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A)
Danish art history abounds with the psychology of the collaborative.
It has been perceived as good to do stuff together in groups and
co-ops, and to slug it out between rivaling fractions or break away
and start a new group with a freer outlook than the previous one.
Obviously, that has its resonance in the way society and production
have been organized. However - or because of that - it wasn't until
the arrival of radicalized collective forms in the 1960s that artistic
collaboration found discourse.
Integrated understandings of collectivity were manifest in the interdisciplinary
work of early feminist manifestations, Palle Nielsen's playground
activism, Kanonklubben, and the Experimental Art School. These initiatives
were all, in one way or another and to varying degrees, showdowns
with aspects of modernist dogma. Of course, they didn't call it
"interdisciplinary" back then, but preferred to comprehend
their activities as activism or anti-establishment efforts, predicated
on purer artistic or political ideologies.
In N55's case, the death of the author by collectivity has given
rise to a multiplied authorial subjectivity that dismisses the art
market's mysterious ways. The group doesn't sell to private collectors
or galleries, but let their work be used by public art institutions
according to the open source principle that also governs their individual
projects. I recently wandered around a group show and came across
N55's work.
Exceptionally, the title sign didn't say "Courtesy of Gallery
NN", but "Courtesy of the artists". That is a good
mark.
As Fuller once concluded, there are plenty of resources on Spaceship
Earth. That is, if we don't squander them on weapons or waste them
on fripperies, made and marketed by his imaginary corporate nemesis,
Obnoxico. As the virtual Obnoxico's actual counterpart, N55's ambition
is to regenerate the social. Their magnification of artistic behavior
meets a Fullerian emphasis on non-specialization and generalized
knowledge. Social space demands a great diversity of knowledge,
but N55's back catalogue of art pieces with ethical and aesthetic
consequences is of their own design and manufacture, in some cases
with the help of experts to solve technical problems. Their production
ranges from furniture to items related to dwelling and transport,
such as the N55 SPACEFRAME or the multifunctional SNAIL SHELL SYSTEM,
and the service modules PUBLIC THINGS. More recent projects in real
and cyber-space are LAND, ROOMS and SHOP, and the organizationally
slanted projects YTEICOS, MOVEMENT and WORK. All projects are re-formulations
of everyday life's elementary functions and spaces. They are produced
to be lived with, not just for being contemplated
This unabashed and somewhat grotesque ambition creates a growing
and increasingly finely meshed net of objects, spaces and networks.
Just think that in a corner of Copenhagen, every thing and function
is being systematically re-invented by four artists, a new organic
synthesis of everything from lipsticks to locomotives! There is
surely more surplus in a project like that than in the defensive
ideologies of the 100% society.2
The style of N55's small parliament of social design imparts a popular
standard to the objects. Even in their hands-on approach to art
making, one can even detect a look of glitzy appropriation strategies
in that floating SPACEFRAME, like Jeff Koons' basketball in a water
tank. Both are sexy. But whereas one represents a kind of zero degree
of consumerism, the other one enacts a social equilibrium
Their work is a sort of minimalism with a social conscience, or
a minimalism that has reopened its recourse to economy and (re)production.
Dan Graham once said about the strip lights of Dan Flavin: "The
components of a particular exhibition, upon its termination, are
replaced in another situation - perhaps put to a non-art use as
a part of a different whole in a different time." However,
N55's work doesn't commute between art and life, occupying now the
one, then the other position, but describes a phasing out of the
separation between works of art and products. However, a dimension
of artistic autonomy is maintained in order to outstrip the state
and society's received ideas and introduce responsibility into the
sphere of artistic autonomy.3
N55's art has something of the fantastic about it. It conjures up
images of science fiction films: intergalactic voyagers stranded
on some inhospitable asteroid who, through science and ingenuity,
attain a quality of life unheard of at home. And sure enough, in
order to begin anew there is for every element in N55's production
an appurtenant manual with information and technical data. A score
for the reproduction of the element in question, the manual demonstrates
that anybody who so desires can build and install, for example,
the CLEAN AIR MACHINE. The manuals' reeling-off of data encourages
resource-transfers among consumption, time, work and material; the
production cost of the HOME HYDROPONIC UNIT, for example, corresponds
to what it would be to splash out on a Bang & Olufsen television
set or to buy a new fridge. N55's pieces and projects are destined
to be reproduced and taken further by other users and inventors,
not to be exchanged or traded. The manuals indicate that the process
is participatory - that it can be carried out at home, without the
aid of the artists. In effect, the manuals outline a constructive
rationality upon which you can engage in social fantasy. The manuals
are also a strategy of unmasking the thing inside the art object
and to show that it has a relatively stable, qualitatively distinct
use value. Capitalism's differential systems of consumer alternatives
are countered with an aggregate system in which the object answers
back at human activity. An open source strategy to find out if there
is life outside of commercial and privatized circuits
N55 don't patent or in other ways monopolize their output. When
elements are appropriated, they are re-combined and permutated,
twisted in the direction of the new, unexpected or awkward. The
accumulated technologies of N55 extend a re-visioning of the way
we usually go about things, a critique of the present rather than
a faith in the future
"Solutions", "Social fantasy" - Is this a utopian
project, then? Strictly speaking, no. An utopian ambition describes
a distance to be covered and overcome in the gap between the existing
reality and the progressive aim of the new topia, the social order
that is striven towards. N55, however, incarnate an inhabited concrete
practice, not a nowhere. Their ideas are there for the taking, to
be used and recreated by users, as they themselves use and recreate
what the world and the imagination have to offer. The temporal movement
that utopian ideologies usually exclude by fixating its promise
in stagnation is acknowledged and incorporated; in this way N55
work with the grain of the utopian promise's impossible temporality,
and keep it on the move. They don't create anything at the price
of its own development. Things keep mutating between the hands of
the group, and new ideas are absorbed and regurgitated that take
their practice elsewhere.
N55 can only be said to be utopian in the original literary sense,
as the first culturally legitimated and conventionally accepted
form of social criticism. Satirical writers could live in safety
by using the utopian as a narrative device. This contributed to
a fundamental change in the way stories were told, by introducing
the seemingly naïve narrator who finds everything under the
firmament surprising, wonderful or amazing. Faced with the way N55's
gadgets respond to the activities that surround them, the viewer/participant
feels like a utopian narrator on a fascinating journey that leads
to subversive discoveries and a satire on current hegemonies
A critique of urbanism and architecture is incorporated, Situationist-style,
in N55. Living is emphasized as an act and the house as a piece
of service-equipment, not a monument. The N55 SPACEFRAME - of which
N55 inhabit a floating version in the Copenhagen harbor - insists
as oddly parasitic to urban space, a different kind of role maker.
Its unfamiliar appearance is in keeping with its radical adaptability,
independent of local styles. Like other examples of alternative,
"universal" notions of housing - from the products of
Buckminster Fuller to those of Matti Suuronen - the N55 SPACEFRAME
looks like it would be as comfortable in the suburbs as in a rain
forest (though it doesn't exactly beg for a garden gnome or an elephant
door mat to be placed by the entrance). Configured with harmonious
formal self-sufficiency as a truncated tetrahedron, it has no cast
foundations, no right angles or window frames. The door is a sort
of docking hatch, and the whole construction is flatly symmetrical
- as if the entire structure could be knocked on its side and still
function. The primitive, crystalline geometry is independent of
scale (the N55 SPACEFRAME could vary in scale and still convey the
same sensibility) and hints at the flexible logic of its construction
suggesting the possible multiplication of this type of geometric
architecture
This is not unimaginable. A version of the N55 SPACEFRAME could
be mounted "by anybody", N55 promises, using small, light
weight components that can be easily manufactured and reassembled
without damage. For the cost of an average car, the N55 SPACEFRAME
can be assembled by hand without the use of cranes or other heavy
tools. It has no need for exterior maintenance, and it has the potential
for zero energy consumption - heating being provided by proper insulation
and sunlight, and by cooking and the physical activity of its occupants.
Pragmatics, as well as Georges Perec's idea that triangular space
is "as spectacular as it is gratuitous", underpin the
basic shape of the N55 SPACEFRAME. The triangle recurs in N55's
bed, table and chair, and other objects, like some highly polished,
intelligent LEGO system. Its design is based on the principle of
the octet truss, an extendable, modifiable structure that obtains
the greatest strength with a minimum of materials (In this case
thin, bent steel struts). The octet truss is a recurring constructive
element in DYNAMIC CHAIR, SUSPENDED PLATFORM and MODULAR BOAT. The
sculptural formulations of the octet truss assume serene, abstract
qualities in the repetition of elements: in the play of light on
the convex accents of each outside plate on the N55 SPACEFRAME,
and in the irregularities brought about by slight variations in
the coloring of the floor plates and the interior wall covering.
If you don't quite know what to make of the N55 SPACEFRAME from
the outside, the inside doesn't offer much spatial familiarity either.
The weightlessness you feel in the pyramid-like interior is due
to the confounding of our spatial expectations - that it should
be rectangular, and that the ground plane will be repeated as a
ceiling a couple of feet above our heads, supported by fixed, even
walls that don't allow your decisions to become an active part of
the architecture
Unlike the world's different prestige museums, millennium domes
or other monuments, the N55 SPACEFRAME also works as a cloud of
conjecture - as art and reality. On your way to dropping in on N55
in their shimmering and steely sea abode, you will pass the Christiania
district with its Pusher Street and architectonic half breeds (at
the time of writing once again under government threat to be cleared
out if they don't clean up their act), the School of Architecture
with adjacent building sites for upmarket flats and for the new
opera (a tax deductible 'gift' to the city from a shipping tycoon).
On the other side of a naval base, among a variety of houseboats,
the N55 SPACEFRAME appears in the dock like a crystal that is the
tip of a new civilization rising from the ocean, or like the drifting
emergency shuttle of some submarine vehicle wrecked during exploration
of the deep seas. After having hung out in the bobbing N55 SPACEFRAME
like a sea Bedouin, treated to wine or a few beers, you will feel
rather elevated when you make your way back onto dry land. And slightly
bobbing yourself.
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B)
On the discursive side, N55 have developed their text ART AND REALITY
influenced by philosopher Peter Zinkernagel's work on logical relations.
With Zinkernagel, and his work's affinities to Niels Bohr and the
later Wittgenstein, N55 propose a third alternative to the traditions
of materialism and idealism.
Within the parameters of logical relations, the opposition between
language, logic and concepts, on the one hand, and experience and
reality, on the other, is rejected
According to Zinkernagel, knowing a language entails that one can
propose correct postulates. Since every technical, scientific, or
philosophical apparatus of concepts presupposes an array of everyday
language definitions, any technical, scientific, or philosophical
language must uphold these rules. Otherwise, he says, we end up
with meaningless assumptions. As N55 and Zinkernagel write:
"We assume that there are no other conditions for deciding
whether something is right or wrong except that one does not contradict
oneself nor is inconsistent with facts. Beyond this there exist
only more or less thoroughly grounded, subjective opinions. However,
there is a level so basic that it normally does not appear in our
conscious mind, where everything does not revolve around subjective
opinions
At this level things are simply right or wrong.
Logical relations are the most basic and the most overlooked phenomena
we know. Logical relations mean that nothing of which we can talk
rationally can exist, can be identified or referred to, except through
its relations to other things. Logic is necessary relations between
different factors, and factors are what exist by force of those
relations. The decisive thing about logical relations is that they
cannot be reasoned.
Nevertheless, they do constitute conditions necessary for any description,
because they cannot be denied without rejecting the factors that
are part of the relations. One logical relation is the relation
between persons and bodies. It makes no sense referring to a person
without referring to a body. When we for example say, here we have
a person, but he or she does not have a body, it does not make sense.
Furthermore, there are necessary relations between persons and the
rights of persons. Persons should be treated as persons and therefore
as having rights. If we deny this assertion it goes wrong: here
is a person, but this person should not be treated as a person,
or: here is a person, who should be treated as a person, but not
as having rights.
Therefore we can only talk about persons in a way that makes sense
if we know that persons have rights."4
N55 situate their proposal for proving logically that people have
rights in a productive present. Since their art is communal, N55
are their own most powerful example. Insofar as the distinction
between thought and action is broken down, the DYNAMIC CHAIR, for
example, says and does just as much in N55's aggregate assertion
as the logical relations says and does. They are merely different
set-ups within the generalized domain of everyday life.
"It becomes of decisive importance to find ways to live and
behave which correspond to our knowledge of persons, the rights
of persons, etc. It is obvious that artists too must be conscious
of persons, the rights of persons, and the influence of concentrations
of power and thus must be concerned with politics. It is obvious
(...) that also artists must first and foremost be concerned with
the conscious making of what we know and of attempts to live and
behave in correspondence with what we know and try to organize in
as small concentrations of power as possible. In this way we have
a case where the fundamental ethical norm and thus ethics become
decisive for aesthetics (...) In a way that makes room for persons
and that which has significance to them in their daily life."
Partial truth-values, at least at this "fundamental level",
are countered by N55's and Zinkernagel's unyielding philosophical
argument. At a point when, institutionally speaking, post-structuralism
has played out its critical potential, N55 occupy a constructivist
position. Their power critique works in tandem with a desire to
build, produce, imagine. These positive components are required
in order to maintain art's independence and drive - especially,
perhaps, with regard to the way art and business these years are
seen to perform a shotgun wedding. Naked criticality isn't enough.
It ends up as mere parasitism.
Richard Sennett has characterized the new forms of capitalist organization
succinctly: today, he writes, power is concentrated but decentralized.5
That is, after nation states have been phased out by global capitalism,
power has become elusive and placeless. You can't ambush it to give
it a good kicking. But it is for sure that somewhere - probably
right behind you - it is there, growing stronger, smoother and more
flexible by the day.
The desire to form a countervailing terrain to global capital is
manifest in the LAND project, started in 2000. More than land as
(non-)site or material, the principle of ownership of land is here
used against itself, to set land free. Seeing that ownership of
land is one of the most pernicious forms of accumulation and the
basis of fundamental forms of exclusion, people are encouraged to
donate land they own to add up to a LAND, a global non-nation, which
can be accessed and used by everybody. LAND is also - finally! -
the deliquescence of patriotism. Fredric Jameson wonders about the
properties of ownership:
"[...] Violence was no doubt always implicit in the very conception
of ownership as such when applied to the land; it is a peculiarly
ambivalent mystery that mortal beings, generations of dying organisms,
should have imagined they could somehow 'own' parts of the earth
in the first place."6
Among the various dis-owned strips of land that add up to the tortoiseshell
of LAND are American desert, Danish villa garden, a Norwegian island
and an Illinois strip of land between curb and pavement. Their co-ordinates
have their own mathematical poetry:
"Sæby, Denmark, 57 degrees north/ 10 degrees east
Chicago, USA, 41 degrees north/87 degrees east
San Diego, USA, 33 degrees north/ 117 degrees east"
The question is, of course, what will happen when land in this way
is set free from the regulations that accompany ownership, and on
which most aspects of the public space / private space divide is
predicated. The LAND project is a re-imagining of the notions of
access and use of land; in extension of that it is also an anarchistic
re-introduction of the notion of global citizenship. Of course,
the patches of LAND won't be lawless white spots on the map as they
will sort under the existing jurisdictions of the countries in which
they are situated. LAND is a challenge to disabling ideas of how
we need ownership to maintain order and regulation; in that perspective
it is a psycho-geographical piece as much as anything. It is up
to its users to make time and space meet, without the overbearing
mental framework of deeds and proprietors
In the terms of Henri Lefebvre, the French ex-Situationist and philosopher
of space, the LAND project is the appropriation of space before
any ideology or superstructure can overlay that space. Interestingly,
Lefebvre's definition of appropriation also addresses the question
of ownership:
"Property in the sense of possession is at best a necessary
precondition, and most often merely an epiphenomenon, of 'appropriative'
activity, the highest expression of which is the work of art. An
appropriated space resembles a work of art, which is not to say
that it is in any sense an imitation work of art. Often such a space
is a structure - a monument or building - but this is not always
the case: a site, a square or a street may also be legitimately
described as an appropriated space."7
The gates between art and life have opened and an appropriated space
"resembles a work of art". Similarly, Lefebvre's notion
of spatial production through appropriation is based on sharing
space with whomever is in that space, regardless of gender, race
or class. In accordance with its Marxist component, Lefebvre's thinking
is closely linked with the possibilities for agency in a historical
present. The pincer-movement politics of N55's two-tiered artistic
practice can be seen as the relief of (Foucauldian) queer theory
and ID-politics, by virtue of their discourse's fundamental critique
of power. N55 prefer to speak about persons' rights in terms of
general conditions. Out goes the focus on identity and discussions
predicated on the body. The correlates of particular identities
are suspended in N55's power critique that instead offers a general
analysis of subjectivity.8
When no heed is paid to the spatial relations that inhere in social
facts, and when social space is represented as disjointed segments,
knowledge misses its target. Lefebvre's brand of Marxism described
a move away from the object and into space, a movement that N55
could be said to share on the formal level. However, as stated earlier,
they maintain the work with art things concurrently with their spatial
projects. The concerns of SHOP and WORK comprise both aspects, in
their attempt at developing non-monetary forms of object and service
exchange, as a redistribution of the resources of social space.
Lefebvre writes that the logical form belongs to those abstract
forms which don't depend on description,
"[...] and which are inseparable from a content. Among these,
in addition to the logical form, must be numbered identity, reciprocity,
recurrence, repetition (iteration), and difference."9
This goes a long way to explain the form, function and structure
of the implementation of N55's projects at the level of social practice,
exchange and social space. Their project is an operation of sameness
and difference that makes it flicker between being an institutional
parasite and host organism, and propels it forward by the convictions
of a content-based logic to new permutations in the meeting with
new people and places
N55's artistic strategies ultimately displace discussions of originality
and creative copyright. Art and the knowledge pertaining to its
forms are represented as common knowledge, social freeware. It is
of no essential interest who has done this or signed that: rather
than existing in an art-historical time bubble, N55 aim to be operational
with their artistic concepts in real time. In fact, one of their
manuals spell it out: "There is no reason to request art to
continue to find new forms." That, as it were, would merely
be another habit
Georges Perec gets the final word, on the subject of the habitual
and its dislodgement. What needs to be done?
"To question the habitual. But that's just it, we're habituated
to it. We don't question it, it doesn't question us, it doesn't
seem to pose a problem, we live it without thinking, as if it carried
within it neither questions nor answers, as if it weren't the bearer
of any information. This is no longer even conditioning, it's anaesthesia.
We sleep through our lives in a dreamless sleep. But where is our
life? Where is our body? Where is our space?"10
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