Conrad Bakker, Untitled Project: Commodity [Capital], 2007
Courtesy the artist © Conrad Bakker
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CONRAD BAKKER
(b 1970, Canada)
Bakker’s work is a critique of consumer culture, but is also intended to
function within it. His Untitled Projects are hand-carved, hand-painted
wooden objects, each one a unique work of art.
The roughness of the carving and painting is both a mark of their individuality
and indicative of the fact that these are made-to-order, replicas of mass-produced
goods, questioning assumptions of what is an original and what is a copy.
Bakker uses everyday systems of distribution, such as eBay, trade fairs
and mail order catalogues to circumvent the gallery system. Bakker’s carved
and painted copies of Karl Marx’s Capital (Volume 1) cost £18.99
(the current market value of its Penguin paperback counterpart) and can be
purchased by mail order from Irresistible Magazine.
Offer expires
25 November.
Matei
Bejenaru, Travelling Guide, 2005
Courtesy the artist © Matei Bejenaru
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MATEI BEJENARU
(b 1963, Romania)
Travelling Guide (2005)is an unofficial guide for Romanians seeking to enter and work in the United Kingdom illegally. The guide includes diagrams of transport networks and information about meeting points for fellow Romanians in Milan, Calais, Munich and other points of departure for entering Britain by flight, ferry, freight train or truck. The advice offered in the guide ranges from how to avoid being detained for illegal immigration to acquiring a false National Insurance number. All the information in the guide was downloaded from the internet and became obsolete on 1 January 2007 when Romania joined the European Union, enabling workers to move freely within the EU. Prior to the opening of the exhibition, Bejenaru collaborated with Romanian community groups to produce Together (2007), a performance in front of Tate Modern which was presented as a video projection in the Level 2 Gallery during the weekend 8-9 September.
Tim
Davis McDonalds II (Retail), 2000
Courtesy of the artist and Greenberg Van Doren Gallery, New York
Image courtesy of Greenberg Van Doren Gallery, New York
© Tim Davis
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Davis’s Retail Series (2001) examines the increasing presence of commercial interests in small-town America. These images of suburban houses are photographed at night using available light from nearby streetlamps, and without any glimpse of their inhabitants. On closer inspection, the logos of multinational brands such as Shell and McDonalds can be seen reflected in the windows. Although the sources of the reflections are out of frame, in most cases, they seem to be just the other side of the road, reinforcing the idea the inextricable fusion of consumerism and everyday life.
Claire
Fontaine, STRIKE (K font V.II) 2005-7 Collection Antoine de Galbert,
Paris Image courtesy the artist, Air de Paris, Galerie Chantal Crousel,
Reena Spaulings, New York
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Claire
Fontaine, The Educated Consumer is Our Best Customer, 2007
Courtesy the artist, Air de Paris, Galerie Chantal Crousel,
Reena Spaulings, New York
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CLAIRE FONTAINE
(Paris-based collective, founded 2004)
STRIKE (2005/7) consists of a scaffold structure on which the word ‘strike’ is spelled out using fluorescent tubes in the ‘K. font’. This font was created by the artists in homage to the protagonist of Franz Kafka’s The Castle, a novel about bureaucratic processes and paranoia. The flickering lights evoke the labyrinthine institutional spaces and systems that Kafka describes. STRIKE is installed in the gallery window and the lights can be seen from offices in The City and from the Millennium Bridge. As visitors approach the window, a motion detector switches off the lights. Only if there is no movement do they switch on again. Appropriately, suspension of activity is required to animate the word strike. On the ceiling is the smoke drawing The Educated Consumer is Our Best Customer (2007), written using a cigarette lighter. It is a hybrid of the vandalistic outbursts scrawled in public toilets and aphoristic statements found in conceptual art.
Mika
Rottenberg, Mary's Cherries, 2003
Courtesy of Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, New York
Image courtesy of the artist and Nicole Klagsbrun gallery
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MIKA ROTTENBERG
(b 1976, Argentina)
The question of labour and the exploitation of women’s bodies lies at the heart of Rottenberg’s humorous video installations. In Mary’s Cherries (2005) three female wrestlers perform a series of bodily actions in small claustrophobic chambers on successive floors. Two women rapidly pedal exercise bikes to power a UV light that promotes the growth of red fingernails. Each nail is carefully cut and dropped through a hole in the floor where another labourer massages and rubs it, softening it so that when the fingernail is passed to the next labourer it is easily transformed into a sticky maraschino cherry. Rottenberg juxtaposes the depersonalised production line with the individuality of the workers, whose sensually grotesque bodies actively become part of the production of commodities.
Michael
Stevenson, The Fountain of Prosperity, 2007
Courtesy of the artist and Vilma Gold, London
Image courtesy of the artist and Vilma Gold, London
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MICHAEL STEVENSON
(b 1964, New Zealand)
The Fountain of Prosperity (2007) is a reconstruction of the ‘Moniac’, a machine designed in the late 1940s by New Zealand economist Bill Phillips to illustrate the concept of monetary flow in national economies. A fixed volume of red-dyed water, representing money, is pumped through a system of transparent tubes and sluices into clear chambers representing factors such as ‘surplus balances’ and ‘International Monetary Funds’. Regarded as an extremely developed tool for analysing economic functions, 15 of these devices were built and shipped around the world. Stevenson discovered that one of the machines was acquired by the Central Bank of Guatemala in 1952, and has imagined what it might look like today. His replica is corroding and leaking, and the chamber marked ‘held balances’ is empty, suggesting that the economic model it represents is on the verge of collapse.
Michael Stevenson - The Search for the Fountain of Prosperity
Judi
Werthein, Brinco, 2005
Courtesy the artist and inSite 05
Image courtesy of the artist and inSite 05 Photo: Alfredo De Stefano
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JUDI WERTHEIN
(b 1967, Argentina)
Werthein’s Brinco (2005) trainers were designed to assist illegal immigrants seeking to cross the Mexican-American border. The trainers include a map of the region printed on the sole, a compass, a mini-flashlight, a secret pocket to hide money and other features to aid migrants in the arduous and dangerous trek north. Approximately 1000 pairs of Brinco sneakers (meaning ‘to jump’ in Spanish) were produced in China. They were given away for free in Tijuana to Mexicans setting off for the border, and sold for over $200 as a limited edition in a high-end boutique in San Diego, with proceeds going to a shelter in Tijuana. Werthein examines how a simple pair of shoes can be a product of cheap labour in a globalised marketplace, a functional tool and a luxury commodity.
Artists Statement:
BRINCO (JUMP)
Is an pseudo American corporation that designs and fabricates a sneaker specifically to cross the Mexican /US border. The sneakers were distributed in Tijuana (Mexico) for free to people attempting to cross the border illegally. It includes in it’s inner sole a map, a flashlight, a compass, and pockets to hide money and medicine, also on the back of the sneaker an image of Santo Toribio Romo the official saint of the Mexican migrants recognized as such by the Vatican.
Underscoring the tensions sparked by the global spread and mobility of the maquiladora (factories that migrate in search for low labor wages), the sneaker will be manufactured in China, imitating the same manufacturing strategies and models of exploitation done outside the US in depressed economies by American footwear companies.
In counterpoint to its potential for utilitarian use by Mexican migrants, the sneaker was sold as a one-of-a-kind art object in the US responding to the avid consumerist American culture.
This project intervenes on the flows of labor and goods across the border and addresses the global issue of the inequalities of economies and markets, the contradiction between free movement of goods and trade and the restricted movement of people.
Brinco presents the existing contradictions between fashion, competition in the manufacturing industry, and migratory flows, themes that lie at the heart of the dynamics of labor geography in today’s world.
Eric Gill, Dumb-driven Cattle, 1915
Tate
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Irresistible Magazine is a one-off glossy magazine produced for the exhibition that features a selection of commissioned texts and artists’ pages exploring aspects of the economy. Topics covered range from the notion and roots of ‘empire’ to Thatcherite economics. The magazine also includes a response to the exhibition concept by Stewart Home, the Level 2 Gallery’s writer-in-residence for the year. Irresistible Magazine is free to all visitors while stocks last.
