| SUPERFLEX |
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Bjørnstjerne Christiansen, * 1969 in Copenhagen (DK), Jakob Fenger, * 1968 in Copenhagen, and Rasmus Nielsen, * 1969 in Copenhagen, live and work in Copenhagen
The interactive installation FREE BEER & COUNTER-GAME STRATEGIES / ART WORLD MACHINE is a skill-based game, which is a parody of the art market. One of the players (the “artist”) puts handmade masterpieces (represented by potatoes) into a pipe. The other players (the “collectors”) try to purchase these works symbolically by smashing the potatoes with a hammer. Playfully, SUPERFLEX act out relationships of power and principles of the art world. The cultural product (the potato) becomes the property of the collectors, and is at the same time destroyed. Disregarded, the pieces of potato spread out all over the room rot. FREE BEER & COUNTER-GAME STRATEGIES / ART WORLD MACHINE is part of the Counter-Game Strategies, a series of seven installations, which question and thematically vary the market principles of cultural production, cultural preservation, and perception. The Danish artist collective SUPERFLEX, which was founded in 1993 in Copenhagen, describes its projects as tools, which are designed to contribute actively to changing the prevailing economic methods of production. To this end, the tools they have developed can be used and modified by other groups or people. They call their artistic strategy “social-economic integration”: art as cultural intervention with the goal of supporting alternative economies as well as democratic conditions of production and self-organization. Amongst other things, SUPERFLEX have developed an alternative production method for power generation (Supergas, 1997), an internet TV channel (Superchannel, 1999), and also fairly produced and license-free products (Guarana Power, 2003; Free Beer, 2004). (EA)  FREE BEER & COUNTER-GAME STRATEGIES / ART WORLD MACHINE, 2007 |