INT. DAY. MUSEE D’ART MODERNE DE LA VILLE DE PARIS – FIRST FLOOR
Huge sliding doors dominate the entrance to the exhibition CO-WORKERS – NETWORK AS ARTIST, like the doors we are used to see at department stores. Toke Lykkeberg is standing in front of the moving glass planes. He is one of the curators of the show, waiting to be interviewed by M, an art historian.
M
Lets start to talk about the sliding doors. It’s a pretty uncommon opening for an art exhibition
– can you tell me more about it?
TOKE LYKKEBERG
The show starts with doors sliding open. There are a couple of other sliding doors in the show. This is part of the mise en scène or scenography that DIS has been in charge of. The many transparent and reflective surfaces lend the show a certain lightness so visitors sort of float through the space. It’s like a space of flows of images, of data in a networked world. But it also reflects life in airports, malls, Apple stores and Starbucks. I know this mise en scène might recall ethnologist Marc Augé’s non-places. In the 1990s, in the wake of the introduction of TGV or Trains à Grande Vitesse, he was interested in a new kind of solitary passenger who left places behind at high speed. But DIS has been more interested in the connected and social individuals who linger, meet up, chill or work in environments with good wifi that has a ubiquitous rather than transitory quality. Places are not negated but rather mixed. So it’s a world in which many divides seem to disappear like the barriers between work and leisure, private and public, commercial and non-commercial space and what is inside and outside, for instance of a museum. The show discusses the divides between what we once called ‘the virtual’ and ‘the real’, between nature and society, the biosphere and the technosphere, East and West, and many other such binaries that no longer work as opposites.
Toke and M pass through the sliding doors, that produce a muted but peculiar sound each time they open and close. The couple walk into the first room of the exhibition. The large and elongated space is lit through a skylight in the ceiling. A range of artworks unfolds. Each of them represents a discrete artistic position, but their arrangement spurs a dialogue between the works, and configures a heterogeneous unity of different media and materials.
M
The display of CO-WORKERS makes me think of Dan Graham and his work.
Is it a kind of Dan Graham 2.0?
TOKE LYKKEBERG
If 2.0, then I would say: yes. Dan Graham’s work is a reflection on and of the ‘modern’ world and its modernist architecture, but Co-Workers is not discussing the concept of the ‘modern’ world in general.
M
So CO-WORKERS is about the contemporary world? What would you say – in what kind of world do we live right now?
TOKE LYKKEBERG
Of course we wanted to create a show that reflects what is around us. While working on the show we realised that our surroundings were changing while we – and many others – were studying them. The problem with art called contemporary is that it is more fleeting than ever. When things accelerate around you, it is very difficult to be contemporary or ‘with time.’ We’re rather out of time.
M looks around at the different works of art. She focuses on a cubic construction in the middle of the room. It is made of glass and steel, forming a space within the larger space of the exhibition hall. Inside the cube there are three flat screens, a work by Cécile B. Evans, accompanied by a fish tank by Aude Pariset and Juliette Bonneviot and a workplace curated by Felix Burrichter.
M
If I look at this display…
The art historian points at the cubic construction in the middle of the room.
M (CONT’D)
… which seems to be open and closed at the same time – a space floating inside another space. It reminds me of an aquarium, can you please say something about that?
TOKE LYKKEBERG
The glass box traversing the space mimics an open office space. It is a transparent barrier. While it divides the space, it also emphasizes the flow from one space to another. We wanted to give each individual artist, group or collective his, her or their own space, but we did not want to cut it off from the rest of the show.
Today an artist stands out as an individual, but at the same time as part of a network. They are ‘networked individuals.’ Sometimes you cannot tell one work from the other. The works are shaped by overlapping yet personalized networks. It is almost impossible to separate the part from the whole, the individual from society, they constitute each other. Bruno Latour explains this idea in the following way: If you want to check out a person, you google his name, for example ‘Bruno Latour’. The more links you find about Latour spread out across the Internet, the more he comes together as a person. You might feel you loose yourself in the network, but it might also be where you resurface.
M
Do you think this is an aspect of our contemporary world – gaining something by losing parts of our individuality?
TOKE LYKKEBERG
Douglas Coupland says somewhere in his recent writings: „At the moment we don’t know which will triumph: the individual or the mob. It might be the biggest question of this century.“ My answer to the question would be: both.
The individual might only reinvent itself, if it gives in to or adapts to its surroundings. You can only shape an environment that you are a part of. By resisting today’s world or simply keeping it at a distance, you don’t change its course. To a certain extent, you might rather have to lose a bit of control in order to regain influence. At least, many artists in the show work along these lines. Parker Ito, for example, creates images that are meant to be photographed by others.
Toke turns to a series of large format pictures. Each part of the series seems to be composed out of different images, drawings and written texts superimposed on each other, in a somewhat raw manner akin to graffiti. Yet, the pictures are framed with a silky and highly brilliant material that lends them the touch of a glossy magazine illustration.
TOKE LYKKEBERG (CONT’D)
The reflector fabric on which he has printed the images are hypersensitive to the faintest change in the light. So depending on the light, the angle, your camera, every photo of his work will be somewhat unique. Parker wanted to make an ‘undocumentable’ work that triggers a multiplication of images the moment it is documented. The work taps into and prolongs a network of images.
Toke takes his mobile phone out of his pocket and points it towards the pictures. He turns flash on and pushes the release button. And indeed, the colourful pictures on the wall suddenly turn black and white, as if they are loosing all their colours when hit by a bit of light.
M
These pictures seem to have lives of their own, changing and never being the same again. The whole exhibition in general somehow reminds me of a living organism, which can be likened to a network, doesn’t it?
TOKE LYKKEBERG
Yes, it might be troubling that something has a life of its own. An oft-heard critique of contemporary network theory is that the individual, the human subject is without power. By reflecting on these networks we might however empower that disempowered individual to impose itself in the networks.
M
Following your definition of network, one could think of an organism?
TOKE LYKKEBERG
If you want things to circulate in a network you need mediation from one node to another. This mediation might be undertaken by an intermediary or a mediator. In the case of the intermediary, there is no transformation of content from one point to another. However, when an image travels from an exhibition space to a camera, to a computer, to Photoshop, to Facebook, to Instagram and ends up as a bad quality print, there’s transformation. There are mediators translating the image so information is both lost and added. Artists work with such mediators in the same way they now work with bacteria, animals, plants and so on. So I’m also interested in networks at the intersection of bio- and technosphere.
Toke and M step into the cubic construction and sit down around the workplace layout.
M
Keeping this gain of loss of information in mind, can you tell me something about the rematerialisation of the art object?
TOKE LYKKEBERG
It goes back to Lucy Lippard’s idea that conceptual art of the sixties and seventies was a dematerialisation….
M
… in favour of the information, becoming the immaterial?
TOKE LYKKEBERG
Yes, you might call it the ‘Helvetica ideology’, following the idea that you can create a form – in this case the Helvetica font – that is so transparent you only get the content. In the course of the democratisation of telecommunication in the sixties and seventies people started to communicate across long distances with ease. They were preoccupied by the feeling of talking with a person without being in his or her presence. So this development was experienced as a disembodiment, a dematerialisation. Some artists got into telepathy, thinking about how they could make thoughts travel from one mind to another without taking on a material shape. Materiality was secondary to the content and ideally you could have pure content. That continued with the way the Internet developed in the nineties. However, with Web 2.0 it became social and now with the ‘Internet of Things’ the virtual and immaterial is evidently embedded in the real and material. So both can make us understand how things rematerialise rather than dematerialise while circulating in the network, but also how the network works and how it is constituted. In a way, we’re not only looking at who is walking around the house, but also looking at the house itself.
M
That is an interesting metaphor. Is this exhibition the housing hosting what is in that larger house?
TOKE LYKKEBERG
We are trying to present images, objects and information that recall the images, objects and information that are around us, but also their surroundings. We both want to present the artworks and the environment in which these artworks make sense.
Toke and M continue walking through the exhibition. They pass by the work of Timur Si-Qin, The Struggle (2012), an installation made of four apparently excessively designed pedestals on which Nike gym bags are hanging. Each of the bags is filled with stones and water bottles. Finally the couple stops in front of a gleaming installation, a cubic box lit by neon lights. On its backside is an image of a boy, which is reflected by a glass surface installed behind the cubic box.
M
Please tell me about this work.
TOKE LYKKEBERG
It is a work by the French artist David Douard, called The reason we no longer s’speack. Slipper of snow (2015). It is an image of a boy that Douard has reworked. His eyes have been erased, the boy’s hand is almost inside his mouth. In a way, right now, I can’t help thinking of The Thinker by Rodin. Rodin got the motif of the thinker from the Last Judgement fresco of Michelangelo, in which one man sits bent over, encircled by the flames of hell. Rodin isolated the figure in his sculpture from any surroundings: The individual suddenly is left alone with his or her troubled mind. This is the modern man. Douard’s contemporary speechless version is a reflection in glass in two ways: A boy is reflected in the glass in the midst of reflecting on himself, withdrawn into his own world. Maybe Douard presents an image of someone in the Internet age who has the possibility to reach out for information anywhere, but ends up trapped by what he’s already into. Today, any new search query is biased by an older one and, as a consequence, one might get caught up in a so-called filter bubble. So a network culture also creates certain disconnects.
M
Would you say that this work is framing a critique of the Internet based society?
TOKE LYKKEBERG
I would personally not use the word critique. It implies looking at looking at the world from the outside. But an artist is always more engaged in the world through his or her work than the critique teaches us. I’d rather say that Douard’s work evokes the pains rather than the pleasures of network culture.
M
So it is more a reflection on the state of things?
TOKE LYKKEBERG
It is an attempt to understand an aspect of a networked world. If you do not feel a certain pain looking at the work, I am not sure you’re on the right track. I am against dividing works into categories such as affirmative or critical. Most works are both.
As they continue, Toke and M find themselves in a room whit a video work by Rachel Rose – Sitting Feeding Sleeping (2013). This visual collage shows images of animals that the artist took in different US-American zoos, as well as computer screenshots and iconic paintings from art history. The saccade rhythm of the video is alternating with more contemplative sequences, conveying a strange feeling of detachment, which is even more accentuated by the alienating computer voiceover commenting the images.
M
For a few years, there’s been a discussion concerning the question whether we should slow down our lives or adjust to the speed of information technology developing faster and faster. What do you say? Is the exhibition a comment on or even a contribution to that discussion?
TOKE LYKKEBERG
About ten or fifteen years ago the French artist Pierre Joseph said: In order to understand how a car works, you have to take it apart. But artists today rather get inside the car and drive it. If we understand the world as networked then there is no outside anymore. Artists are less interested in utopias and more in the potential of the world we inhabit. We should accelerate some things, others we might slow down. But I don’t believe in history given in advance, i.e. that there is a certain goal to reach at the end of the journey, therefore I am not sure what it might mean to speed up the process we are in the midst of.
M
So taking up your metaphor of the artist as a car driver, you understand an artist today as what you call a prosumer: a producer and consumer at the same time.
TOKE LYKKEBERG
Yes, that’s another dichotomy that I would like to mention as example of the end of the great divides, namely production and consumption. What characterises the artist today is that he is a prosumer to a certain extent, part of a network where production and consumption are difficult to tell from each other. So today I see artists more as mediators or prosumers.
Toke and M reach the last room of the exhibition and stop in front of a work by the collective DIS. The Island (KEN) (2015) resembles at first glance an ordinary, white coloured kitchen in IKEA design. One notices water coming down from time to time from an object that might be mistaken for an exhaust hood. Close inspection reveals it works as a shower. The Island combines the social space of the kitchen with the private space of the bathroom – thus creating a scene in which anything can happen, production and consumption becoming one, and the spectator an activated mediator himself.