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FRESH KUNST.EE 1/2024 OUT NOW!

 

A Hot Dog That Dresses Itself with Ketchup

Hanno Soans (4/2015)

Hanno Soans visits “Prosu(u)mer”, the centrepiece of this year’s “Tallinn Photomonth”.


18. IX–18. X 2015
Contemporary Art Museum Estonia (EKKM)
Participants: Andrea Büttner, Amy Cuddy, Daugavpils Mark Rothko Art Centre, David Raymond Conroy, Hank Herron, Luka Knežević-Strika, Gil Leung, Cayce Pollard, James Richards, Buzz Rickson's, Rockstar Games & Karl Smith, Rundum, Liina Siib, Philippe Thomas, Kohei Yoshiyuki.
Curator: David Raymond Conroy.

 

The term "prosumer" was coined as early as 1980 by the California-based futurist Alvin Toffler to describe a "pro-active consumer" simultaneously involved in both the manufacture and consumption of products. Toffler wrote on the relationship between the digital communication revolution and society. Dividing social development into three waves, he referred to the agricultural revolution, the industrial revolution and, starting from the 1950s in leading industrial countries, the transition to a post-industrial society. The latter involves the diversification of mass production, the knowledge-based economy and the acceleration of change. His main interest still lies with the innovations that take place in society in order to generate added value.

The "consumer" part, which provides the stem for the term "prosumer", is unequivocal, but what complicates things is the prefix "pro-", which can be read as a reference to professionalism, productivity or pro-activity. The situation is not helped by the fact that the concept is ideologically loaded. Originally, there is even a utopian dimension to the concept of the prosumer, one according to which alienation is reduced as the roles of producer and consumer are fused in a post-industrial society. Although, of course, many theorists have subsequently taken issue with this.

To give an example from the theoretical package that accompanies the show, Rob Horning, from whom I have also borrowed the title for this article, voices the manifesto that alienation is in fact deepening, as users constitute both the product and the voluntary work that creates the product in such a way that they are harnessed as the producers of the income earned by social media platforms, and their leisure time, too, is alienated. With the incorporation of voluntary work and the relativized concept of work, this, however, deals a blow to the uncompromising labour theories of value by Adam Smith and Karl Marx, according to which the real value of a thing is unequivocally determined by the amount of work undertaken to produce it.

 

Labour of love consumption

The simplest example of prosumerism is the way that we use cash machines to replace the work of the bank teller. This links the concept with the theories of Jeremy Rifkin in "The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market Era" (1995). In sociological terms, the concept also seems to tie in with the economic hipsterisation theories of Richard Florida in "The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It's Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life" (2002). And this is where things actually get interesting.

Prosumers become the new consumers, whose market ethics simultaneously make them both the occupants and consumers of market niches. A good example are the social networks Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, which would be meaningless without our ceaseless input, while profit-seeking companies are earning an income on this by means of programmed recognition of our market preferences using algorithms. The users, who see themselves as consumers, at the same time become the product that the company sells, a kind of objectified personal brand. Based on personalised choices, these environments also make algorithmically determined recommendations on what the prosumers should read or know and how they should spend their time. Things get even more complicated with services like NIKEiD, where the shoe producer Nike encourages consumers to design their own footwear to produce models with a certain potential for uniqueness, facilitated by the flexibility of the production line. Or the construction toy producer Lego, who holds competitions to find the best environments built from Lego game consoles, which are then used in production. Here Nike not only conjures up the illusion of the creativity of the consumer and promotes itself as a producer of tailor-made trainers, the consumers themselves – in fact already prosumers in this context – do a large part of the marketing work by manifesting the authenticity of their pair of Nike shoes through their life-style choices on, say, Facebook. They become product and brand advocates through their life-style choices.

Highlighted as a positive aspect in this is the fact that producers no longer have complete control over brands; instead, consumers have a say in the process through bloggers, contributors to online forums and members of social networks. While on the negative side it can be highlighted that it is precisely these large enterprises that in turn have the most resources for influencing such online consumer platforms and anticipating consumer behaviour. In a list of "Ten economic trends of the future" on the website for BDA Consulting, we read under "prosumer" that there is an increasing economic trend of acquiring something unique and participating in its creation.

The term "prosumer" is also quite widely used with a slightly different meaning. For example, to refer to photographic equipment that outperforms consumer grade technology while not quite reaching the professional level, thereby targeting a market segment that shows more awareness than the general consumer and for that reason can be charged more. Artists often fall in the market segment that consumes "prosumer technology". Open-source software initiatives, such as the Linux operating system, which has publicly accessible source code that can be improved by people anywhere in the world, also relate to the concept of the prosumer.

 

Producer or consumer: a tour of the show

Clearly, artists are a peculiar market niche, largely working in paid employment in order to support their artistic work, thereby mixing the roles of producer and consumer to a significant extent. At the same time, they are privileged consumers of the creative output of others, the market segment with the highest awareness for some niche products. Artists often show a heightened awareness in designing their social network profiles, which makes them agents of self-promotion. The fact that the members of the creative class, more than any other, are attracted by the grey areas of creativity is self-evident. When I talked to the artistic director of "Tallinn Photomonth", Kristel Raesaar, about the concept of the prosumer, she responded to my comment that I do not personally know of anyone using the NIKEiD service by saying that she does know some foreign artists who do. This, however, points to nothing more than the fact that these artists are, often unintentionally, a more experimental market segment among the broader creative class – relatively limited in their purchasing potential but an important segment because of their responses, which trend gurus rely on in order to keep a finger on the pulse of consumption.

The physical text for the exhibition begins on the lower floor of EKKM with the video "William Eggleston – Chromes (Volume 2)" (2012) by the Serbian artist Luka Knežević-Strika. In the 11-minute-long video that focuses on a single motif – a homage rather than an independent work in fact – we see a hand leafing through all the pages of the second volume of Eggleston's "Chromes" (2011), revealing to us an impressive and extensive book of photographs, which is almost unobtainable because of its luxury edition format. The text accompanying the work says: "Rather than aiming to create an artwork, Knežević-Strika seeks to use the relative transparency of HD video to share his enjoyment of the work of another photographer, which is mediated by an expensive and not easily obtainable volume." Here it is not only the highly regarded work of William Eggleston that is fetishized, but also another artist's relationship to that work. Knežević-Strika simultaneously acts as a privileged consumer of the work of another artist and a mediator of the work.

The large-format offset printed posters by the German artist Andrea Büttner play with an image library imagined by the artist as accompanying Immanuel Kant's "Kritik der Urteilskraft" (Critique of Judgement, 1790). Entering into a dialogue with the philosopher's work, his "third critique", which discusses among other things aesthetic judgements, the artist has identified image types that Kant could have imagined when writing his theory, and combined these with contemporary images, and with Kant's thought constructs on the agreeable, the beautiful, the sublime and the good projected onto them.

Already intriguing in its own right is the representation of the visual literacy of Kant himself and his clearly indirect knowledge of the key aesthetic codes of the time due to the fact that his experience of art history was inevitably limited to what was offered in a Prussian provincial town. Here, the text regenerated into an image library by Büttner plays both the role of the source material consumed and that of a parallel text. Between the abstractness of Kant's arguments and the concreteness of Büttner's image library, a kind of field of tension forms, which the viewer enters into without ultimate certainty about the extent to which the images are actually related to Kant's world and the extent to which they are projections.

The photographs in Kohei Yoshiyuki's "Untitled. From the Series "The Park"" (1971) came from the artist's accidental contact with the "dogging" subculture in the parks of Tokyo. It began when he literally stumbled on a couple having sex in public in the Chuo park in Shinjuku. The artist spent the next six months getting to know this subculture of sex and voyeurism, in the end also secretly taking pictures. The slightly grainy, silver-gelatine photographs that came from this make us ask to what extent we in turn become voyeurs by looking at the pictures. Also realised here is a reference to the role of all sorts of contemporary web platforms that show amateur sex in a culture of surveillance society and selfies.

The Mark Rothko Art Centre established in Daugavpils in 2007 is a peculiar initiative that sprang from the fact that one of the most important 20th century American painters – Mark Rothko, born Markus Yakovlevich Rotkovich (1903–1970) – happened to be born in the city during the final years of the Russian empire. Housed in the Daugavpils fortress, the centre has produced 41 copies of key works by Rothko. Alongside the copies, six authentic Rothko's are exhibited, original works donated to the centre by Rothko's heirs. What is important at this point is the exceptionally high market value currently enjoyed by Rothko – in May 2012, a 1961 Rothko original sold at Christie's in New York for 86.9 million dollars, which at the time set the new world record in nominal value for a post-war painting. Upon entering the exhibition at EKKM, the first reaction of the better informed visitors will be: "Rothko here, that can't be possible!"

The real intrigue, however, begins moments later when they realise that despite it being a digital print copy of Rothko, and one that is not even on the same scale as the original, it is presented as an auratic, authentic experience of painting. The specially built wall surface, special lighting and humidity control equipment all come across as part of that surreal but very contemporary experience that serves to authenticate this fake encounter. It is even hard to tell which is more important in today's cultural context – the need for the original, which glimmers through the copy in the form of distant knowledge, supported by the art market with its enormously high prices, or the process that artificially authenticates the copy, lending to it part of the glory of the original. Of course, it is interesting to think about what Rothko himself would have made of all this, living, as he did, in an unshakeable belief in the unique authenticity of his paintings. I doubt that he would have understood the cunning smile on the curator's face when introducing this curious exhibit.

 

 

The Mark Rothko Art Centre
Untitled (Red, Orange)
1968/2007
reproduction on canvas, 172 x 130 cm
Exhibition view at EKKM,
photo by Tõnu Tunnel
Courtesy of Daugavpils Mark Rothko Art Centre

 

 

The video "Radio at Night" (2015) by the English artist James Richards, a 2014 Turner Prize nominee, points to the fact that artists often create their work in dialogue with other artists while being their privileged consumers and re-presenters of their aesthetic code. The video was made this spring when the Walker Art Center commissioned from him a work in dialogue with someone from their collection. Richards chose as his dialogue partner Derek Jarman, whose experimental films show an interest in the effects of collage, fragmentation and painterly sensitivity. In my mind, however, this poetic piece of video art only enjoys a very indirect connection with the concept of the prosumer, which after all extends to economic sociology.

The presence of any direct connection with the concept of the prosumer, a concept that transforms the relationship between work and consumption, is also questionable with Gil Leung, who practices post-minimalist installation and whose "Vessels & Tools_wrapper" (2015) consists of an empty display case that only illuminates itself, emits the background sounds of a church organ being tuned, and presents a fictional text that offers a fragmented description of a trip to Paris. It is as if these separate fragments kindly allowed each other to co-exist, at times chiming in with one another and in their dislocated way raising in the viewer more general questions about the relationship between representation and illusion.

One of the more philosophically intriguing exhibits (an artefact rather than a work of art, in fact) is attributed to the fictitious character Cayce Pollard, who relates to a character in William Gibson's "Pattern Recognition" (2003). In the novel, Pollard is a marketing consultant characterised by her avoidance of brand logos and fashion trends in clothing. The compelling quality of the character and the uncompromising minimalism manifested by her have created a broad fan base in the real world, which in turn has inspired the clothes producer Buzz Rickson to design logo-free items based on the practical designs of military clothing. "Who should be attributed with authorship when we are exhibiting the products from a production line based on the fictitious Cayce Pollard?" the curator asks in the video presentation recorded for the exhibition.

The Estonian artist Liina Siib shows a video work on two screens, a clever enquiry into the processes of work and production today and in the commune culture of the 1960s. To be more precise, she has combined the visual imagery depicting a mineral water plant on the island of Sylt in Germany with the free inspiration-based music of the krautrock pioneer Amon Düül II. An automated production process where the human being is reduced to an insignificant instrument is contrasted with a legend according to which a band that sprang from a political art commune in West Germany in the 1960s was established in order to fund the commune and incorporated all its members, including those who lacked any experience of or skill for making music. Consequently, Siib simultaneously evokes two conflicting concepts of work – one based on automation and the other on creative freedom.

The Rundum artist-run space has been incorporated by the curator in a rather intriguing way, as if lending Rundum artists the exhibition space and then allowing them to use it freely within the framework of the exhibition in order to promote their own project, creating a physical parallel with the way a social media platform offers its framework to users for uploading content. Rundum have connected this space in EKKM with an installation in an abandoned police building nearby on the premises of the Port of Tallinn at 15 Lootsi Street. Exhibition visitors were left with the knowledge that by entering the Rundum project space they set off an artwork somewhere else about a kilometre away – a light installation that looks like a kind of detached beacon as the evening light fades.

The only other work in the room allocated to Rundum was a poster that was part of a project by the French artist Philippe Thomas. In a 1990 exhibition in Paris, "Art & Publicité", that addressed the relationship between art and advertising, the artist organised an international poster competition for public relations agencies entitled "Readymades belong to everyone", reversing the traditional roles of artist and ad maker. The poster, rather nondescript in itself, was used as an advertisement in the public space.

Karl "Illsnapmatix" Smith is a figure who, among many other things, has taken a photograph of a homeless community under a railway platform at a station called Strawberry, ending up with a picture that captures a lonely man raising a bottle to his mouth in the background. It is a photograph of life on the margins of society; it is not real, however. Smith is not a photographer in the ordinary sense and these are no ordinary pictures. The photograph was taken by his avatar in the computer game Grand Theft Auto by Rockstar Games – a game known for its depiction of open environments. In reality, these pictures, then, are nothing other than in-game screenshots. But as increasingly complicated games become virtual worlds in their own right, a question arises about the status of this type of image.

An extremely popular conference video from YouTube is also included, where someone by the name of Amy Cuddy describes body language, associating the use of certain poses with self-confidence. Cuddy, then, offers a recipe for success along the lines of fake-it-till-you-believe-it, or in other words, practising certain postures, she claims, is enough to achieve self-confidence. The video ties in with the concept of the prosumer in the sense that re-interpretation of oneself and self-invention are also important when it comes to the prosumer.

In the inclined space with the ramp, often used for showing video work, this time we find a painting, "Study for Getty Tomb" (1973/2015), by the fictitious American artist Hank Harron. What the legendary Harron practices is the falsification of the history of appropriation art, claiming that an artist has existed who, throughout his career, created copies of the paintings of Frank Stella. So what is the nature of the object that we consume in this case; is it merely an imitation of Stella or some kind of mystification revolving around copyright as is usually the case with appropriation art? Or is Harron, as a piece of fiction, rather a parody of the artistic strategies of appropriation and imitation, reducing these to an inevitable part of the postmodern consumption of culture? At any rate, the curator appears to be fascinated with questions about the status of original artefacts and their derivatives in contemporary art.

 

The future has arrived

In summary, it seems that in addition to playing out the concept of the prosumer, the show aims to emphasise the way fetishized cult products are acquiring the kind of auratic quality that was classically confined to works of art, while the latter themselves are losing it. The space between production and consumption, which underlies the concept of the prosumer, is, especially in virtual culture, related to a new type of creativity and identity creation where new strategies of authentication that are alienated from corporeality and materiality apply. In regard to the concept of the prosumer, it is like a hot dog that is preparing itself for being eaten. While William Gibson coined the oft-cited thought that "the future has arrived – it's just not evenly distributed yet", this exhibition seems to paraphrase his statement: the future has arrived, but whether we recognise it or not is another matter. The exhibition package seems to make this recognition possible.

 

Hanno Soans is a freelance curator, art historian and critic, who lives and works in Tallinn.

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