reviews a mySteriouS thinG
Nils NormaN aNd stephaN dillemuth:
a mysterious thiNg
Vilm a Gold, london
7 – 30 Septem ber
If one subject preoccupies the artworld right now,
it’s the art market, and all the money to be made.
It’s the elephant in the room, the laying of golden eggs;
and mixed metaphors aside, there’s just too much
to lose to criticise it. So it’s refreshing to find artists
hitting the subject face on. Nils Norman and Stephan
Dillemuth are no fans of art’s commercialisation, or its
latest identity as a circus of luxury consumption and
speculative investment. A Mysterious Thing presents
new works by the collaborators, who have also curated
a show of work by artists associated with the now-
defunct New York gallery American Fine Arts Co.
Ltd, once strongly hospitable to the critical themes
of art’s commercialisation and its part in the process
of urban and cultural gentrification that Norman and
Dillemuth continue to pursue.
Norman and Dillemuth’s video I’m Short Your
House (2007) mixes satire and hard facts to pick away
at how investment speculators have moved in on art
– the latest ‘asset class’ – plugging loose capital into
art’s trendy cultural bohemianism. The film follows
the route of a tall hunchbacked, blanket-cloaked
character with a false nose, stalking unendingly
through the dark backstreets of the East End gallery
quarter. As a sort of avatar of retribution, the walker’s
progress is voiced-over with conspiratorial mumblings
that collage contemporary quotes from financiers
involved in art market speculation with passages from
Ian Burn’s 1975 essay ‘The Art Market: Affluence
and Degradation’. Burn’s text was a jeremiad against
the way in which artists had, by the mid-1970s,
become subservient to a market-defined idea of
their practice which, Burn contended, suppressed
a more ‘socialised’ consciousness of what art might
do. It still rings partly true, especially when it touches
on the illusory ‘freedom’ that a career in art and its
ideology of the bohemian individual seems to incite:
while the hunchback wends his way, we’re privy to
the inane conversation of a Pinocchio-nosed gallerist
and his artist, counting on their fingers - “blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. See you in Basel!” Norman and Dillemuth’s mockery
is sledgehammer-subtle: gallerist wears trendy trucker cap and goatee, artist wears hooded top, aviators and low-slung jeans
– you’ve seen these assholes before, at whatever art fair you last attended.
Norman and Dillemuth’s polemic is sharpest when it shows how the art market has become the last refuge for risk-shy
investment capital at the most extreme end of disposable liquidity, because the protagonists damn themselves in their own
words. Their mockery of art’s freewheeling entrepreneurs has a rancorous enthusiasm, but if there’s a weakness, it’s that it
doesn’t quite draw out how the lack of social or political engagement today affects the culture of art more than market forces
– bohemian self-delusion isn’t the inevitable consequence of the art market, it only becomes so when artists finally give up on
any alternative (unless one assumes that the market has a totalitarian control over artists, which it doesn’t). Criticisms of the
venal art market are too often a scapegoat for the decline of radical commitments elsewhere. While Norman and Dillemuth
A Mysterious Thing, 2007
(installation view).
have brilliantly hit on the current moral emptiness at the heart of both market and art, their critique, like their hunchback,
Courtesy Vilma Gold,
london is something of a lost prophet, doomed to wander. J.J. Charlesworth
artreview 194
November_REVIEWS.indd 194 26/9/07 13:31:36
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