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 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 , 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 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. In such a eighteenth centuries, and only den authorship, these authors way the Mattes exaggerated the slowly. Dryden, Jonathan Swift, were working in a quite different distance and lack of real engage- Laurence Sterne, Walter Scott – situation to that of the Mattes ment people complain about in they gave their name to only some and other Net artists and activists relation to the net and in social of their works, and as late as the who have also made fake author- media encounters, creating a sit- nineteenth century Jane Austen ship a recurrent motif.10 Though uation of the most dire loneliness is mostly referred to in critical Pope resorted to subterfuge and and affect – an updated version literature as ‘a Lady’ or ‘the au- misinformation, much of the pub- Staged or depicted death (or, as of the anonymity suggested by thor of Pride and Prejudice’. 7 lishing world at the time knew in Colorless, the incipient death) the urban cliché of ‘woman dead Pseudonyms were also common he was the author. The Mattes often appears in their practice, as in Manhattan flat for two years particularly for female authors, operate in a playing field that a limit against which all claims of and no one realized’: ‘man seen and misinformation and lies lacks the coordinates for such fictionalisation and falsehoods hanged on internet but no one abounded on title pages; the first recognition. If the world is larger, run against: people do really can get to him in reality’. edition of Pope’s Odyssey of 1728 global and consequently one of die, and when they die, they are announced itself as a re-printing increasing anonymity, the Mattes of a Dublin edition, which indeed exploit how people navigate this never existed.8 Much of this was faceless world.

I V. Indeed the essence of Camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration.11

With Darko Maver, the art world images ostensibly showed sculp- expected a dissident political art- tures made by ‘Maver’ that were ist to arise from post-communist bloody, grotesque mannequins Yugoslavia; the Mattes took that he would leave in public these expectations on board places. The reality, however, was and, as with the cat and canary, even more gruesome: the images materialised it. The works they were not documentation at all but staged of Maver’s were in bad actual photographs of corpses taste and almost too much: the the Mattes found on the internet, 12 Eva and Franco Mattes aka 0100101110101101.ORG variable dimensions untitled, Anonymous, 13

V. Camp taste is a kind of love…12 senses of the word) – which in of tendencies toward thematic practice must have been offset by and teleological significance that In Life Sharing (2000–03), one regress a few decades and use the sheer voyeuristic thrill of rum- formerly had characterised only of their best known works, the the post and telephone in order maging freely through another’s the public realm’.14 Viewed on Mattes made the contents of their to avoid scrutiny. The project is, personal effects. The grandiosity this continuum, the internet does computer public for three years, in many ways, a highly romantic of the gesture would, I think, have not so much erase the distinction encouraging others to follow their one – both for the ideal of open been undermined by the termite between the two spheres as con- life and to take documents from and free information, which was interest provoked by the details; tinue the replacement of matters their computer at will. Everything so current at the time,13 and, sig- and for those who never saw it, of public significance with those on their computer was available nalled by its title, by being very the reverse might obtain. of the private that began in the to search, read and freely copy much about love. It communi- 1600s. Life Sharing, a very early (notably, it was mainly text, as cates the opening-up, outpouring The work has become famous for work in Net terms, reflects this his- this was before digital cameras and lack of secrecy that comes being an example of the inter- torical swing, but also over-plays and smartphones became ubiq- with the ideal total trust of a rela- net’s levelling of any distinction it, moving it beyond the bounds uitous), as were their emails, tionship, and indeed the Mattes, between public and private – a of representation and into that of which could be read by others who are romantic as well as ar- shift discussed in many different real life – another historical shift, as they arrived, and even before tistic partners, have often called terms, from the political (people’s towards participation and reality the Mattes saw them. Friends and it a ‘self-portrait’. Opening their private lives becoming matters TV, that it anticipates. acquaintances who were squea- lives to the public also entailed of public concern) to the per- mish about this level of attention an exhibitionist dimension – look sonal (people sharing their lives Moreover, rather than the one- were forced to technologically at our total confidence! (in both through social media but ‘not way street of publishing and pas- actually living them’) and even to sive reception that characterised the effects on journalism. Again, the pre-internet age (it might be looking to the beginning of the instructive to note that Franco era of mass publishing tempers Mattes once called gallery visi- this hype somewhat. European tors ‘passive voyeurs’), the mode civil society has since the 1600s of sharing public and private is generally shifted its focus from now social; people feed back, matters of public significance at least outside of a gallery. The to those of private significance, path of the misinformation the culminating, as McKeon says Mattes give out in their work in his study of this shift, in the is difficult to follow, as it abuts apotheosis of domesticity that against a desire for transparency marked the nineteenth-century – the opposite of the art world in novel. In their focus on the rites many ways – which means they of marriage and the social world will as happily communicate the contained within the drawing truth as dig deeper into their lie. room, these novels accurately re- Their work, that is, cannot be ex- flected the fact that one’s public amined distinctly from the social standing was often determined context in which it appears; they within the realm of the private, have said that with their works and these works took over from they seek to ‘frame a moment in ‘secret histories’ in showing ‘the space and time’. assumption by the private realm 14 Eva and Franco Mattes aka 0100101110101101.ORG variable dimensions untitled, Anonymous, 15

VI. Camp makes no distinction between the unique object and the handled and beloved in a private, inconsistencies of its position. If mass-produced object. Camp transcends the nausea of the replica.15 interior domestic realm – a mode everything is open to be copied, of understanding that would be then copying it shouldn’t be a As with Life Sharing, the Mattes of decent photographic records exemplified by Roland Barthes’s crime. The video work comprises often underline or confuse the of the place online, so taking Camera Lucida (1980) and his dis- a digital slideshow of 10,000 social character of private infor- their own pictures has become cussion of the photograph of his photos the Mattes have taken mation, and its often inconsis- a performative token act’.16 It mother in the Winter Garden, a by hacking into others’ personal tent configuration as such. One becomes an act of authentic- photograph too precious to even computers: a rolling slideshow of such means, as we have seen, is ity but also a ritual – an act one be reproduced in his book – im- private images of different peo- toying with the significance of does as if to prove that one actu- ages on photo-sharing sites are ple performing their own selves . authorial authenticity, which per- ally visited the site. Photography to be seen by everyone, organ- It is, in many ways, a condensed, sists in relationship to photogra- has also become more social. ised for public view, and indeed pictorial version of the naviga- phy at times, and other times is In the text ‘Display, Identity and often originally taken in order tion of the private/public sphere merrily ignored. For instance, the the Everyday: Self-Presentation to take part in this public forum that unfolded in the nineteenth- proliferation of images available Through Online Image Sharing’,17 of expression. Furthermore, as century novel. However the meat online has, as Julian Stallabrass Julia Davies writes how images Stallabrass’s comment reminds of the work is not just the rep- put it in a recent interview with posted to digital sharing sites us, the act of taking these images resentation of these images but the artist Trevor Paglen, who are experienced socially: they in order to participate is in itself the act of stealing them, and sig- works with stealing images of are taken in order to be shared, potentially superfluous. People nificantly, the bringing of these secret military sites, rendered and content streams are added could simply source already ex- images of others into the public the act of photography performa- to in a crowd-sourced, openly istent images from the web in realm of the gallery context is tive: ‘Tourists at any reasonably accumulative way. Moving away order to add these to their online not only a trespass from public to well-known spot can be sure that from the fetishised material profiles – though, significantly, private but a breach of authorial they will find dozens or hundreds photograph that is meant to be they do not. ownership.

Two things are at work here: firstly, the public, open nature of the photographs’ reception and dissemination, and secondly, the bias towards an authenticity of the works’ creation – the need for the images to be privately authored before their public consumption. Barthes’s Winter Garden image, it seems, is not wholly left behind: the use without permission of personal images is still an ethical taboo, and equally a legal one, despite images’ being posted to the web without safeguards to prohibit their proliferation. The Mattes’ most recent work, The 3 Others (2011), seeks to contra- vene this taboo and tease out the 16 Eva and Franco Mattes aka 0100101110101101.ORG variable dimensions untitled, Anonymous, 17

VII. One is drawn to Camp when one realized that “sincerity” is course not.’ But just as I assumed they acquired them – the jolt of not enough.18 that they were going to keep up authenticity in a practice of half their charade, and then they went (and full and non-) truths. on to tell me the full story of how

1 Susan Sontag, ‘Notes on “Camp”’, in Against Interpretation and Other Essays, New York: Picador, 1966, p.288. Note 41. 2 An internet meme is perhaps best described as a collaged image that acquires specific meaning as it spreads online. 3 S. Sontag, ‘Notes on “Camp”’, op. cit., p.288. Note 43 The Others has resemblances website. In organising shows a 4 S. Sontag, ‘Notes on “Camp”’, op. cit., p.287. Note 36. with another act of theft they ac- key question has been how to 5 See, for example, James Dickie, Art and the Aesthetic: An Institutional Analysis, Ithaca: complished – a theft in material handle the transition of their Cornell University Press, 1974. terms, not just digital, which was works from the more undeter- 6 Michel Foucault, ‘What Is an Author?’ (1969, trans. Josué V. Harari), in The Foucault Reader in fact their first work together. mined space of public encounter (ed. Paul Rabinow), New York: Pantheon Books, 1985, p.119. Emphases mine. 7 See Pat Rogers, ‘Nameless Names: Pope, Curll, and the Uses of Anonymity’, New Literary For Stolen Pieces (1995–97), they to the determined space of the History, vol. 33, no. 2, Spring 2002, pp.233–45. pilfered ancillary bits and pieces gallery, where actions that might 8 Ibid., p.237. from artworks by major artists be shocking are bracketed off as 9 See Michael McKeon, The Secret Life of Domesticity, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University – Marcel Duchamp, Nam June gestures or exist as with quote Press, 2005. Paik, Jeff Koons, Tom Wesselman, marks around them – represen- 10 See, for instance, John Cunningham, ‘Clandestiny and Appearance’, Mute, 8 July 2010: http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/clandestinity-and-appearance , Robert Rauschen- tations of an intention to poison 11 S. Sontag, ‘Notes on “Camp”’, op. cit., p.275. berg, Andy Warhol – and the list someone, rather than the real 12 S. Sontag, ‘Notes on “Camp”’, op. cit., p.291. Note 56. of pieces they pocketed can go attempt (even though, of course, 13 The Mattes and their website, 0100101110101101.ORG, were one of the first in the field of on. Once taken out of the museum the carbon monoxide emissions Net Art. Emerging in the late 1990s and early 2000s as a group of (literally) networked space, with its value-bestowing are real enough). The ruptures individuals, Net Artists were interested in politics and the forms of sociality the internet promised, and the transformative capabilities of art on the web; they and others copied aura, the integral constituents of and reactions that the Mattes material, stole material, created ephemeral visions online and connected people in real great artworks descend into be- seek to provoke are ones that time. Net art’s exclusion from the commercial art world meant that digital artists encount ing mere bits and pieces. need their social dimension – ac- ered participatory art and relational aesthetics, which also reached their peak at the same complished within the complex, time, somewhat differently: they operated outside of the gallery space anyway, making How to keep that deterritorialised dialogically constructed spheres their marshalling of the subjectivities of others less provocative and more pointed – not an end in itself, but a means to a political and ideological statement, such as the freedom status while also becoming a of consensus-forming in which of information in the Copyleft movement or the grass-roots anti-globalisation move work ‘by Eva and Franco Mattes’ one establishes the basic facts of ments that organised over the web and also looked to Negri and Hardt’s Empire, as Net in an art space is one of the dif- a situation: is Nike taking over the artists did, as the key text of their time. Net artists saw the world as one of deterritorialisa ficulties of this type of practice, space or isn’t it? Is the man hang- tion: the unmooring of a place from its markers, and capital as the deterritorialising agent and one that they grapple with in ing in danger or isn’t he? And so par excellence. Their NikePlatz project is a classic example of illustrating this deterritorialis ing impulse, showing how large-scale corporations with political clout and gargantuan putting together exhibitions for on. It also probably helps that ambitions for market share might and do usurp publicly owned spaces. gallery or institutional venues. ‘Eva and Franco Mattes’ are long- 14 M. McKeon, The Secret Life of Domesticity, op. cit., p.xxiii. They have specified, for example, time pseudonyms under which 15 S. Sontag, ‘Notes on “Camp”’, op. cit., p.289. Note 46. how important it is to them that they have operated their art prac- 16 Julian Stallabrass, ‘Negative Dialectics in the Google Era: A Conversation with Trevor their work exists outside of the tice – a fact I came to rather late. Paglan’, October, vol.138, Fall 2011, p.3. 17 Julia Davies, ‘Display, Identity and the Everyday: Self-Presentation Through Online Image gallery space, and indeed all ‘What do you think?’, they said Sharing’, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, vol.28, no.4, December their works are usually available when I asked them whether they 2007, pp.549–564. before a show’s opening on their were indeed their real names. ‘Of 18 S. Sontag, ‘Notes on “Camp”’, op. cit., p.288. Note 41. 18 Eva and Franco Mattes aka 0100101110101101.ORG variable dimensions untitled, Anonymous, 19 Melissa Gronlund

Melissa Gronlund is an editor of Afterall, and a writer on contemporary art and film. She has written catalogue essays for a number of venues, including the ICA, London; the Serpentine, London; Witte de With, Rotterdam; and Milton Keynes Gallery, and has contributed to different publications, including Afterall, Cabinet, Dot Dot Dot, Flash Art and frieze. She is a visiting tutor at the Ruskin School of Drawing & Fine Art, University of Oxford, and in 2009 and 2010 assisted with the programming of the Experimenta section of the London Film Festival.