Group exhibition
I have to admit that some things about the Possessive Excessive exhibition trigger me. One, quite superficial and personal, is the fact that I have been working in a gallery for several months with an entrance through a gift shop festooned with clothes (merchandise) which cannot be purchased. This is not an artistic intention; it is an unwanted arrangement due to clerical inaction. Thus, it pleases me even more to observe Mildeová’s installation subverting the concept of the brick-and-mortar shop and (its) exhibition possibilities from all sides.
Mildeová creates a designer simulacrum of a clothing store tailored to the space in Pragovka. Her installation is a mental reflection of the insistent need for a constant supply of dopamine through various channels. She plays with the metal tubes of prefabricated yet custom-built hangers, arranging fast fashion pieces for cheap queens and kings in a bizarrely high-end art style. Her focus is not on specific fashion clothes, but on a system, a design shaping our desires.
She is motivated not so much by her own shopaholism, nor by a trauma mediated by me, but by a similarly strong obsession with composing her own (micro)worlds, with implied internal mechanisms of finding oneself and getting lost in them. The volumes, the details, and the very content of Milde’s shop installation accumulated in the exhibition area under the pressure of an addictive wave, an irrepressible tide of hard-to-control desire. A desire not so much for possession in the sense of owning something specific, but for the infinite possibilities of having everything (and, in fact, nothing) immediately. Not to arrive at its release, but instead to practice our habitual pursuit of the next wave of dopamine while we seek a stylish release from our neuroses and torments.
Design, which Mildeová graduated from, is a system which co-creates our vision and behavior, which fascinates her—her way of denying the clean utilitarianism and emphasizing the (co)influence of design on our psyche through playing with sculptural elements in their borderline or somewhat comical form. You can usually read subversive pop culture (and quite satirical or dark) references in the details of Milde’s installations which are in sharp contrast to the initial bubblegum impression. However, other man-made artificial situations and environments inspire her too, for example, the gaming world or reality shows, which, like a collection of designer pieces, are a collection of aspirations for money, fame, and status.
Michal Golák, on the other hand, observes different social and eco-systems from Mildeová. He does so from a distance, from the position of an insider observer and a resident of an urban periphery, the town of Rovinka near the Slovak capital, Bratislava. He listens to these systems, collects their fragments, and amplifies their claims to living space. The placement of an oil refinery surrounded by satellite towns—as close to human dwellings as Bratislava is—is a consequence of the bizarre city expansion and the strange adaptability of its inhabitants who yearn for normality (a house with a tree) against the backdrop of several meters of flames shooting out of huge burners. I perceived these burners peripherally, yet quite intensely as a resident of a more distant part of the city, as an ever-present threat and a sign that everything was running like an (atomic) clock.
The hybrid landscape emerging in the uninhabitable immediate surroundings through the symbiosis of ordinary vegetation and the waste of human (in)activity creates a territory of vague terrain out of sight, a place of temporarily lost potential but all the more freedom from the defined omnipresent pressure of productivity and growth. The imaginary flag of Golák’s vague terrain and the flagship of his authorial poetics would be a translucent plastic bag caught in the crown of a tree, billowing as if on a flagpole in the onslaught of a warm breeze containing chemical admixtures.
Golák works with sculptural shapes and forms in their rudimentary, no-frills way. The dirty minimalism of the forms in his installations is enlivened by a similar fascination with material, but with a different sense of the aesthetic of excess from Mildeová, the glitter princess. In this instance, the rubble of plastic leftover from factories is both the sad confetti of the oil industry and the basic building unit of his post-industrial landscape version. The hunter’s seat and/or the arbiter’s chair, in turn, becomes a metaphor not only for the ubiquitous (online and offline) surveillance, but also for the change of perspective, the need for distance. But is it even still possible? Microplastics have already made their way into our lungs and brains, just as several-seconds-long clips have into our ability to focus. What is the relief of your hybrid mental landscape? What lurks in its recesses?
The moving parts of Golák’s installation are a relatively quiet but persistent quasi-noise soundtrack combining the two installations made of metal structures, artificial fibers, and plastic pellets into an inexhaustible symphony of overproduction and boundless consumption. Both artists’ approaches underline the bulging excesses of contemporary society to what pushes itself to the surface from beneath the perfect facade of bastardized global versions of capitalism. They are fueled by the exploitation of the attention economy and the exploitation of natural resources, the commodification of our mental world and… still untapped oil reserves.
The name “Possessive Excessive” refers not only to the surplus of seemingly cheap things or experiences which we crave and which are meant for immediate consumption. Possessive Excessive is above all a playful response to the hard-to-degrade materials and neurotic feelings that we have all become accustomed to in our own way, even though they are actually disturbingly new (recent) and linked to the expansive activities of the human species. Possessive Excessive builds on the spindly legs of mannequin-faced capitalism, on a mountain of heavily recyclable plastics and shopping dopamine, and on a post-communist socialist-building passion for everything which we lack neither in the center nor the periphery. We are open!