Creador de dueños (The Creator of Owners)

Off Limits, Madrid. April-June 2008.

Artists: Laibach, PSJM, Juan Pérez Aguirregoikoa, Andreja Kuluncic, Karmelo Bermejo, Noaz, Daños Colaterales, Daniel Villegas y Antonio Ballester.

Laibach. “Life is Life”

One of the great leading motors in society is consumption. Consumption that, beyond the logic of the need, has acquired a primary simbolic function. Within the planned harassment of our individual and collective imaginery, The Great Stories of Modernism, their great projects, have been moved by a great amount of short stories, the stories that are given to us by the consummerist-advertising machine… the failure of utopias has been replaced by the daily seduction of the goods offered on the open market.

The capitalist logic has entered all areas of collective experience (both exceptional -rites of passage, celebrations…- as the everyday) monopolizing the simbolic exchange networks that give forcé to a community. In its expansion process it also has appropriated the scope of privacy, it is increasingly dependent on the technological means connected, dependent on big multinationals that monitor and guide our consumption. Therefore, the traditional moulds where life experiences were re-elaborated (family, education, city, political parties…) have come into crisis.

In a recent advertising campaign, the Argentine subsidiary of the Mother agency, created a slogan for a new product of the Mortgage Bank: “Creador de Dueños” (“The Creator of Owners”). It is clear that in a society where we do believe that we are all “Dueños” (“Owners”) there’s little space left to think about other forms of cohabitation and organization. Another Bank, in this case Spanish, Santander, offered mortgages to forty years with the aesthetic and promise of “La Revolución” (“The Revolution”).

Individualism is a main feature in our society. From it comes freedom, the perception of the Ego, the need to be different… but it also leads to the “rat race” which Bertram Gross spoke about, to refer to the gradual dismantling of the civil contemporary society.

Contemporary Art is often presented, using a metaphore of war, as an area of resistance to the colonization of images, the new regime of fiction, which now affects social life, polluting, penetrating it to the point of making us doubt about it, it’s reality, it’s sense and the categories that constitute and define it. But its effectiveness rather than transforming (definitely have to be a cynic to believe in it) can only establish the boundaries of these symptoms, using in this case a medical metaphore. The impotence of symbolization at the moment of mediatic globalization matches the medical metaphore with the warrior one. It means that the enemy is within us. Our disease is autoimmune, ours is an internal war.