ill open an open-source restaurant that is completely made of, and only serves food based on the original instructables all the members on instructables.com have made or will make.
I mean, every chair, dishwasher, menucard, light etc. and all the food, will together be the restaurant. And I would like to ask you guys for your brilliant, funny, original ideas concerning all aspects restauranty. Inside the restaurant everything will be presented with the original instruction and accreditation to the maker. I have been involved in several pilot and concept restaurants in the past like Food Facility, a restaurant based on take-out restaurants by Catalonian designer Marti Guixe, and The Micro-Green Restaurant by Debra Solomon of culiblog.org. Both at Mediamatic in Amsterdam, where I was at the time working as an exhibition maker. I would appreciate it so much if you'd get involved in this and share your ideas with me to make it into an incredible creative place for adventurous diners, and maybe the first open source restaurant ever created (but i'm not sure about that and I guess it doesn't really matter anyway). In some restaurants you can buy the stuff you see, in this restaurant you'll go home knowing how to re-create what you just enjoyed, be it the food or the chair you sat on.
If you like it, please join the group about this: http://www.instructables.com/group/instructables-restaurant/
Saturday, August 23, 2008
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
Identity non grata
The Dutchman does not exist.
-Princess Maxima (future queen of the
Consensus has been institutionalised in the
-Mark Kranenburg (journalist)
Until recently the Dutch identity found a strong metaphor in the engine for its latest economic revival, the Polder model. The Polder model is a Dutch-designed system for achieving consensus on economic policies with all parties involved, government, employers and employees. It was about making sure things didn’t get out of control so business could get down to business. The Dutch created their identity out of a pragmatic getting along.
This profitable attitude came to a stop with the killing of politician Pim Fortuyn in 2002 by an animal rights activist. His supporters accused the Dutch government for demonizing their popular leader and thus, indirectly, of being responsible for his murder. Two years later Theo van Gogh was killed by a Muslim extremist for releasing, together with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a controversial film on the position of Islamic women. The consequences to Dutch society are well known: intolerance was increasingly tolerated; society polarized quickly and people mistrusted politics to a level unheard of before. It caused a political crisis in a country where political things had been comfortably boring. So boring actually that Dutch artists never have been very inspired by it. Five years ago, before the tragedies, when asked to reflect on art and Dutch identity I wrote: In a lot of Dutch art the lack of drama seems to bring forth some sort of romantic notion, a fleeing from the scene of the non-crime. There was a tendency to imagine other, more heroic or romantic lives. To say that Dutch art was not the counter-force it is in some nations is an understatement. Paradoxically this meant that once things heated up artists lacked the tools and the stamina to sink their teeth into the matter, even if Theo van Gogh was an artist himself and related to one of the symbols of Dutch art, Vincent van Gogh. As a matter of fact Theo van Gogh was one of the few that could, and would have gone full throttle on an issue like this.
An explanation for the lack of artistic involvement in the national debate following the murders could be that the situation asked for diplomacy and the reinstitution of consensus. It is not arts traditional responsibilities to create consensus and avoid sharp conflicts. Probably more the opposite. But that’s precisely the point. Dutch arts’ moment had passed in the years before, while dreaming of places less ‘boring’. Arts role if any should be to create the transparency in which the abuse of mythological constructions is harder to get away with. In this case the mythological character that the pragmatic Dutch identity had always been.
To speak of a crisis in the identity is to speak of a crisis in pinpointing the dynamics of a certain moment. It is in this moment that myth is often used as a tool to recreate stability, even if in bypassing the reasons for the instability of the moment.
The linguistic confusion this creates between art and politics can be witnessed in the mixed zone of national cultural policies where the artist and the politician use the same words but speak a fundamentally different language. Keywords in Dutch cultural policy are participation, large audiences and low thresholds. It aspires for art what it aspire for politics; democracy based on a common set of values. By setting the agenda quite clearly in favour of projects that are focussed on creating another polder culture Dutch political involvement in culture is copying its own logic, making art a short term political or even mythological tool, not just in pushing an agenda of consensus but even by its inner logic of representation by the few. Consensus, the need for incorporating as many as we can into the identity of the Dutch is, like its economic model, just a way to get down to business, the business of politics. Art represents the opposite of politics. It deals with the individual, and with seeing, with individual seeing, not with identifying with and seeing for. Dutch art, had it been a constructive part of society, could have been a force of consensus, not by looking for it or forcing it like politics do, but by uploading the individual potential for the critical moment when the choice is made between seeing for yourself or letting somebody else do the seeing for you. At the moment there is only one artist-collective that can do the job the way the Dutch government would like: The Royal family. Ironically they are the only Dutch citizens who don’t have freedom of speech. Nobody knows better what it means to struggle for identity.
On a floating BMW
Een paar maanden geleden tijdens de TMF Awards, bij het optreden van de rapgroep Party Squad (we rampeneren op de vloer en het geeft geen ene moer) zweefde er een BMW boven het publiek. De techniek was feilloos. De glimmende natte droom voor pubertjes en papas slalomde aan onzichtbare kettingen geruisloos en vloeiend door de lucht van de Heineken Music Hall. In tijden niet zo’n goed werk gezien: brutaal, fout, grensoverschrijdend, en bovenal volledig transparant. Zo’n ervaring maakt een betere consument van je. Ik kan het alleen maar vergelijken met het speeksel-in-je-mond-werk van Greco, de kitscherige late Matthew Barney of de zon van Olafur Eliasson in de Tate. Waar het object een pseudo-religieuze ervaring tot stand brengt en het kritiekloze innemen een aanvang neemt. De Franse semioticus Roland Barthes heeft ooit een Citroën met een kathedraal vergeleken. In een mooi tekstje dicht hij het auto-object magische krachten toe. Ik heb de neiging de diepere rituele betekenis van spullen voor waar aan te nemen maar als jullie het er niet mee eens zijn hoor ik het graag. Waar Barthes de onaantastbare status van het object door de vieze vingertjes van het publiek laat domesticeren, daar bewaart de BMW een onoverbrugbare afstand. Slim natuurlijk want niet in het aanraken maar in het kijken klampen wij ons aan de dingen vast. Als het met het onderwijs en de kunst nog iets wil worden moeten we het oog eerst eens bevrijden van die glimmende BMW kunst die overal de baas is. Maar dat zal niet eenvoudig zijn. Volgens de filosoof George Bataille is het vastklampen aan de dingen überhaupt de enige manier om mens te kunnen zijn. Zodra wij de veilige functionaliteit van het object vaarwel zeggen, vallen we terug in de chaos. Worden we weer beestjes. Een vliegende BMW als viering van het menszijn.
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