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| Art as a tool Elīna Dūce, Visual Art Theorist The artists’ group Superflex | |
| Why should art be monotonous and ‘flat’, and why should it content itself with the role of decorator or critic / commentator on socio-political developments? Why couldn’t art be practical and useful in daily life? Could an artist become the one to tackle social, political, and economic problems? It’s possible that matters like these arose in the trio of creative minds gathered in a woodland cabin in Sweden. Perhaps these issues were considered even earlier, when the three met at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. What is certain is that Rasmus Nielsen and Bjørnstjerne Christiansen, both born in 1969, and Jakob Fenger, born a year earlier, founded an artists’ group that they named after the cargo ferry M/S Superflex Bravo, on which they had returned home from Sweden.(1) They simply liked the crew’s orange boiler-suits with the vessel’s name on the back, and it seemed that the captain had watched many a clip by Kraftwerk.(2) To return to more ancient past, Rasmus had photographed Jakob in Siberia half a year before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, when Jakob and his band Soul Only were touring the Soviet Union and Rasmus was working in a potato field in the name of ‘peace’. Rasmus couldn’t get near Jakob, of course, because he was surrounded by massive crowds that hungered after music from the West (they had played something in the style of The Beatles). Rasmus remembered the photos back in Denmark, when he met Jakob at a school for documentary photography. Afterwards they both enrolled in the sculpture department of the Royal Academy, because sculpture students could get larger studios. It was 1993, and the boys – by now Bjørn had joined them – had problems with the Academy, because they had hooked up a telephone to their studio and registered under the name of a company named Superflex (they dropped the ‘Bravo’ in order to sound more serious). The Academy’s curriculum struck them as overly classical, so, thirsting for other sorts of knowledge, they sought out private tutors in economics and engineering. This is where they got the idea of calling their art projects ‘tools’, having determined that art should function at a practical level, beyond the walls of galleries or exhibition halls. | |
 Superflex. Production of video 'Flooded McDonald's'. Thailand. 2008. Publicity photo. Courtesy: Superflex | |
| Socio-economic art, or the tools of Superflex If we accept that the usual goal of the artist is to reach an audience, telling or shouting out what they have to say and then terminating the relationship (at least until next time), then – to borrow Nicolas Bourriaud’s terminology – the period of relational aesthetics requires mutual interest and an exchange of information in both directions.(3) Superflex constructs its relations with the receiver of art in the hope of finding a user, demanding (also allowing) participation (collaboration), offering a tool that they themselves, together with designers, engineers, entrepreneurs and other specialists in various fields have created; this tool can be the idea, method, or technology of an elaborated system of usage. The tools they introduce basically live lives of their own, so long as someone still takes an interest in them. One could say that their works function in a way similar to entrepreneurship, because they spread and become part of the structures of society, politics, business, exhibitions and the art market, supporting themselves. In addition, these tools are available to everyone, without any concern for exclusive property rights, and can be used when, by whom and how as needed. The Superflex tool that has been used the longest is Supergas (Biogas). The artists began work on the project when they were still students. Studying the situation in Tanzania, Superflex determined that if the people there don’t purchase charcoal, it takes an average of 200 to 300 working days to accumulate enough fuel for the family. Installing an independent energy source would require about 250 US dollars and, depending on the cost of charcoal in the region, such an investment would pay for itself in 10 to 20 months. Working full time for the minimum wage, moreover, such an investment would pay for itself within seven months. In 1997, after two summers of preparatory work, the first orange coloured plant was installed in a small village in central Tanzania. With the dung from two to three cattle it could produce three to four cubic metres of gas a day, sufficient to provide a Tanzanian family of eight to ten persons with enough gas for cooking and lighting one lamp in the evening. The latest – and also improved – Supergas tool was installed in Zanzibar in 2007. It has been said that “any tool is a weapon if you hold it right”.(4) This is exactly what Superflex wishes to accomplish, to give users the possibility of independence, transforming themselves from the obedient servants of capitalism or predictable, calculable consumers into independent persons. The tools Superflex offers are not consumable end products to be bought and sold; the activities of Superflex are more like an incubator of business ideas in which, having determined the users’ needs, tools are created to be used independently of the existing system. To refer again to Bourriaud: “There is nothing more disruptive in the economic system than the act of doing something that nobody had asked you to do and for which you are not paid.”(5) Growers of guarana(6) in Brazil were dissatisfied with the sudden drop in prices being paid by purchasers of the fruit (over four years it fell from 25 US dollars per kilogramme to 4 dollars). The growers saw no way out of the pressures brought to bear by the big companies, because maintaining guarana plantations was no longer profitable. Superflex suggested that the growers themselves process the fruit, leading to the idea of making non-alcoholic drinks. At the 2003 Venice Biennale, Superflex created a Guaraná Power presentation, and a drink by that name has been produced, in cooperation with Danish entrepreneurs, since 2004. Similarly as Joseph Beuys once expressed the idea that anyone can be an artist, Superflex believes that “anybody can be a business person”.(7) They themselves do not take the path of profitable business, because “art can and must change reality”.(8) Wide-ranging boundaries and the unlimited possibilities for experimentation are what draw them to art. In addition the professional artists of Superflex are determined to achieve social and economic change.(9) After all, an artist can be more than a reflector of society, to Superflex, they not only can but also must influence and change the existing social model. But is this necessary? Outside Western society, the norms and values originating in the West do not work. Africans, for example, confirm this, pointing out that aid organizations make their societies dependent on the providers of “assistance”.(10) On the one hand, the Supergas tool isn’t given as a gift, but some studies show that despite its value in the disposal of waste and its success in protecting woodlands from being cut down for fuel, it nonetheless “served as an indicator of privilege”(11) because, although it did improve people’s lives in the short term, the Superflex intervention was speculative and rhetorical. Perhaps it is better to help by not helping? Consumer culture Superflex has no wish to criticise anyone for anything; it instead offers “tools for thinking” so that each person can use these tools (think) at their discretion. Their three films (so far), two of which have been screened at exhibitions in Latvia, are among these “tools for thinking”.(12) In Burning Car (11 min, 2008),(13) flames devour a Mercedes, the icon of Western brands. Against the background of 9,000 cars burned in Paris that week,(14) this ‘sacrifice’ was meant as a symbol of the unrest in that period. At kim? / RIXC gallery in Riga, one can watch Flooded Mc-Donald’s (20 min, 2009). Shot in the latter half of 2008, the film is a commentary on the economic downturn.(15) The artists have said that the film is not intended to be critical of the particular enterprise that is mentioned in the title and where the entire film is set. The business just as well could have been any other, but McDonald’s is recognized by its fast food concept, its range of products, its interior design and even its smell also by those who do not frequent the approximately 31,000 franchises McDonald’s operates in 118 countries.(16) McDonald’s, in other words, has become one of the most significant symbols of globalization. Not without reason the sociologist George Ritzer introduced the term McDonaldization(17) – it refers to processes of calculation, productivity, control and predictability (standardization and the equalization of service). In short, it is rationalization down to the last thread. Superflex asks: what is the personal joint responsibility of each of us is in the promotion of consumer culture? – leaving the material presented in the film open to interpretation. As Jakob Fenger said in an interview with the artist, writer, independent curator and publisher of magazine The Brooklyn Rail, Phong Bui: “There’s no real alternative economic system at the moment, so sadly we just have to wait for this system to collapse before we can change it and do something else.”(18) Thomas L. Friedman, the American journalist and columnist who has won three Pulitzer prizes, gives his views on globalization in The Lexus and the Olive Tree (1999), observing that a country with a McDonald’s will never become involved in a war with another country that is part of the fast food chain, because globalization has created strong economic ties between these states and in war there would be too much to lose. The great machine continues to churn. There are, however, protracted debates about the interpretation of the term ‘war’, since disputing the “Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention” would not be difficult if the US invasion of Panama (1989), the bombardment of Serbia (2006), the war in Lebanon (2006, part of a series of conflicts dating back to 1973), the wars in Southern Ossetia (2008) etc., were defined as wars. People enjoy talking about mishaps and watching ‘deliciously’ filmed catastrophes shown on television. Destruction also features in the movie produced in a Bangkok film studio (Thailand was one of the major sufferers of the 2004 tsunami, by the way), where in a fairly precise copy of a McDonald’s interior Superflex shot the film in the style of an authentic Hollywood horror movie – a familiar, cosy space that gradually overwhelms one with claustrophobia, the usually busy place suddenly empty, as if hastily abandoned. The space slowly fills with water. Half-eaten hamburgers float by, as do fries and Happy Meal toys, packaging, and the plaque with the surname of that month’s best employee. The still plugged in cash registers short-circuit, and the plastic, lifesize figure of Ronald McDonald (whose image began its career with the chain in 1966) gracefully slips into the rising water. The scene is yet more tragic because the source of the water – the cause – is not known. And all of this is accompanied by the sound of real water flowing… I’m lovin’ it!(19) The lovingly recreated detail in the close-ups, the slow movement of the camera, and the rhythm of the montage add a dose of humour to the epic. To an environmental activist, pollution has reached a level approaching self-destruction. To nutrition experts, serving animals bloated with hormones in fast food chains might be considered mass poisoning. Someone else might see the biblical flood, but we, at a distance, calmly watching the water rising, are quite content with our habits. What did the global financial crisis bring? Besides McDonald’s seeking another 15,000 employees, Superflex made another film – The Financial Crisis (12 min, 2009), laden with irony about Western society. Super-rights and the predictable order “If someone borrows from me, it makes me richer, not poorer. We artists, I believe, are part of a single community sharing the same language.” (Sol LeWitt in FlashArt, 1973)(20) The Free Sol LeWitt project in 2010 – its name hinting at the multiple meanings of ‘free’ – ‘demanded’ the freeing of Sol LeWitt’s 1972 minimalist installation Untitled (Wall Structure), asking why a work of art should be imprisoned in a museum. In a metal workshop installed in the museum, precise copies of LeWitt’s work were made and given to visitors free of charge, raising questions about reproduction, authorship, property and intellectual rights – issues that have grown increasingly complicated in the Internet age. This all took place at the invitation of Van Abbemuseum for Superflex to work with the museum collection, the group choosing LeWitt’s piece because the artist had stood at the cradle of conceptualism. The chosen work Untitled (Wall Structure) was created by hands other than the artist’s, since LeWitt believed that “in conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.”(21) Whether the works/projects/tools created by Superflex are or are not art can be debated also in the context of Free Shop, a project that took place in five cities in 2009. These were real shops in their usual, everyday places, with real merchandise and the familiar faces of salespeople… but they differed from ordinary shops because for a certain period of time the cash registers issued receipts with a sum of zero. In typical Superflex style, questions arose: why does a Japanese shopper call his friends to come and shop because everything is for free, when he himself takes advantage of this great opportunity only to ‘buy’ a rice bowl? Why weren’t Norwegians shy about returning to shop again as soon as they had filled their bags? Why were some shoppers angry when they found out that they don’t have to pay? For some it is unpleasant to have their desire to spend interrupted – it is spending money and not the item to be purchased that is more important to them, as it turns out. Leaving aside Free Shop, shopping has been compared to the natural process of excretion – one gets rid of money as one does of excrement. If only it were so! At any rate, the goal of Superflex was to show how accustomed people are to a system so deeply ingrained that they (we) follow it blindly. Free Beer (2005) is about this same kind of constriction or system. It is a classic Superflex tool; the recipe can be found found on the Internet and is available to anyone. They can develop the recipe further and even make money from it (though if the recipe is improved it must be published). Free Beer is a challenge to intellectual property rights, branding, patents, and similar rights that have such a stranglehold on the developed world. “When someone has an idea, their first reaction is to run to the patent office and trademark the name or idea and 200 variations of it so that others have difficulty working on something similar. People haven’t been challenging this system much and we think it is a dangerous thing,” Bjørnstjerne Christiansen said.(22) It could be that they began to consider the absurdity of the intellectual property system after Superflex and the engineer Jan Mallan registered two patents in Denmark in 1998, one for ‘Plants for anaerobic processing of organic waste’ and the other for an ‘Automatic pressure equalisation system for processing gasses from pressure chambers’.(23) In any case, for one of their tools I do have the deepest respect – high resolution photos are available at the official Superflex web site. So to say – take them and use them! (1) Bui Phong. Superflex with Phong Bui – The Brooklyn Rail. February 2010 // www.brooklynrail.org/2010/02/art/superflex (2) The pioneering German electronic music group Kraftwerk video The Robots (1977). (3) Esthetique relationnelle. Published in Latvian in 2009 by the Centre for Contemporary Art. (4) Ani DiFranco, American poet. (5) Bourriaud Nicolas. Make Sure that You are Seen (Supercritique). 2002 // www.superflex.net/text/articles/supercritique.shtml (6) A plant with a healthy fruit containing caffeine. (7) www.superflex.net/tools (8) www.rethinkclimate.org/titel/titel/?show=cbk (9) Myers Julian. Superflex – Frieze. Issue No. 106. April 2007 // www.frieze.com/issue/review/superflex (10) Nacking Åsa. An Exchange between Åsa Nacking and Superflex – Afterall. 1998 // www.superflex.net/text/articles/an_exchange_between.shtml (11) Bišopa Klēra. Sociāli angažēta māksla vai estētiski angažēta politika? – Forums, 14 July 2004, p. 4. (12) Superflex also participated in the exhibition Ventspils. Tranzīts. Termināls (1999) curated by Kristaps Ģelzis. (13) The Latvian premiere took place on 16 May 2009 at the festival Māksla+komunikācijas in the RIXC Media space. (14) Bui Phong. Superflex with Phong Bui – The Brooklyn Rail. February 2010 // www.brooklynrail.org/2010/02/art/superflex (15) Denmark was the first European country to confirm that a recession was underway, in the middle of 2008. (16) www.aboutmcdonalds.com/mcd/our_company/mcd_history.html (17) The McDonaldization of Society, 1993 (18) Bui Phong. Superflex with Phong Bui – The Brooklyn Rail. February 2010 / www.brooklynrail.org/2010/02/art/superflex (19) McDonalds’ slogan in 2003. (20) www.artdaily.com/index.asp?int_sec=2&int_new=37370 (21) The article Paragraphs on Conceptual Art was first published in Artforum, June 1967. (22) Vartanian Hrag. Economic Sur-realities: A Conversation with Bjørnstjerne Christiansen of Superflex. 2.06.2009 // blog.art21.org/2009/06/02/conversation-with-bjoernstjerne-christiansen (23) Steiner Barbara. Radical Democracy, Acknowledging the Complexities and Contingencies. August 1999 // www.superflex.net/text/articles/acknowledging.shtml /Translator into English: Pēteris Cedriņš/ | |
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