Melanchotopia
Last of The Mobile Hot shots
Melanchotopia, Witte de Witt (2011)
This work highlights the ambiguous and shifting fictions surrounding mass-produced objects. Fictions that in our times are contested both in respect of their existence and possible autonomy and in relation to variations in modes of economical exchange. The piece explores the poetics of objects, those vague moments when the being in the world of objects transform. On the one hand the piece rehearse the object as object - as an autonomous existence independent of human verification (correlationism) – and on the other looks into the differentiation of how objects participate in our present economical reality, where a shift can be experienced diminishing the importance of accumulation of goods in favor of rent and rentability, a shift that puts the very project of modernity out of balance.
In the specific context of cinema the object gains yet another layer of fiction, sliding in and out between the superfluous world of cinema, the tangible and the experienced, this poses questions to the ontology of cinema as object and experience as well as to the object in cinema in respect of image production.
The piece could be said to operate in the crack, nor on the surface or in depth but in the breaking point where the objects autonomy can be understood both as a threat and a way out of our present predicament - concerned with issues such as climate change, corruption, mediation and the understanding of “rights”, yet objects doesn’t necessarily care for humans and doesn’t bother about peak oil. Can a different understanding of objects offer us new perspective of the world and what is important to our lives?
The western world has through out modernity consolidated an understanding of objects connected with strong models of ownership, commodity and exchange value. Historically the accumulation of material value has been constitutive to our society. Over the last 20 – 30 years however we have experienced a fundamental change where what constitute our lives and social relations is rent and the ability to rent and produce rentability. In other words Western society today is concerned with accumulation constituted around abstract circulation of value. In this respect the object can be said to have lost its primacy and is now just an appendix to a society organized through “pure” management. What is circulated is value as such, and it is the circulation “as such” that is the very center.
Artistic production is intimately connected to general modes of production and circulation, when modes of production change the understanding of art must also transform. This work reflects or perhaps even anticipates the transformation, of what status the object can have in an exhibition, especially in connection to a state/city supported museum/kunsthalle. Hence this work emphasizing the movement or circulation of objects not their status and/or location.