Ud24_T12_"The flea market: the dominant form of the art of the 90's" / Nicolás Bourriaud

UNIVERSIDAD POLITÉCNICA DE MADRID ESCUELA TÉCNICA SUPERIOR DE ARQUITECTURA

udd

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federico soriano Textos 2018-2019

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2. The flea market, the dominant form of the art of the 90’s

BOURRIAUD, Nicolás, en Postproducción, AH Editora, 2014.

Liam Gillick explains that “In the 1980s a large part of artistic production seemed to indicate that artists were making their purchases in the right businesses. Now one would say that new artists have also gone out shopping, but in inappropriate businesses, in all kinds of businesses”.7

We could represent the passage from the 1980s to the 1990s by juxtaposing two photographs: the first would be a shop window, the second would show a flea market or a shopping gallery at an airport.

From Jeff Koons to Rirkrit Tiravanija, from Haim Steinbach to Jason Rhoades, one formal system has replaced another and the dominant visual system approaches the open-air market, the bazaar, the fair, the temporary meeting and nomad of precarious materials and products of diverse origins. Recycling (a method) and chaotic disposition (an aesthetics) replace as formal matrices the stained glass window and the shelves.

Firstly, because it represents a collective form, a proliferating and incessantly renewed chaotic agglomeration, which does not depend on the authority of a single author: a market is constituted with multiple . In the catalog ”No man’s time”, CNAC Villa Arson,1991.

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individual contributions. Secondly, because in the case of the flea market, it is a place where the production of the past is more or less reorganized.

And finally, because it embodies and materializes flows and human relations that tend to disincarnate with the industrialization of commerce and the emergence of Internet sales.

The flea market is therefore the place where products from multiple sources converge in expectation of new uses. The old sewing machine can be converted into a kitchen table and an advertising object from 1975 to decorate the dining room. In an involuntary tribute to Marcel Duchamp, the idea is to give an object “a new idea”. An object previously used according to the concept for which it was produced finds potential new uses at flea market stalls.

In 1996, Dan Cameron returned to Claude Levi-Strauss’s opposition between “raw and cooked” as the title of one of his exhibitions: on the one hand, artists who transform materials and make them unrecognizable (the cooked); on the other, those who preserve the singular aspect of materials (the raw). The form-market is the place par excellence of rawness. An installation by Jason Rhoades, for example, is presented as a unitary composition made up of objects that nevertheless retain their expressive autonomy, in the manner of Arcimboldo’s paintings. In formal terms, his work is closer than it seems to that of Rirkrit Tiravanija. Untitled (Peace sells), made by the latter in 1999, is presented as an exuberant sample of disparate elements that clearly attests to a repugnance to the formatting of the varied, perceptible in all his works. But Tiravanija organises the multiple elements that make up his installations in such a way as to emphasise their value for use, while Rhoades stages objects that seem to be endowed with an autonomous logic, indifferent to human beings. There we notice one or more guiding lines, structures interwoven in each other, but without the atoms gathered by the artist fusing completely into an organic whole. The sphere of forms to which Rhoades refers thus evokes the heterogeneity of the stalls of a market and the ambulations it implies: “It is about relations with people, my father and I, or tomatoes with pumpkin, beans with seaweed, seaweed with maize, maize with land and land with barbed wire. By explicitly referring, at least in its beginnings, to California’s popular markets, its facilities are the maddening image of a world without any possible center, collapsing on all sides under the weight of production and the practical impossibility of recycling. When we visit them, we sense that art no longer has the task of proposing an artificial synthesis between heterogeneous elements, but rather of generating formal “critical masses” through which the 2

family structure of the market becomes an immense mass store or even a monstrous city of waste. His works are composed of materials and tools, but on a disproportionate scale: “piles of tubes, piles of tools, piles of fabrics, all those things in industrial quantities...”.8 Rhoades adapts the American junk fair to the dimensions of Los Angeles through the experience of driving a car, the capital of his work. When asked to justify the evolution of his Perfect World part, he replies: “The real big change in my new job is the car. Circulating in his Chevrolet Caprice, he was “in [his] head and out, in and out of reality”, while the acquisition of a Ferrari modifies his relationship with the city and with his work: “Driving between the workshop and various places is driving physically, it is an immense energy, but it is no longer a dream ride as before”.9 The space of the work is the urban space crossed at a certain speed; the objects that subsist are therefore either enormous or reduced to the size of the vehicle’s cabin, which plays the role of an optical tool that allows us to select shapes.

Thomas Hirschhorn’s work stages spaces for exchange, as well as places within which the individual loses contact with the social and ends up incrustation against an abstract background: an international airport, stained-glass windows of large shops, the administration of a company?

In his installations, sheets of metal paper or plastic film envelop the vague forms of everyday life, which are thus uniformly projected into monstrous forms proliferating and tentacular networks. However, the work goes up to the market form insofar as it introduces into those typical places of the globalized economy elements of resistance and information: political pamphlets, newspaper clippings, televisions, media images. The visitor who moves through Hirschhorn’s environments uncomfortably passes through an abstract, dense and chaotic organism. He can identify the objects he finds, newspapers, products, vehicles, usual objects, but in the form of viscous spectra, as if a computer virus had ravaged the spectacle of the world to replace it with a genetically modified ersatz.

Such usual products are shown in a larval state, like so many monstrous matrices interconnected in a capillary network that leads nowhere - which is in itself a commentary on the economy.

8 ”It’s about relationships to people,like me and my dad,or tomatoes to squash, beans to weeds,and weeds to the corn,the corn to the ground and the groun to the extension cords.” And then:”pile of pipes,pile of clamps,pile of paper,pile of fabric,all these industrial quantities of things...” In Jason Rhoades, Perfect world, catalog from exposition in Deichtorhallen de Hamburgo, Oktagon, 2000.

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A similar malaise surrounds George Adeagbo’s installations, which offer an image of the African recovery economy through a maze of old record covers, waste objects or newspaper clippings that read personal notes analogous to an intimate diary, as an irruption of human consciousness deep into the misery of shop windows.

Since the end of the 18th century, the term market has moved away from its physical reference to designate rather the abstract process of sale and purchase. In the bazaar, explains economist Michel Henochsberg, “the transaction overcomes the cold and reductive simplism with which modernity disguises it”,10 assuming its original status of negotiation between two people. Trade is first and foremost a form of human relationship, and even a pretext intended to produce a relationship. Thus any transaction could be defined as “a successful encounter of stories, affinities, desires, coercions, blackmails, skins, tensions”.

The art tries to give a form and a weight to the most invisible processes. When entire aspects of our existence fall into abstraction through the change of scale of globalization, when the basic functions of our daily lives are gradually transformed into consumer products (including human relations, which become a real industrial gear), it seems quite logical that artists should try to rematerialize those functions and those processes, and give back a body to what is taken from our gaze. Not as objects, which would imply falling into the trap of reification, but as supports of experiences; by striving to break the logic of spectacle, art gives us back the world as experience to live.

Since the economic system progressively deprives us of this experience, we still have to invent ways of representing this unlived reality.

A series of paintings by Sarah Morris, representing the façades of the headquarters of large multinational companies in the style of geometric abstraction, returns their physical location to marks that would seem purely immaterial. According to the same logic, the paintings of Miltos Manetas take as their themes the networks of the web and the power of computer science, but under the aspect that allows us to access it, the computers, located in a domestic environment. The current success of the market or bazaar among contemporary artists stems from a desire to make palpable again those human relations that the postmodern economy places in the financial bubble. But immateriality itself reveals . Michel Henochsberg, Nous nous sentions come une sale espèce, ed. Denöel, París, 1999, p. 239.

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itself as a fiction, moderated by Michel Henochsberg, to the extent that the data that appear to us to be more abstract - the great governing prices of raw materials or energy, for example - are in reality the object of negotiations that sometimes border on the arbitrary.

The work of art can then consist of a formal device that generates relationships between people or arise from a social process a phenomenon that I have described by the name of relational aesthetics whose main characteristic is to consider interhuman exchange as a fullyfledged aesthetic object.

With Everything NTS20 (Chaos minimal), Surasi Kusolwong piles on rectangular monochrome shelves, in a range of vivid colours, thousands of objects made in Thailand: T-shirts, plastic artifacts, baskets, toys, kitchen utensils... The brightly coloured batteries are gradually diminishing like the stacks of Féliz González-Torres, as visitors to the exhibition can take the objects in exchange for a little money deposited in large, transparent, smoked glass urns that explicitly evoke Robert Morris’ sculptures. What Kusolwong’s device makes clear is the transaction: the dissemination of multicoloured products in the exhibition halls and the progressive filling of the boxes with coins and banknotes provide a concrete image of commercial exchange. When Jens Haaning set up a store in Freiburg selling products imported from France at prices obviously lower than those in Switzerland, he is also questioning the paradoxes of a falsely “globalised” economy and assigning the artist the role of a smuggler.

“Perfect World”, Jason Rhoades.

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