SYNOPSIS BY RICHARD JOHN JONES: I will never forget some of the most luxurious houses that I visited in Mexico City while I was participating in an 'experimental school' whose art-world A-list tutors attracted a selection of Latin America's superstar collectors, patrons and artists. My journey began at the owners of Taco-Inn's Modernist villa replete with Hirschorns, Warhols, Naumanns, Durhams, Tiravanijas etc etc through to the Jumex collection, deemed the most powerful and influential, a veritable art monopoly funded from a Latin fruit Juice monopoly with the same name, and concluded (when myself and my fellow participants decided that the fairy-tale was well and truly over) with the proudly displayed Nazi memorabilia at a house of an Art Patron who was related in some way to the tainted bread brand Bimbo.
Quite naively I was shocked by the world of the Hooray HeNWIs (this is the charming acronym for the High Net Wealth Individuals - a small community of individuals and families that supposedly own collectively, not counting any non-cash assets, over $40,000,000,000,000). Yet the director of the experimental school was surprised at my breathlessness, as I was the only participant from the UK, and more specifically London, he retorted that there were far more wealthy collectors and far more extravagance to be found in my home town. Mexico City, he suggested, was small fry! In our spare time, the participants and I were entertained at the roof-top bars of the cities finest 'design Hotels' where I was also introduced to a new phrase, living 'part-time'. Many of the people I met, those of which were a step down from the peripatetic lifestyles of those who reside in Tax exile, lived in Mexico City for half the year and in Europe for the rest, in search of perpetual summer. A nice idea, and an excellent way of tapping into two art markets.
Back in London I still haven't visited any collector's houses, and nothing will quite beat what I was able to access in Mexico City. But perhaps this is the next best thing (please note my cynicism), not the house of a collector, but the opportunity to show work in the house of an artist who has done very well from the market, Martin Creed. Who better to confront or wonder at the location than Rachel Pimm. An artist for whom the home as a space of dream-fulfilment and aspiration as key factors in our understanding of the rituals and fictions of our lived urban reality are a central issue.
How better to frame all this than by the curator, Katie Guggenheim, for whom a name change suggests more than just a conceptual interest in the performative roles we play in the distribution of contemporary art but also a desire or admiration of excess and the erotics of exchange. Guggenheim's rules for the show were that the artist could choose any feature length film the duration of which would dictate the length of the art show. The film would be split, the image being projected in one room, the sound in another. Rachel Pimm chose The Truman Show. There were seven shows, one of which was mine, but The Truman Show stood out as one of the most mainstream productions, in fact, it was the only film that week other than the one I chose, that I had seen before. There are not many people who haven't seen The Truman Show. This is a mainstay in the pop-culture canon of faux-philosophical conspiracy movies, if you haven't seen it, I advise you to watch this, and The Matrix, and to get out more! The work seemed characteristically kitsch, a video of some cute kittens in the sound room, and some holiday brochure images of sunsets and idyllic twilight vistas of unspoiled landscapes and endless calm blue oceans in the film room. In the kitchen cheap Pink Champagne was served in disposable plastic flutes that were neatly stacked in this immaculately tasteful art-flat.
The holiday images were the view's from Creed's second home, a veritable part-timer, there was a sardonic tinge to the juxtaposition of the actual view from the windows of the flat onto the drab Brick Lane, to these new windows, stuck with wallpaper paste to the wall with images of a 2D paradise. This coupled with The Truman Show made even more grim parallels especially at the symbolic moment when Truman pierces the sky mural on the wall of his enclosure, foiling his reality. The black hole that is left is as grotesque as the Swastikas on the mantelpiece of the home in Mexico City, that even though they are on the other side of the world, and in London too no doubt, they are only ever thinly veiled by the fake veneer that money allows one to construct.
One thing I had forgotten about The Truman Show was the central drive for Truman to break out of his prison, it takes the lust for a woman for him to realise the theatre of his own existence. This is the drive for the movie, although in its bland conservatism it is presented as 'true love'. Perhaps the most poignant moment is when Truman pulls out a collage of images that come together to resemble this woman. This cannot be 'true love' this is pure lust, and also pure lust for an image, an unreality, a representation. Sound familiar? I’m sure it's something that our HeNWIs can tell us all about, the most widely distributed thing in the world that is completely empty to its core yet totally symbolic is, of course, money. So I couldn't help but pick up on a moral message in Rachel Pimm's show, the parallels were too great to miss. However, I hope sincerely that Pimm and Guggenheim do not mistake the lust for 'true love', like Truman rejecting his false reality in the pursuit of something as empty as a magazine image, there is an excessively gloomy undertone to this film/show. Game playing goes only so far. When you show in Martin Creed's flat, with his overly sincere permanent installation of the lights going on and off, it is important to keep hold of the knowledge that there is nothing decent to be found in a world as fake as Truman's, just endless fragile tricks, and the movie is wrong, the libidinal drive is not emancipatory, it is the route of the crisis.
