Karriere Bar

Logging onto the Karriere Bar’s website and clicking the link ‘i’m a voyeur baby’, fragments of real-time conversations and ambient sound enter my study, picked up from an ashtray-shaped microphone on a table at the Copenhagen venue. This bar/home interface is the work of Janet Cardiff & Georges Bures Miller, one of the 32 artworks showing at Danish artist Jeppe Hein’s newly-opened bar and restaurant in Copenhagen (promising ‘contemporary art & social life’), co-run with his sister Lærke.

The Internet affords a kind of convivial voyeurism that is sometimes more appealing than being at the bar itself. Opening night at Karriere was so crowded that the only works to be seen were Olafur Eliasson’s gigantic prismatic lamps hanging above the bar. Outside with the smokers is Dan Graham’s Dividing Wall, where a double-mirrored glass creates confusing reflections. As the free drinks finally ran out and the credit card machine broke, some space gradually started to appear between the guests and parts of the building could be made out. Listed as a cultural inheritance, little has been changed and, situated in an old slaughterhouse, the sparseness is quite charming.

Jeppe Hein’s 2007 installation Illusion in New York

Hein has invited artist friends (whose practice tends to the relational) to create works that react to the barroom environment. Even with a full bladder it was fun getting lost in AVPD’s labyrinth of toilet doors, while every inch of wall-space in the ladies’ loo has been tagged with a black marker by Gardar Eide Einarsson, and Hein’s own contribution, an extremely slowly revolving bar that mixes up drink orders, certainly gets people talking. Ceal Floyer has picked up on the old trick of using a well-placed beer mat to correct an uneven table, only multiplying it by four, ensuring that every table leg in the bar have got its own mat. If this conspicuous consumption leaves you with a bad conscience, Alicia Framis has asked that for every beer sold 7% of the price gets put back into the local community.

The problem with all of this is that, after a few drinks, you try to start analyzing just where you have ended up: is this a commercial venture with a novelty twist or a noble experiment in integrating art with life? Or is Karriere a final – and fitting – resting place for the legacy of relational aesthetics?