DECEPTION. i-DESIRE. RADICAL OPTIMISM
Apparatus 22 – art collective
Text by Mihaela Varzari
to be published by Hatje Cantz
Distinctly eclectic, fractured, non-heterogeneous and multidisciplinary in their approach, Apparatus 22 – a collective comprising artists Maria Farcaș, Erika Olea, Dragoș Olea and the late Ioana Nemeș (1979-2011) – employ a limitless range of everyday materials to create installations, performances, workshops, sculptures, and sound and text-based pieces, as well as interventions in public spaces. Their mishmash of practices and competing visions suggest an affinity with the historic avant-garde, which did not operate with stable barriers between visual art, cinema, music, theatre, costume design or fashion. The group were first brought together in Bucharest by a shared interest in experimental fashion during the early 2000s, before they formed the collective in 2011 as a result of a fortuitous encounter while on an IASPIS residency in Stockholm. In recent years, all its members have lived at different times in Bucharest, Turin and Brussels. With no background in the arts, Apparatus 22 came together motivated by an ethical drive to convey into art their own life experiences as they unfold. Their shared sensibility, informed by critical thinking, places them in the position of the hopeful pessimist, holding to a “radical optimism” (as they label it), which stems from vigilance in the face of the contradictions within an art system immersed in the logic of global late capitalism [i].
Vilem Flusser’s hypothesis on history after photography – that its goal is to become an image – resonates with the text-based works produced by Apparatus 22 for their solo show Several Laws: The Elastic Test in 2016. Writing on media and technology in the 1980s, Flusser seems to have anticipated many tropes of our era, which is dominated at all levels by the rampant acceleration of the internet. It is an era especially associated with fake news, which has arisen since Facebook allowed algorithms to select and publish news on its website in 2017[ii]. Such excessive mechanisms of self-deception specific to twenty-first century cognitive capitalism appear to inform Apparatus 22’s text-based works. Destined to engage with the post-internet era,[iii] they consist of condensed poetic texts, not lacking in wry humor. This series are impregnated by nostalgia for unfulfilled desires, which might be considered projections of the self as mediated by intelligent screens. The texts are tattooed on multi-colored canvases made out of stretched, untreated vellum, whose smell fills the entire exhibition space because animal skin, whilst such a versatile material for fashion in the form of leather, retains its olfactory quality when processed for use as parchment. This material, closely associated with the origins of inscription, places the art object at the intersection of a combative relationship between text and body. In the Marxian mode of wanting to change the world rather than merely interpret it, the collective decided to introduce this series of art works into the intellectual and art market with great care, showing caution as to how the works’ financial potential might affect what they wished to criticize; the collective chose their collectors and did not go for the highest bidder.
Apparatus 22, UNTITLED (5), from SEVERAL LAWS. THE ELASTIC TEST series - exhibition view
object (leather, laser inscription, hand dyed in grey) | 2016 | 100x140 cm; image courtesy of the artists and GALLLERIAPIÙ, Bologna; photo by Stefano Maniero
Positive Tension (in the air) (2012) is a series of five participatory performances that focus on generating conversations with participants. It has since attracted multiple invitations from various cultural institutions across Europe, as well as within Romania itself. In its various permutations this ongoing work includes extensive questions on curating. What could be the biggest pieces of confetti in the world poses questions concerning the role of fashion in consumerism, written on large round multicolored pieces of paper. Thrown in the air in carnivalesque style, the confetti reclaimed for a brief moment the public square of the Museumsquartier in Vienna, for which the performances were initially conceived.
The universal TuTa garment designed
by the artist Thayah 4[i]
formed the basis for the ongoing
project Art is work (2011) 5[ii].
The initial 1919 design resembled a jumpsuit, similar to a worker’s
uniform, whose pattern was made available to all in an attempt to unburden
clothes from their social status by making them open-source. One hundred or so
years later, the same cutting pattern is made available to download by
Apparatus 22, who also manufacture the jumpsuits to be given away to artists
for immediate wear at art openings. In their own words: “the plain uniform,
available to all is an impossible position from which to start thinking about a
new project”. It is an utopian ideal, which generates new attitudes vis-à-vis
creation, production, distribution, reception and consumption, as well as
towards the immaterial labor of late capitalism. Labor conditions are also examined in a quaint way by
engaging with the life of magic, in Morpheus Buyback (2011), an elaborate performance and installation, complete with
music, furs, seating areas, stories, fears, and desires. The inhabitants of
Graz are asked to partake in a gift transaction, specific to archaic tradition,
by retelling their nightmares in exchange for good luck charms, customized on
the spot.
Fashion used as catalyst for reflection and investigation allows Apparatus 22 to delve into a common imaginaire of pre-Christian tradition associated with myths and folklore, which is combined with their outright discontent with the Orthodox Church in Romania, invested as it has been with infinite political influence after the events of 1989. The critique of surplus value as it is produced by the art market maintains the group’s allegiance to utopian ideals, and sustains their particular appeal to political struggle in the related quest to bypass naïve and formulaic anti-capitalist attitudes.
[i] In its variety of instantiations, capitalism produced in Romania after the events of ’89 “nepotistic capitalism”, a self-explanatory term first coined by the former Romanian president Ion Iliescu (1989-1996 and 2000-2004). The Romanian-born writer and political dissident Dumitru Țepeneag (b. 1937), who lives in France, discussed this in his book Capitalism de cumetrie (Nepotistic capitalism) (Iași: Polirom, 2007).
[ii] Philip Mirowski, ‘The “logic” of Fake News’, 27 October 2017. At: http://www.perc.org.uk/project_posts/logic-fake-news-philip-mirowski-28th-october [accessed 1 June 2019].
3 “Post-Internet Art” is a term coined by the German artist Marisa Olson. See: “On the Internet, No One Knows You're a Doghouse” at: https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/post-internet-cities/140712/on-the-internet-no-one-knows-you-re-a-doghouse [accessed 15 May 2019].
4 [i] Thayaht, the alias of Ernesto Michahelles (1893-1959), was an artist and designer and a pioneer of the Italian Futurist movement in the 1920s.
