The Berlin transmediale.06 exhibition »Smile Machines« took its title from an art work from 1972 by the Fluxus pioneer George Maciunas. The »Flux Smile Machine« is lying in a glass case right at the entrance– a small device with a spring that forces users to smile when it is placed in the mouth.

Around 30 years of media art later, in his installation »Cheese«, the German artist Christian Möller focused on the way good-tempered grimaces are more than ever a part of the indispensable inventory of the media world. Six monitors show actors wearing permanent grins. Every time the »seriousness« of their cheerfulness lessens, an alarm reminds them to readjust their lips to happy mode.

The technological reproducibility of smiles is now an indispensable capital asset. »Smile Machines«, as the curator of the exhibition, Anne-Marie Duguet, stresses, »is partly a metaphor for this forced hedonism and the mutated behaviours that are formed in the consumer society.«

With around 30 exhibits, Duguet spans a period from the 1970s to today. A theorist and head of the Paris Centre for Cinema Aesthetics and Audiovisual Arts, Duguet presents as obsolete the idea of media art as a restricted field. She combines various media, ranging from videos, installations and robotics, to embroidered text pictures.

However vague and wide-ranging themes connected with »humour« may appear to be, Duguet’s conception of this well-structured exhibition is very »straight«. She has not attempted a flirt with the common clichés of media art as amusing technological games. »Humour is not (necessarily) funny!«, she says. One should thus not expect »Smile« to be a gag-fest. Rather, the sometimes subversive artistic approaches criticise real systems like politics and entertainment using satire, irony and parody.

In the general view, technology symbolises progress. Several of the works shown break with this belief. The video version of the performance »Death Is Certain« by Eva Meyer-Keller can be read as a brilliant example of the demystification of technology with an element of tragic-comedy. In it, the artist torments beautiful cherries with everyday objects like pins. Or she hangs the juicy fruits on white balloon that she bursts with darts. The impact of the fruit on the white walls creates a image of a blood-red massacre, which in its symbolism evokes the absurdity of violence and makes one think of Dada as the artistic response to the war.

Before the start of the Bosnian war in 1992, jokes about the fictive figures of Suljo and Mujo made the rounds within the communist system. The Bosnian-born French artist Maja Bajevi_ has examined the rapid updating of humour in connection with real events. In her video installation »Black in Black«, old and young people from Sarajevo tell the popular and legendary »Suljo and Mujo« jokes. People use them to come to terms with their wartime experiences. Made anonymous by stocking masks, they sit in pubs, where farce is presented as transformative self-protection.

Several of the works by the media artists take a critical look at persistent stereotypes of female roles, for example, the feminist video classic »Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman« (1978/79) by Dara Birnbaum. In 1974, in her work »Ma collection des proverbs«, Annette Messager embroidered handkerchief-sized pieces of material with misogynist sayings in scrawled writing. »What’s worse than a woman? – Two women« is one of the altogether 200 examples. Finally, in »Antes de La Televisión« (Before Television, 1983-99), Ximena Cuevas is chased through her living room by her vacuum cleaner in the black-and-white slapstick style of old silent films.

Wherever the viewers are called upon to interact at »Smile Machines«, they can see directly what is sense and what is nonsense. This part of the exhibition does without complicated instructions on the walls, which is even more cheering. You can enter into interaction with »The Helpless Robot« of Norman T. White, for example, by turning it. The machine reacts with words that become more dictatorial and harsh, the more you try to cooperate with it.

The exhibits at »Smile Machines« have an immediate and direct effect on the visitors, just as good punch lines do at best. Any initial scepticism about an exhibition with the visitor-friendly label »Laughing permitted« is not borne out.

Duguet, the curator, has installed the major figures of Fluxus as humour pioneers in media art, and gathered a younger generation of artists around them. The old ones, George Maciunas, Robert Filliou & co., still have the ability to fascinate today with the accessible presentation of their criticism of complex social systems. This is shown at the start of the exhibition, for example, where, in Nam June Paik’s installation »The Thinker – TV Rodin« (1976/78), a small replica of the sculpture looks at itself on the monitor.

At the end, the artistic activists The Yes Men employ the fake as a comic strategy. Because of their faked Internet site dowethics.com, they were invited to a bankers’ conference in London, where they presented a gauge that measures an acceptable death rate in connection with high profits. In the video document »Dow does the right thing« (2002-05), the representatives of multinational corporations in all seriousness ask the artists, disguised as managers, to work with them. Heavy-handed gallows humour seems to be gaining ground in view of inscrutable global balances of power.

»Smile Machines« could be seen at the Academy of Arts, Berlin, from 3 February to 19 March 2006. http://transmediale.de/page/subhome/subhome.0.exhibition.3.html

 

Translated by Timothy Jones

 

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