This Unfortunate Thing Between Us-- in NYC
Newsweek 24 Sept. 2013 by
Blake Gopnik
The
only problem with the latest installation by the great Berlin-based
artist Phil Collins is that it doesn’t come with an amazing Ginsu knife;
it hasn’t got any “buy two get one free” deals; you don’t get a bonus
zirconium ring, even if you call before 9 o’clock. Other than that,
Collins’s take on home-shopping TV, recently unveiled at the
Tanya
Bonakdar Gallery in New York, is
as gripping and strange as anything on
offer in this autumn’s new season of art.
This Unfortunate Thing Between Us, consists of two camping
trailers—what Collins and his fellow Brits call caravans—rolled into the
gallery and kitted out with all the pleasures of an English vacation.
They come with a supply of “crisps,” lime cordial, and, most especially,
a flat-screen TV to while away rainy days by the British seaside.
Gallery-goers are invited to curl up and watch the custom programming
Collins has prepared.
One of the caravans screens the first
night’s hour-long program; the other presents the next day’s broadcast,
during which three regular Germans take their place in one of the three
experiences.
Over two nights in 2011, on primetime in Germany,
Collins broadcast TUTBU TV,
a custom-made shopping channel that had all
the trappings of a normal one—fast-talking host, slim spokesmodel, a
bank of telephone operators—except that what it sold was utterly
original. As our sleek host puts it in the subtitled video of the
broadcast screening in the caravans, “With the endless electric
blankets, gardening tools, upholstery cleaners, and fake jewelry, one
need of customers has sunk into the background:
the need for
experiences.”
That is,
instead of selling consumer goods, TUTBU TV
offered viewers a chance to participate in one of three experiences
that the host claims to be Germans’ favorite fantasies:
“Interrogation!
Porno! Death!”
For the “low, low price of just 9.99 euros” you can buy
the chance to be grilled by actors
- dressed as Stasi agents (“Reach for
your phone now!”),
- to perform in a costume-drama porn flick, or
- to wake
from a coma and berate the neglectful relatives standing by your
deathbed.
Collins’s take on home-shopping TV is gripping and strange.
One
of the caravans at Bonakdar screens the first night’s hourlong program,
during which t
he three experiences are “sold” to the television
audience. Actors do trial runs of the interrogation, the porn (a
foursome), and the hospital scene, w
hile a bank of operators takes
customers’ calls.
Collins’s other caravan presents
the next day’s
broadcast, during which three regular Germans, chosen by Collins from
among the hundreds who’ve called in, take their place in the same three
fantasies.
- Gerd Radeke, a middle-aged man from Bremen, gets a grilling
from the Stasi about his first love affairs and almost breaks down.
- A
bearded youth from Berlin (“I’ve always wanted to know how people had
sex in earlier times”) chooses to play the part of a bewigged Jane
Austen maid who pleasures her mistress while a strapping stable boy and a
redcoat have sex nearby.
- An elderly Berliner named Klaus Funke tells
his assembled family—most are actors, but a few are clearly relatives,
weeping real tears—what jerks they have been.
Klaus Funke berates his assembled family—most are actors, but a few are clearly relatives, weeping real tears—from his deathbed.
One
of the standard lines about art is that
it’s less about the objects
artists make than the experiences those objects provide and what they
mean to their viewers. Collins seems to have taken that cliché at face
value. His latest artwork seems like pure experience, divorced from
consumable aesthetic goods. It’s also guaranteed to mean something to
its viewers—in this case, those who’ve bought said experiences and the
wider audience witnessing them.
But offering up experiences rather than
objects doesn’t pull art out of the world of consumption, and I think
that’s part of Collins’s point. As our smarmy host peddles his goods, we
have to figure that he’s supposed to stand for an artist—even for
Collins himself. And
there’s no doubt we’re in the presence of art,
rather than of straight commerce or entertainment, because Collins
inserts so much artsy weirdness into the broadcast: fright wigs, goth
makeup, other avant-garde details worthy of Mike Myers’s “Sprockets”
routines. “Let’s find out together what teleshopping can do,” is TUTBU’s
tagline, as though it’s exploring a new art medium, the way abstract
painters were once told to explore the limits of acrylics.
So even
as we art-world sophisticates enjoy the wit and circularity involved in
Collins’s gallery installation, we are forced to recognize that we are
no better than, or much different from, a couch potato in a cheap
trailer, teleshopping for a garden hose.
