Institute for Provocation cordially invites you to attend Marc Oosting’s exhibition ‘Fridge Please… Display + Displacement = Displayement’ this Sunday at 5:30 PM.
Time and Location
2017.11.12 - 2017.11.22
Opening party: 12 November 2017 5:30 PM Institute for Provocation · Black Sesame Project Space
What can be stored and displayed?
- A potential text based on the imagination of an artist’s possible works
Destroyed, forgotten, never completed, not written, thrown away, hidden, sketched but never continue, possible collaborations never coming to be realized, fragmental thoughts embedded in objects simply because of the inability of display and the capacity of displacement · Called ‘displayement’ by the artist · The myths of objects and personal life stitched together are stored in a couple of sealed ‘cases of ideology’, maybe the false/true account of the working of the world · Ideology serves society by shoring up its particular forms of social organization · How does one address these issues in everyday life, therefore revealing the public and economic in the personal · It seems reasonable to use forms that refer to mass-cultural forms in relation to consumerism, at least in the artist’s practice, without simply consuming or imitating them · Advertising, the handcrafted and the massively industrialized promise personal power and fulfillment through consumption · We are continuously involved in a kind of mediation, in the form of objects and commodities, between ourselves and the natural and social world · Our mode of economic production, in which people seem less important than the things they produce, shapes a consequential situation by giving the aura of life to things and removing it from people · We personify objects and objectify persons · This fetishism of commodities, as Marx pointed out, is not a universal mental habit · It has its origins in a productive system in which we are separated from our own productive capacities, our ability to make, which is transformed into a commodity itself · We experience this condition as alienation from ourselves as well as from others · So does the artist creating vacuum spaces distanced from the social and material context in which we are being · Looking at the alienated objects, in which their materiality seems to be dematerialized and digitized, produced by himself or others · Twenty one scrapped fridges scatter around · Some lay on the ground as showcases, some stand around for proper usage · Some work, some malfunction · Their original brand ads hint their ‘identities’ in such commodity ruins · No one would come to claim · The opening party alcohol is stored in a museum-like display system · No difference from the ones in the shops · Accompanied by a GIF titled In A Vacuum, showing Ace Ventura opening and closing a balcony door · Hinting at the visitors what to do and in potential creating social aura by interacting with the artwork · Apparently the artist is happy to hijack those displayed objects and commodities authorship · Such as Coca-Cola Can Stop Diarrhea · ICan · like a play on words, they indicate ‘can’ as a capacity of carrying economic ideologies as well as the ability of acting on our personal life and identity as consumers and next to the literal sense of the work · ‘Can’ being a ‘can’ · Bergen Zwisschen Kashgar Und Tashkurgan · is a group of sculpted clay miniature mountains resembling the letters H, E and double L · Potential in reading comes in play again as the display of the sculptures is letter group based and whether one decides to put the letters in an English reading or another Roman language · Hybrid existence with personal affect and touch · Also returning to a basic technique of sculpting ambiguous objects in a primitive way · … · More to explore of course · In dealing with questions around object and display and authorship in the exhibition ‘Fridge Please… Display + Displacement = Displayement’, in particular how objects can be related to people’s social positions, the artist uses a variety of different forms of objects, most of which are borrowed from common culture and ‘market’ · Written letters, scripts, graphic fonts, scrapped fridges, Coca-Cola cans, tourist photos and souvenirs, television program, clay and IKEA ceramic bowls etc. · Using these objects provides an element of familiarity and also signals his interest in real-world concerns, as well as giving him the chance to take on their cultural and social forms, to interrogate them, so to speak, about invoking the image of decoy, their meaning within society…
by Hu Wei
2017.11
