PETER GESCHWIND´S PHANTASMAGORIA

Text by Lars-Erik Hjertström Lappalainen

It should look as if the chair were moving through the room. Or rather like a picture of a chair moving through the room, as if the space itself were a movie or as if a movie appeared in space instead of on a surface. A 3-D-movie, but rather based on sculpture and early trick films than on contemporary technology for enhancement of the illusion of depth in motion pictures. The special effects of Georges Méliès' works from the infancy of cinema is often said to have a phantasmagorical quality that permits us to see in them a continuation of what was known as phantasmagoria during the revolutionary years at the end of the 18th century: a particular kind of theater where images of sculls and demons , skeleton and ghosts were projected from mobile projectors onto screens, walls and smoke. I is not impossible that this tradition is brought to life again in this exhibition, with a power to unbind the spectator from space and time – all the while pointing the strangeness of everything out to us, here and now.

When I write this, Peter Geschwind's work does not yet exist. It is only a ghost from the future. There is something of an inverted science-fiction to it. By the somewhat jerky movements of this piece (at least in the test model of it that I saw), the audience finds itself projected to the time when the motion picture was invented. It is like taking part of an imaginary optical technology from back then, a technical isolate which did not have a part in the evolution leading to the motion picture or to any other optical device that has survived. In that sense, an alternative history emanates from this exhibition. - Or is it the other way around? Isn't it the 19th century that repeats itself in this piece in a guise that it could not have had at the time (for technical reasons, although in principle, it could have had it)? It might very well be that this work reactivates a sensibility from the past, but conditioned by later experiences. If that's the case, we could have a science-fiction like experience of our contemporary situation, viewed in the light of, and as, a the past, i.e. we would see it from the point of view of the future, a past future or a future past.

What is it about, this will to three dimensional motion picture? At the beginning of the 19th century, the image (a mental image, for example a perception) was no longer understood as an immediate copy of an object. Immediacy was replaced by a process in time, synthesizing a flux of stimuli into an image. This flux does not only come from the outside: the eye responds to stimuli by creating visual phenomena all by itself. If you for example look at a diptych, white on the one side, magenta on the other and first concentrate on the latter one before switching, then the white side will turn into green. An after-image has appeared and blended into the picture. This means that the image not only has extension in space, but also in time, and that it is not a still image, but a moving one since it transforms itself from being white/magenta to being green/magenta. Thus, it is no longer possible to understand the visible world as an immediate visual transfer from object to subject, but must be regarded as a plane common to both subject and object, to which both of them has contributed. It is a surface constituted by the way subject and object affect each other in the visual, or in the sensible – “a world of affects with the same rank of reality as our drives and affects”, as Nietzsche wrote, calling this world will to power. The visual world is then almost like a film-screen (but three dimensional, at least) where images move and change.

But even though the image concealed a process, the 19th century still considered it as in principle a still. Movement was attributed to bodies out there, in the world, not to the images inside the subject (nor to the ones hanging on a wall). This situation offered two possibilities to connect movement and image. Either, movement was thought to be a secondary phenomena, only existing in between poses. A movement of this kind was possible to recreate through putting several images of similar poses in a row, and show them in a rapid sequence – the invention of moving picture. Or you consider the bodies as images, and then movement become a primary phenomenon, that which is directly given (and this was Henri Bergson's and Nietzsche's solution), as in the transformation of the diptych mentioned above.

Peter Geschwind could be said to use both solutions in order to do something else with them. His image of a chair is a real chair: in that sense, the image is a body. Then he takes multiple chairs, puts them in a row and lets the light travel, from spot to spot, thus giving rise to a sensation of movement, a mental image-movement. Of course, this combination is not optimal if your aim is to create an illusion. But, Geschwind is probably not interested in the most efficient solution, in terms of illusion, but in the relation between appearance and reality. It is a traditional locus for art; the point where appearance and being merge and the appearance manifests its own degree of reality at the same time as reality manifests its degree of fiction. But in Geschwind's work, being and appearence do not relate in quite such a traditional manner. He does not want them to merge. Instead, he wants tocreate a borderland between them, as large as possible, where the proceeding of things is different from the ones of being and of appearance, even though all the functions come from these two realms.

How make the illusory and fictional more real without simulating reality? Decrease its level of perfection. For a long time, perfection was a measure of reality or being. Thus, God was the most real being, the being with the highest degree of reality, since his perfection was the greatest. In arts today, it is almost the opposite: a sense of reality is often communicated by the very lack of perfection in an image (either in terms of composition or of technology). The rhetorical function that poor images have, is that of expressing a certain urgency and importance in recording events, an importance that is superior to that of appearance or the perfection of the image. Just think of all the pictures of war, taken with a cell phone: obscure blurred shapes in green light. The value of these pictures does not reside in clearly showing us something, in documenting the appearance and details of something, but in recording the existence, here and now, of something (a war), and making the images instantly accessible. The reverse side of this is that the poor images also give the impression that they actually have an audience, and that fast distribution is the reason for the images low quality. Access is more important than perfection; the image's existence is more important than its essence. The message has to come across, that's all that matters. That is also why the image quality of many movies we see today is not that much superior to what it was during the tender childhood of the motion picture.

That is the locus where Geschwind establishes his borderland. He takes the thought of reality and appearance to a meta-level, and applies it to illusions: if the illusory movement is made in a less illusory manner, it will appear to be more real to us, in spite of our calling its bluff. Which in its turn enhances the illusory power of it... This weird logic, which makes every unmasking reveal a more realistic, i.e. more illusory, mask, is one of the reasons for me to use the word “phantsmagoria” when speaking about this work of Geschwind's. In this installation, our sense of reality is like an affective after-image. When we are not seduced by the spectacle, but see through it, we get a feeling of reality that we transfer to the illusion. And when it happens, the installation has suddenly become an image inside of which we suddenly find ourselves, like in a phantsmagoria.

All these twists of logic and turns of time (the past as our present viewed from the point of view of the future; decrease in illusion = increased illusion, etc.) that we have seen are to me truly phantasmagorical. But there is also another side to it. Some of that which we reckon as being real sticks to a movement of the image that is proper to early motion pictures, the effect of a few frames less per second than we are used to today. I believe that it is the association to time passed, provoked by old movies, that finds it way into Geschwind's piece – but also the sensation of phantomatic technology that several new inventions, like the telephone, gave rise to. I think I got that sensation when receiving an automatic Facebook message, telling me to reconnect with a person there who, although dead, still had an account. All on its own, technology provokes feelings of forlornness, solitude, oblivion and death that may give this installation – and the audience – the quality of an undead, of a restless spirit. I also imagine that this piece will be reminiscent of a ghostlike roller coaster for one single person, transforming the exhibition space into an amusement park that is also purgatory or at least some kind of place for undead people. I do not quite understand why this work triggers off that kind of existential, slightly moral ideas. But the fact that these ideas come to my mind, pictures of death, of strange modes of life and a spiritual reality of peculiar proceedings, bears witness to the phantasmagorical quality of this work.

When Plato, in his dialogue The Republic, describes the relationship between the world of phenomena and the world of ideas, he talks about a cave in which a shadow play is going on. In this allegory, people are seated with their backs against the source of light before which everything is played out – a world whose shadows are the only thing those present can see. Against his better judgement, man takes this image to be reality, and is doomed to be limited, via the senses, to this “reflection”.1 The fact that everyday life is separated from loftier and truer life is a major existential trauma, and throughout history man has tried in various ways to bridge this gap. Actually, it isn’t a given that all this matters very much, at bottom. For many people, the possibility that existence is a shadow world is a minor problem, and even if it were a falsification, existence as we know it is endlessly fascinating anyway. Plato’s low opinion of art is tied to this, as he believes that art must increase
the distance to the ideal – no matter how well executed and like reality art is, it can only ever be an image of something which in itself is incomplete. It is a fact, however, that people do not only put up with this deficiency – they’re even capable of rejoicing in the illusion. The truth of this is amply confirmed by the innumerable methods and inventions which have been conceived to baffle and entertain our senses – from the mnemonic structures of oral storytelling to the advanced technical animations of films and computer
games.The late 18th and 19th centuries were a golden era in this respect. It was during this period that countless machines and devices were constructed to serve the desire to see – and as several of these have important points in common with Peter Geschwind’s work, there is reason to linger a moment over some of the contraptions and seeing practices that emerged at this time. Perhaps the most important one is the camera and the photographic process. In 1839, after decades of experimentation, the Frenchman Daguerre patented
a method which was named after him – but there was also Henry Fox Talbot’s technique of negative and positive, which enabled the duplication of pictures and came to play an important role in the development of the mass media.2 Photography was both preceded and followed by a number of other inventions,
of which the diorama, the waxworks and the laterna magica are among the most familiar. The desire to create moving pictures was also great, and the simple method we’re familiar with from Plato’s allegory – the shadow play – was one of many used. With figures of metal and cardboard, whose limbs were controlled with strings and sticks, performances were held on purpose-built stages. The stories were often simple in terms of narrative content, and it was quite clearly the visual effect which was the central thing. One of the most ambitious contexts in which moving pictures featured – albeit
still in a primitive form – was the so-called phantasmagoria. This was an animated light-image show with sounds, smoke, scents and electric shocks – all in order to entertain and frighten the audience. The images were taken from the bizarre fantasy world of gothic horror romanticism, with mythological
creatures, naked women, witches, skeletons and other dread things. The phantasmagoria, like most of these phenomena, was part of an emerging
entertainment industry, and just like today, the main ingredients were violence, sex and excesses of various kinds. It need hardly be said that the phenomenon was immeasurably popular in major European cities around the turn of the 18th century.3 Another, related phenomenon – which peaked in popularity somewhat later – was the mechanical, or self-playing, musical instrument. There was everything from basic pianos to entire orchestras, and they were used to play classical pieces as well as the popular music of the period.
The fact that performances were mechanised was not concealed; quite the opposite, in fact. These ingeniously devised machines combine sound and image in a fascinating way. Many of them can be described in terms of moving sculptures, and it’s still a magical thing to watch the mechanical choreography
of self-playing instruments.If you imagine a combination of these two phenomena – the illusion-making projection and the animated object – you end up with a multimedia piece which greatly resembles Peter Geschwind’s installation at Färgfabriken, entitled Automatic. But this is not his only work which can be included in the comparison; his work shows a clear consistency, and absolutely everything
he has done since the beginning of the 90s appears in a clearer light if you view it mindful of the history of man’s unstoppable desire to create illusions,
and to use these to amuse as well as alarm. Automatic takes the form of a fairground – another phenomenon which emerged in the 19th century and which is part (many would say a degenerate variant) of the bourgeois public sphere that became established during that century. In fairgrounds you are subjected to a barrage of sensory impressions whose intensity quite physically takes hold of the visitor. The attractions often create contradictory feelings, simultaneously causing hysterical laughter and nausea, or a delight mixed with fear. The very idea is that you should leave the place in a state of exhaustion and euphoria. This experience is helped by the architecture of fairgrounds, with its customary cacophony of styles, in which fairy-tale romanticism and high-tech visions of the future feature side by side or merge in unlikely hybrids. Whatever their appearance, the buildings always have a prop-like quality which adds to the feeling of stage and spectacle. This world – in which the hallucinatory side of popular culture is revealed – could be described as a particular Geschwind territory, albeit one he shares with other artists such as Paul McCarthy and Stig Sjölund.4 Returning to Automatic, it fills the length and breadth of Färgfabriken’s main hall with contraptions in strong signal colours: blue, red, black, and yellow. The rooms and the objects are made of prefabricated parts from diy chains, but there is also a recycling of things originally meant to be used for something completely different.5 The installation’s look is familiar from handy-
man culture, then, but also from a number of other contexts beyond the domains of good taste.6 In addition to the noisy character of the visual side, a lot of it actually makes a noise and moves – as if the dead objects, ghost-like, had come alive. It is a nightmarish thought that the objects all around one should suddenly possess the ability to act as they themselves saw fit; an idea which has been exploited in a number of horror films in which toys in particular possess an evil consciousness, and deviously turn the playroom into a haunted place.7 Here too, the feeling of comfort and familiarity is mixed with a sense of unease, and the further into the construction you get, the stranger and more labyrinthine it all becomes. When you reach the far end of the room you’re suddenly faced with a screen blocking your way. A strong light and a piercing sound leads you to an adjacent wall on which shadows, or rather silhouettes, of people can be seen. At first they stand, conversing, or walk slowly through the room (or the surface of the image), but soon everything is transformed and the people are forced to flee before chairs, boxes and other objects flying through the air. It’s difficult to say where all of this is taking place, but here – just as in Plato’s cave – the illusion has such persuasive powers that it’s easy to take it for reality.The fairground is a place that makes its appearance early in Peter Geschwind’s work. In the mid nineties, he made two moving sculptures in the form of merry-go-rounds. In The Trip (a), animals hit each other as the contraption noisily turns around its own axis,8 and a similar violence features
in Merry-go-round (b).In both cases, the works are activated when the viewer presses a pedal which makes them turn, which in the case of the later merry-go-round sculpture leads to small plaster figures of humans crashing brutally against the poles and gradually being smashed. Of course one ought not to be amused by someone being subjected to violence, not even symbolic violence, but sometimes
it’s difficult not to. A troubling factor in this case is that you’re the one who makes it all continue, but there is here, as in classic slapstick comedy, a considerable exaggeration which makes us laugh at the absurdity while at the same time feeling sympathy for the victims. The liberating power of humour helps us to endure the misery of existence – our own as well as others’, be they humans or animals.The Trip, whose title is anything but innocent, is reminiscent of those wooden toys which, due to the authenticity of their materials and the craftsmanship
of their execution, are often associated with a well thought-out and pedagogic upbringing. Even if this picture has become more nuanced, there is still a deep-rooted view that children are innocent creatures – but in his work Peter Geschwind avoids neither the darker sides of childhood nor the abyss of teenage angst. From a skinny figure in denim, two empty eye sockets peer out of skull wearing a knitted cap (Toymachine) (c). Teenage Suicide, the darkest of the works, consists of a pair of denim-clad legs hanging unsentimentally
and frighteningly from the ceiling, feet shod in the obligatory trainers a clear marker. But there are less fateful depictions in which either a general listlessness (sometimes aided by drugs) is expressed, as in Candyman (d) (1998), or the teenage-specific mix of assertiveness and vulnerable self-esteem – evident in the doll-like figure in Sonic Youth (1998). Several of these sculptures belong to the group of works for which he has used classic novelty
items in the shape of severed hands, tongues, or plastic turds. They are funny in a distinctly unsophisticated way, bringing out the child in the adult viewer, who of course ought to know better than to laugh at such silly things. One of the things that characterises popular culture (b-movies, fairgrounds, computer games etc.) is that it uses simple means to create strong effects. The fact that they’re rarely lasting or refined need not be a problem – experiences
can be different and work in different ways. One of Peter Geschwind’s site-specific works had precisely this character. It was a sculpture consisting of a pair of legs – denim-clad and trainer-shod as well – just visible beneath an advertisement pillar (e). It was so convincing in its fidelity to reality that a woman phoned the police to report that a person had been standing inside the pillar all night and that they must do something about it.9 In a world where seriousness comes first, “the childish” holds a fair measure of subversiveness,
and with his refined feeling for situations and surprise effects, Peter Geschwind succeeds in peeling away layers of protective adult-ness to reveal the tragicomic sides of existence.The fairground is one area of modern life that Peter Geschwind has dealt with; another, and in many ways related phenomenon is the shopping mall and commercial culture.10 He is particularly interested in the importunate and hysterical style of the advertising and graphic expressions that invade the public space in a never-ending flow – but also in all the rubbish produced by consumer society. There are tangible similarities between a supermarket and a fairground. Superabundance is a central component of both, and the display of colours, patterns, sounds and moving images is there to augment our desire to consume goods and experiences. The heart rate of a person in a shopping centre is actually said to be comparable to that of a person who has just stepped off a roller coaster. The proximity between these phenomena is expressed in such works as Cheap High (f) (2003), whose tubes of inflated and joined-up plastic bags from discount chains are reminiscent of a fairground attraction.11 The sculpture has a distinctly litter-like appearance due to the way it’s been constructed and the choice of materials – plastic bags of that kind are also used by many people for throwing away kitchen rubbish. Litter and cleaning are two important themes of Peter Geschwind’s work, united by their interdependence and by the prominent role they have in commercial culture.12 All you have to do is switch on the tv to be reminded of the eternal need to clean, and the constant development of liquids and machines to make your home shine. The commercials are usually hysterical in both tempo
and cheerfulness – there is no greater joy than cleaning and washing your home until it sparkles like a jewel and smells like an alpine meadow. (Since the actor, as a rule, is a woman, this state could possibly be bettered by her having her period at the same time – which seems an awful lot of fun, judging from the adverts.) With an invasive and surely calculated persistence, some of these film spots stick in your mind – not least due to the music – and leave you no peace. In a 1998 sculpture with the advert-familiar name Wash & Go (g), there is a gesture which recalls the memory of a mother – the children are also in the heteronormative scene – who has just finished cleaning the house and therefore joyously raises her arms into the air so that her body forms an x. In the final sequence she is magically transformed into the last letter of the Ajax brand. The sculpture, made out of cleaning products, looks like a little man who has frozen in the same studied pose; with painful regularity, he vomits scouring liquid into a bright-red bucket. The manic streak is further increased in Sound Cut (h), a 2002 video in which everyday chores like vacuum
cleaning and washing have been twisted and edited to produce an effect which is quite psychotic.13 The film has turned the home into a fascinating, frightening and entertaining mechanical ballet; and to a certain extent we are back where we started, among mechanical instruments, the illusionist acts of phantasmagorias, and Peter Geschwind’s new work.There is a special reason for starting from the beginning again: Automatic is preceded by an animation created in a virtual environment, and it is from this that the installation has evolved and been given its physical manifestation.
The relationship between the two versions can be interpreted in several different ways. One way would be to see the digital version as a sketch, secondary
to the realised work; another would be to regard it as the idea – the archetype – in the Platonic sense, which would give the animation precedence
over the actual installation. The two versions can also be described as equal, even if one temporally precedes the other. In the exhibition, which is made up of two parts, this order has been reversed, however, so that the second part shows that which precedes the first, thus making the already ambiguous relationship even more so. There is one difference between the presentations (and the works) which is particularly worthy of mention. In the physical version, you walk freely and your body relates to the work in an ever-changeable way; in the digital version, movement and speed are completely controlled by an agent the viewer cannot influence. So when the show at Färgfabriken is over, and Liljevalchs throws open its doors, all the visitor has to do is sit back and experience – what might actually be the very beginning of the whole thing.

In the summer of 1998, under the newly instituted auspices of Moderna Museet Projekt, Peter Geschwind had a satellite exhibition at the Centre Culturel Suèdois in Paris. He was the first artist to do a Moderna Museet Projekt outside of Stockholm when he presented a series of new works in the culture institute's small gallery in the Marais.

Geschwind's at once entertaining and disturbing objects and installations are based on a "do-it-yourself" aesthetic and could hardly be conceivable without the West's consumption and brand-name culture. His work is often composed of widely different things like clothes, household objects and discarded furniture; they also contain elements of machinery, children's playthings and folk art. The individual objects are in themselves so banal that they could have been taken directly out of a convenience store or a rubbish heap. Combined, they almost look as if they belong in a children's programme that has misfired.

The work that Geschwind made in Paris for Moderna Museet Projekt has continued on this track. The lower half of a little body with jeans and sneakers is hung from the ceiling and suddenly begins to spin around; a figure with a package of puffed rice for a face is slumped like a bored teenager in a corner. Now and then a toy tape recorder next to him made a gutteral noise, sounds from a TV game. And, as a gesture to the place of the exhibition, a decorative Eiffel Tower was woven out of many meters of green garden hose. The water that was conducted through the hose terminated with a "cleaner" - a tragic-comic figure made out of a scrubbing brush, a bucket and a bottle of washing up liquid.

What at first glance seems playful or funny in Geschwind's work is soon revealed as not only
violent but even psychotic. In the colourful Merry-Go-Round (1994), constructed from an old table and a dilapidated parasol, simple plaster figures slam against the poles of the merry-go-round. The mobile pieces of junk in Moving Trash (1997), where he has mounted crumbled soda pop cans, empty candy wrappers and entire sacks of rubbish on radio-controlled wheels, also show close contacts with American popular culture, not least in B horror films.

Peter Geschwind's action sculptures are irresistible: just like a good trip on LSD they bring out totally unknown sides of their addicts. During the Stockholm Art Fair in March 1994 a great deal of time was spent dispersing hordes of young people away from Geschwind's rattling "globe" which stood shaking at the entrance. One kid reacted a little differently from the rest: instead of hopping about in delight when the "globe" slammed into the wall, the boy looked at the sculpture with the same devastating intensity as Peter Fonda devoted to an ordinary orange in the film The Trip by Roger Corman (1969). For several hours, this "turned on" child had his eyes glued to the globe - a colourful, besotting ball that clearly explained for the thoughtful little boy how everything is connected to each other.

A few months later Geschwind had his first one person show, which caused a great commotion on Ynglingagatan in Stockholm. The exhibition consisted of a pair of "loose legs" clad in a pair of boot-cut Levi's and a pair of Adidas sneakers which the artist had placed inside the Wennergren/Williams three-sided advertising pillar on the pavement outside the gallery. This macabre joke was very successful; the opening public had to look twice before they finally twigged to Geschwind's realistic illusion.

The next day the local police got a desperate call from an upset lady in a flat above the gallery. She said that there was a live person inside an advertising pillar on the pavement and he´d been there all night! The police promised to come as soon as they could. After repeated calls, all in vain, the paranoid lady broke down and decided to take matters into her own hands. Armed with a hammer she ran down to the street to see whether the legs belonged to a living person. At just that moment the police arrived and two sturdy constables picked the massacred "loose legs" out of the advertising pillar. Fortunately the whole thing was witnessed by a few lads in a nearby pizzeria, who convinced the police that the "look-out on Ynglingagatan" was a work of art that did not need to accompany them to the station.

These incidents from 1994 explain some of the power of attraction of Geschwind's sculptures, which capture the observer's interest through the sort of "effects" that one normally finds in competing media with a far greater public: American TV detective stories, video games, action films, soaps, home pages or music videos. Geschwind's Handjob from 1995 is a hand-woven little bee that buzzes around a daisy in full bloom but never manages to land - a both entertaining and meaningless way of spending time. Even though art lovers are getting better and better at buzzing around, the bee offers no release; a "stone-age" video game where one is never up-graded to the next level but only gets pains in the elbow.

Geschwind's low-tech aesthetic comes from the late '70s - hobby rooms, tech labs, the first
generation of video games from Atari - but just like the techno-punk Mad Max's masked dragster, the sculptures are well equipped for the highest speed on our information highways Geschwind's noisy Merry-Go-Round from 1995 consists of various bits of junk that actually belong to a refuse tip: a table turned upside down, a worn out parasol, a few plastic pipes and an old Husqvarna sewing machine pedal. When the visitors press the pedal to the floor the plaster figures on the carousel blow up, an event that is repeated on a couple of adjacent video monitors. The blurred results resemble a bad karate film from Hongkong, where the action scenes are piled on each other so that the whole is reduced to abstract speed streaks - smack, smack, smack! Obligatory for all young teenage boys with suppressed aggressions, who have to fast track themselves through Enter the Dragon with Bruce Lee in order to sleep at night.

Soda Stream from 1996 is an at least equally hypnotic eternal machine. From a bucket of water in the middle of the floor a 300 meter-long garden hose winds around the whole gallery. The hose ends in a used soda-stream bottle with a joke head - a less qualified actor has landed the lead part in Geschwind's drama. A little electric pump in the bottom of the bucket makes the pressure rise; the "soda-stream man" gets more and more full, finally loses his balance, falls over and throws up all he contains into the bucket.

Soda Stream uses the same captivating intervals as our most common soaps. Each demarcated scene accelerates towards a final release only to collapse and begin all over again from the beginning. (This is what makes it completely impossible for us to get up out of the sofa in front of the TV.) The hose is a kind of flexible set design, it makes people feel at home - that is, it makes them ready to repeat their ingrained consumption patterns. At an exhibition in Los Angeles the hose "represented" a well-known flower-power drawing; next time it may be Impressionism or the Eiffel Tower.

Moving Trash from 1998 is a series of terribly frivolous special effects that seem to be on the run. The sculptures haven´t much to say but are at least as conspicuous as the latest computer animations on the net. In the middle of the wall is an enticing pile of junk and when a visitor slams the door a little too hard, the sculpture begins to fall headlong towards the floor. After half a meter the precious object fortunately halts and begins laboriously to climb back up the wall.

A little further away lies an abandoned old packet of Ahlgren's candy cars. Suddenly the bag up and runs over the floor, crashing into the wall; you turn around and see a pair of upside-down legs sticking up out of the floor. The pair of legs immediately begins to spin at high speed. The sound of a pinball machine stream out of the soles of the bright red Converse basketball shoes. The legs belong to a break dancer who has lost control over a head spin and is in the process of "breaking" right through a concrete floor.

Geschwind's sugar sweet Honey Monster from 1998 is afflicted with a similar problem. Instead of keeping only to sugar-coated Puffed Wheat, Quaker's little mascot has popped a few ecstasy tablets. The monster can´t stop dancing to the mechanical funk coming from a pair of old Sentec speakers. His feet move automatically and his smile feels terribly forced; it is a scene that seems lifted direct out of MTV's The Grind, where zombie-like party kids dance to flat hit list music hour after hour. "You have to fight for your right to party!"

A few of Geschwind´s sculptures can be taken to be crazy toys - a misconception that is quickly corrected when the works are shown together. At the art fair in Stockholm in 1998 the artist synchronised ten action sculptures; the result was about as fun and relaxing as hysterically zapping between ten of our most common cable channels. When our most popular TV crimies, action films, soaps, cyber programmes and hit lists flicker by out of the corner of our eye we only have time to take in their essence. From such a hallucinatory kaleidoscope a few well-known labels are crystallised: Levis, Adidas, Husqvarna, Converse, Ahlgrens, Quaker, Sentec and MTV. A series of flashbacks from the shadiest, murkiest back alleys of consumption society, where the product mongers fight over our attention in order to sell a whole load of things that we can find in our nearest dustbin.

"Capitalism is dead, consumerism is king." (1)
Aldous Huxley

"In some cases, when we looked at heart rate and blood pressure, [we saw] something you"d expect to see in fighter pilots going into combat or policemen going into dangerous situations."(2)
British researcher David Lewis on the effects of Christmas shopping on men.

When referring to advertising, particularly on TV, we wallow in murky psychobabble: we feel "persecuted" by it, it "hypnotises" us, and we suspect "subliminal suggestion" or quite simply feel "Pavlovian". Consuming, rather than the result of "the ability of large numbers of people to make realistic choices in the light of adequate information" (3), is predominantly described as a mass disease, or else an innate behavioral trait ruthlessly exploited, of course, by the Machiavellian, profit-driven advertisement machine. Sounds familiar?

Truth is that the constant information flow distilled by advertisement creeps into our consciousness, triggering off latent emotional responses, a phenomenon echoed in the frenzied pace of Peter Geschwind's works. Evolving from a background as a musician, Geschwind has been gearing up his proto-adolescent aesthetics with cartoonish installations widely known for the ironic puns they regularly deliver. Working with everyday household items such as cereal boxes, soda bottles, plastic buckets, mops and scissors, Geschwind's attention is directed at what they "really" are. His gaze zooms in on the "Being of things", summoning up Huxley"s mescaline-induced visions of a bamboo chair, the folds in his trousers, or a row of books: "... they glowed, when I looked at them, with brighter colours, a profounder significance... they seemed to be on the point of leaving the shelves to thrust themselves more insistently on my attention." (4)

However literary this description might seem, it serves our purpose: With Geschwind in command, things come alive. While movement for his manic props was achieved using mechanics, in video the editing technique does the trick. Geschwind's decision to use moving imagery and sound must then be seen as an extension of his sculptural works, just as much as it announces a formal return to the artist"s origins. His recent music clip Sound Cut has a crowd of brand products go bonkers: a ketchup bottle drops, scissors click, next, a box of washing powder skates the kitchen floor, chased by a roaring vacuum cleaner in a racy sequence not unworthy of high-end animation films. Clearly, the production is at odds with Hollywood standards: constructed of looped single shots, it uses natural, barely enhanced sound and was unmistakably shot on custom DV. The frantic succession of whimsical events nevertheless manages to induce a near psychoactive reaction in whoever has a close look.

Edited to the rhythmic chart of a Dead Kennedys song (5), this hilarious clip both exorcises and ridicules our often conflictive, but strangely human relationships with the objectual world. How often have you caught yourself pleading with a renitent bottle cap, trying to reason a defunct dishwasher, or cursing a humming fridge?

"What the rest of us see only under the influence of mescalin[e]", writes Huxley, "the artist is congenitally equipped to see all the time. His perception is not limited to what is biologically or socially useful. A little of the knowledge belonging to Mind at Large oozes past the reducing value of brain and ego into his consciousness. It is a knowledge of the intrinsic significance of every existent." (6)

Geschwind's works always achieve to mediate some of this significance. No matter the form they are likely to adopt, his animated goods take on a life of their own, compelling us to contemplate them in new, unsuspected ways. Many of these objects appear to be engaged in senseless and repetitive, manic activities, likely to disturb, unnerve or even slightly frighten viewers. Unsurprisingly, a full loop of Sound Cut induces an effect not unlike the one unravelled by David Lewis"s research. This kind of heightened, near psychotic experience of seemingly petty things is obviously a dangerous state of consciousness when permanent. But distilled through art works such as Geschwind"s, it introduces a fresh look on the world of the objects that surround us, a world under the curse of the humming fridge.

Boris Kremer

Notes:
This text is based on an essay previously published in BE 9 Magazin on the occasion of Peter Geschwind and Gunilla Klingberg"s joint exhibition at K¸nstlerhaus Bethanien, in June 2002, as part of their Berlin residency on a grant by IASPIS, Sweden.

(1) Quoted from: Brave New World Revisited. Harper & Row, Publishers. New York, NY, 1958.
(2) Quoted from: Associated Press, December 14, 1998.
(3) Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited, ibid.
(4) Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception, Chatto & Windus Ltd., London, 1954.
(5) A four-stroke rhythm is based on beats per minute (bpm), the Pal video system on 25 frames per second (fps). The footage was edited by translating bpm to fps: 1 second is worth 25 frames and more or less 120 bpm. 4 frames then becomes one click, so with a structure of 4, 8, 16, 32, etc. frames it is possible to edit the footage by counting the frames, comparing it to the shape of the sound waves of a given song, in this case a tune by the Dead Kennedys. (Technical notes provided by the artist)
(6) Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception, ibid.