to become
aware of how our subjectivity on various
levels—personal, national, global, financial—is affected through processes of
information organization and display.
In her book Debt to Society: Accounting
for Life under Capitalism, Miranda
Joseph cites the rallying cry from Strike
Debt, an offshoot from the Occupy
movement: “You are not a loan.”5 She
points to this phrase in order to frame
a discussion of the ways in which we
are, in fact, our loans, and our accounts,
and our constantly shifting calculation

69

of our human capital. She makes this
argument not to sound the alarm of
the end of hope, but rather to advocate
for thinking through our financialized,
mathematicized subjectivities as generative, and to approach our condition
dialectically. I think a similar impulse
can be read in KP Brehmer’s work, and
is perhaps why I find it so resonant with
current strategies in artmaking.
In an interview he gave in relation to the
1974 exhibition Art into Society—Society
into Art at the ICA in London, Brehmer
spoke about his work and that of the
other artists in the show as an “agitation
of the ways of seeing” (Sichtagitation).6
In her essay for the catalogue of the
exhibition of Brehmer’s work at Raven
Row in 2014, curator Doreen Mende
expands on that position and describes
his project as one that aims to “abuse
capitalism’s means of articulation.”7 It
is that same mode of articulation that
I was reacting against when I provided
a fake name and a defunct number to
my neighbourhood supermarket. I am
still uncomfortable with all of the ways I
am enumerated. But my error comes in
believing that there is still a me outside
of data, in holding on to a liberal dream
of self instead of simply ceding terrain
that has already been lost. Locating
economies of pleasure, play and laughter
and insisting on living in those numbers
seems to be a more promising strategy.