Anti-Social Handbooks
How to Subvert the System
In a clear reversal of Oscar Wilde’s maxim that ‘all art is quite useless’, the four artists’ books published by Book Works under the umbrella title ‘access/excess’(all books 2000), and curated by Stefan Kalmar, take the form of instruction manuals for monitoring contemporary control systems.
Doug Aitken’s Diamond Sea, for example, is a photographic record of his infiltration of Diamond Areas 1 and 2 - the world’s richest diamond mine - along the coastline of the Namibian desert. Janice Kerbel’s 15 Lombard Street is a master-plan of how to rob a particular bank in the City of London, complete with details of CCTV surveillance blind spots and money transportation. Angela Bulloch presents Rule Book, a selection of social regulations - from Birkenstock Care Tips to The Standing Order of The House of Commons - while Nils Norman, in The Contemporary Picturesque, responds to the security and defence measures in modern architecture - surface studs, rubbish cages and anti-poster surfaces - with the ‘vernacular architecture of protest culture’: barricades, earth bunkers and tree houses.
Surveying the contemporary culture of surveillance, the ‘access/excess’ project suggests that if the looping tangle of social control systems can no longer be avoided, it can at least be played at its own game.
Michael Bracewell
frieze is now accepting letters to the editors for possible publication at editors@frieze.com.
