Camping in the Art World Eva and Franco

4 variable dimensions untitled, Anonymous, 5 Catt, 2010 Fake Cattelan sculpture Eva and Franco Mattes: Eva and Franco Mattes: Camping in the Art World Camping in the Art World Melissa Gronlund I. The whole point of Camp is to dethrone the serious. Camp is playful, anti-serious. More precisely, Camp involves a new, more complex relation to “the serious”. One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious.1 Franco Mattes once had a debate with a friend over whether an idea originating on the internet could ever last as long as a work of art. To resolve the debate, and to prove his point that the internet is capable of ideas as long- lasting as that of contemporary art, Franco made a bet to take the first internet meme he came across,2 refashion it as an artwork, and see if it held up. He went to 4chang.org – an image board website – and took a Photoshopped image of a cat in a birdcage with a canary atop the cage. 6 Eva and Franco Mattes aka 0100101110101101.ORG variable dimensions untitled, Anonymous, 7 As internet memes go, it wasn’t The art world bought it, hook, line the works they create, the Mattes of the Mattes’ work. Though the even that funny: the canary/cat and sinker, and Cattelan, whom set up situations in which the Mattes are known as pioneers of reversal was a little ironic; the they talked to later, said he didn’t viewer’s mistaken assumptions Net Art – that famously atomised, physical comedy of the fat cat mind. Ironically, the sculpture and actions create the form of the human-via-console breed of art- hemmed in by the little cage was photographed and uploaded work itself. These are often quite making – they are in fact masters more so. But Mattes chose it any- to the internet, and ultimately simply based on the fact that his of skills one might expect to lie way, and refigured it materially, gained a new life through further or her assumptions seem so plau- elsewhere: emotional manipula- asking a taxidermist in Italy for anonymous manipulations. sible, more so than the reality tion and storytelling. a cat that resembled the one in the image, which he then wedged into a small birdcage and topped II. The traditional means for going beyond straight seriousness - irony, with a stuffed canary. satire - seem feeble today, inadequate to the culturally oversaturated medium in which contemporary sensibility is schooled. Camp When Franco exhibited it with his introduces a new standard: artifice as an ideal, theatricality.3 artist partner, Eva, they charac- teristically attributed the author- name that hit just the right notes ship to someone else – Maurizio of chauvinist patriotism and he- Cattelan, an artist they felt could roic gun-slinging (set against a plausibly be believed to have background of a waving EU flag, made the work. Incidental details the movie’s tag line read: ‘Europe happily corroborated their story Has a Mission’). It was advertised – the Italian taxidermist had ac- by billboards in Vienna, Berlin, tually worked with Cattelan be- Bologna, Barcelona, Bangalore, fore, and one of the curators at Brussels and (breaking the chain) the gallery where the work was New York. Reaction among the first shown, Inman Gallery, in public varied from place to place Houston, Texas, had just finished – some of the European audienc- a large Cattelan retrospective at es thinking the film was a parody the MCA Houston. of Hollywood-style blockbusters; some of the US audiences not This switch of authorship is a realising that the EU had a flag. recurrent device in the Mattes’ In 1998, they created a fake artist, practice, suggesting an affront Darko Maver, who they alleged to the value system of the art was based in the former Yugosla- world, in which value is conferred via. Maver was the progenitor of through an artist and an institu- fashionably political protests that tion’s imprimatur, but also an went perhaps beyond the bounds example of the rootlessness that of good taste; his works were they bring to the art object or art picked up by the wider art press encounter. Whether by obscuring and he was ultimately invited to the name of the author, hiding the Venice Biennale of 1999. In information from the public or United We Stand (2005–06) the presenting false information to Mattes created the marketing (often unwitting) participants in campaign for a movie of the same 8 Eva and Franco Mattes aka 0100101110101101.ORG variable dimensions untitled, Anonymous, 9 true: it is the kind of thing Nike would have done. In acting as if they were Nike, in Nike Platz the Mattes exaggeratedly performed the identity of the corporation – playing Nike, as Sontag would put it, in drag. III. Something is good not because it is achieved, but because another kind of truth about the human situation, another experience of what it is to be human – in short, another valid sensibility – is being revealed.4 Often operating outside of the of writing: ‘since the eighteenth gallery space, the Mattes’ proj- century, the author has played ects attempt to harness the infor- the role of the regulator of the mation contained within the ar- fictive, a role quite characteris- chitectural or societal clues that tic of our era of industrial and Colorless, Odorless and Tasteless Platz. The “info-box” store com- guide one’s understanding of a bourgeois society, of individual- (2011) is a hacked arcade game prised two floors, and was kitted situation. The institutional theory ism and private property’. How- that emits toxic carbon monoxide out in the mix of clean design, of art,5 by which the museum or ever, since those conditions have the longer one plays it: a literali- technocratic Hadid-like architec- gallery walls prompts a visitor to changed, and are ‘in the process sation of the handwringing fear ture and swoosh logo that has read an object with the kind of of changing’, he states that ‘the that video games lead directly come to signify Nike in adver- close attention befitting a work of author function will disappear, to homicide, but also a trespass tising campaigns. The structure art is one example of a situation and in such a manner that fiction of one of the basic rules of soci- looked expensive; the amount of in which the context changes the and its polysemous texts will etal engagement, the pact not to money one assumed it cost sug- literal identity of the object. The once again function according try and surreptitiously kill one gested not a Situationist prank Mattes, going further, find and to another mode, but still with a another. The Mattes’ plays with but the veritable renaming of the exploit these conditions in the ev- system of constraint’. 6 Foucault secrecy and subterfuge are well- public space by the footwear cor- eryday spaces of human encoun- leaves this system of constraint judged, playing off of and abetted poration. Nike, which eventually ter, particularly that of the digital open to the imagination, writing by the viewer’s own prejudices, found out about the stunt, then world, putting out false proposi- that it ‘will have to be determined and they enlist these unaware sued the Mattes, giving their fic- tions that appear unauthored or or, perhaps, experienced’, but participants to complete the sto- tional intervention into the public which are hidden behind a fake saying no further. However, it is ries they simply begin. sphere a purchase on reality – a name. In his famous essay ‘What not clear that this new system of real example of the litigations a Is an Author?’, Michel Foucault constraint has since appeared, In the project Nike Platz (2003), company will go into in order to identifies the author function as a and indeed I would argue the for example, they put up a mobile safeguard their reputation and an means of uniting a corpus of writ- conditions of existence now – the mini-Nike headquarters announc- illustration of the monetary value ings as a discrete set of literature internet’s unprecedented level ing that Karlsplatz in Vienna had of a brand. Nike Platz worked that may be examined as one and of both anonymity and access to been bought and renamed Nike because it so easily could be as different from other examples others; increasing globalization 10 Eva and Franco Mattes aka 0100101110101101.ORG variable dimensions untitled, Anonymous, 11 and deterritorialisation – further a means to evade censors and and which they exhibited to a really dead. This fact, and the raw inhibit this system of constraint lawsuits in a politically repres- public prepared for representa- emotions provoked by it, are for from forming. It is thus into this sive publishing environment, and tions of violence from the former the Mattes a tool to test how at- space of fiction formerly ruled ‘secret histories’ and romans à Eastern Bloc, but perhaps not for omised we really are. For No Fun by the author function that the clef were a highly popular genre, real death from, well, wherever. (2010) Franco Mattes simulated Mattes enter, and whose rootless- particularly in Restoration Eng- committing suicide in a public ness they crucially exacerbate land. (Secret histories were a webcam-based chat room. Thou- with their fake authorships. kind of novel that made public sands of people watched while he libellous, sexual or elite secrets hung from the ceiling, swinging The author is not a timeless func- through allegorical structures; a slowly, for hours. The fact that the tion on the literature landscape; good example would be Aphra footage was not still but showed indeed it emerged in its modern Behn’s Love-Letters, 1864.)9 But him swaying made it both more guise in the seventeenth and if there is a long tradition of hid- ghastly and compelling.

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