OPEN SPACE

……………………………………………………………"That bottle keeps its blink on its side red from horizon." Clark Coolidge………………………………..

First there’s a booth devised by Paris collective Société Réaliste, in which a lottery is played, and you can become a member of the European Economic Union, the so called “Common Market” of the Keynesian 1950s. Sounds cool doesn’t it? It takes awhile before the knowing signage reveals that it is actually a parody of existing scams in which some South and Central American subjects are tricked into signing up for an American lottery. Laura Mott points out in her statement that we grow up surrounded by “pretense and deceit,” something children know instinctively, as evidenced by the L Frank Baum novel The Wizard of Oz, or perhaps more vividly the 1939 Victor Fleming movie of Oz with Judy Garland. Or are children as easily deceived as the rest of us? Isn’t it Toto who keeps pulling at the curtain to reveal the great and powerful Oz no more than an ordinary man like everyone else.  It’s not a person, it’s a dog.

Later we debated whether or not Baum’s narrative (Toto showing the human face of evil, and thus vanquishing it by bringing it to our level, making it capable of being fought) was a progressive gesture or just the opposite. It would be pretty to think that, if our tyrants are human, like George Bush with his goofy grin, that makes them assailable but in truth it doesn’t, since the machine that empowers them rolls on invisible. They should have called the show “The Curtain behind the Curtain.”

The film and novel on display, created by Swedish provocateurs Goldin+Senneby, raise the spectre of offshore corporations and their tax-dodging schemes to siphon off profit into the hands of ma mysterious few. The artists brief a team of Canadian filmmakers to target one firm for investigation, the mysterious Headless, Ltd. If you buy a copy of the accompanying novel, Looking for Headless by “K.D.” you will encounter a breezy spy thriller with some aspects of Ian Fleming and some of Alain Robbe-Grillet. How much do the shadowy owners of Headless Ltd know of Georges Bataille and his secret society known as Äcephale (the Headless)? The film isn’t saying, but like the novel it suggests that the medieval historian Ernst Kantorowicz, with his magisterial reading of the “King’s Two Bodies,” was also in on the joke—at any rate fully aware of the 20th century trend towards strategies of withdrawal and substitution. If the medieval subject saw his king in two different ways, as a human and as a symbol, and each version with a different body, how far are we from Baudrillard’s insight that the copy precedes the original?

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