A Caveat

by Andreas Schlaegel

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The term „interior design“ may have a distinctive ring to it, especially in a Scandinavian context. But here it is used not to reflect on elegant furniture and home improvement, but rather on the design of something even more intimate, the furnishing or mental make-up of the self.

Let’s first take a step back: what in this pamphlet appears as a rather disparate group of works, may be more poignant in the exhibition it shares its title with - there every work has its own compartment, like every work here has its own page. This strategy of compart-mentalization is at the center of this project.

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In psychology the word compartmentalization address-es an often subconscious defense mechanism, em-ployed by the individual to „avoid cognitive dissonance or the mental discomfort and anxiety caused by a per-son’s having conflicting values, cognitions, emotions, beliefs, etc. within themselves. Compartmentalization allows these conflicting ideas to co-exist by inhibiting

direct or explicit acknowledgement….“ (Wikipedia)

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This publication spans unfinished works from the last fifteen years, only fairly recently brought to a close. Even if the individual works don’t contradict each other, they do reflect a wide and sometimes con-flicting palette of artist’s mindsets: sceptic, euphoric and prone to flights of fantasy, with inevitable -crash landings, moments of depression as much as  self-de-lusional instances of grandeur…

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In the exhibition the viewer sees the work while pro-gressing though the succession of individual compart-ments, as a sequence of individually staged presenta-tions. As viewers move from one partition to another and back, the social component of meeting inside the individual segments, that end up forming a labyrinth, but with no way out. This way you  see the work twice (once for the way in, and for a second time on the way out), which creates the specific social and theatrical character of this exhibition.

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The works also pick on the motif of reflection, such as paintings with attached rear-view mirrors. These add a notion of precariousness to the viewing experience, as if the act of seeing a painting required additional safeguarding. And it probably does: seeing for yourself is never completely safe.

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One could find the works in their individual partitions to be chapters of a larger narrative that plays out ideas of classic self-deceit and contemporary post-truth against the backdrop of the everyday life experience of an artist. The idea of independence of art and artist has contributed significantly to the latter becoming a role-model for self-organized „content-producers“ in this late neoliberal society, with its constant focus on individual strength and self-improvement. It doesn’t help ideas of solidarity.

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But what is the alternative? The „democratic sculp-tures“ sculptures consist nearly entirely of chewing gum, the artist only supplies a small impromptu sup-port structure and plenty of chewing gum, and leaves it to the audience to shape the work. While it is easy to enjoy the  free gum, it literally becomes a sticky (and surprisingly sensual) subject to publicly stick your gum to the gums already on the structure, often still soft and with traces of saliva. Form is the actual challenge this piece presents, even if the process follows the classic sculptural technique. Without a vision the work of many ends up as merely a grungy lump of chewed gum - or is it a sculpture?

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The absurdist humor of the works presented here only thinly veils a more serious concern at the basis of this artistic endeavor: the effect of the irrationalist turn in global politics on the individual. It can hardly be disput-ed that a decade of post-truth politics have left a mark on everybody. The populist tactic of dominating the discourse by appealing entirely to emotions, to control public political discourse, encourages a well-estab-lished psychological pattern: a prevailing willingness for self-deception.

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A century of „scientific management“ or Taylorism, with management focussing on increasing productivity by avoiding everything seemingly superfluous, has successfully reframed populaces as individual prosum-ers. Today, social networks, operated with personal devices, has produced filter-bubble compartments, thereby contributing to making the manipulation of the rationalization process so effective, that everyone is now staging themselves as their own optimized ver-sions, factually producing individual post-truths.

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By definition self-deceivers intentionally convince themselves to hold a belief they know to be false. This process of „rationalization“, of twisting reality to com-pliment an existing mindset, rather than understanding an existing reality, is influenced by personal biasses, fear, socialization and cognitive repression. That these powerful emotions can be exploited so successfully, require to scrutinize the design, if not very nature of the individual, the „self“ itself.

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Psychology suggests that knowledge of the intention to self-deceive renders the attempt ineffective. Unfor-tunately the work on display here won’t help with this. Rather, when the artist revisited pieces begun in differ-ent times, it was by surrendering to the superfluous, the wayward and absurd, that enabled him to finish the work, and be it only in snippets, trinkets, models - and unpredictable personal encounters. For these artworks to eventually become components of interior designs themselves, they need to give pleasure, not to deceive, but to convince.

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