ROOM SERVICE was originally the name of a work of art.
A WORK OF ART that was inseparable from the surroundings and the circumstances in which it was displayed in the Fall of 1991, i.e. nearly 6 years ago.
THE APARTMENT, which was a part of the work, is still at Studiestræde 5 st.th., in the center of Copenhagen, but it is probably entirely different now, since today it is being rented out as private living quarters.
THE FURNITURE AND OBJECTS have long since been returned to their rightful owners.
ROOM SERVICE became, in its time, a close collaboration of three young artists who were still studying at the Copenhagen Academy, namely Tine Borg, Anja Franke and myself.
After the work's redissolution, the name "Room Service" lived on for several years, both as a designation for the original work and for the constellation of us three artists. The cause of this was partly that we chose to continue the successful collaboration in a combination of discussion and production, which among other things resulted in yet another collective work of art, created for Charlottenborg's 1992 Spring Exhibition and entitled "Room Service at Charlottenborg," and partly that successful names apparently, and in agreement with the autonomous logic of language, take on their own lives, assuming an ever wider net of meanings regardless of original intentions. Stated in another way: people continued to refer to us as "Room Service" for several years after the actual collaboration had been concluded, which several times led us to wonder about the extent to which the collaboration actually was concluded. (It was.)
MEMORY
"The memories one recalls intentionally and repeatedly are rare and pure exceptions. On the other hand, the recording of facts and images unique to their kind takes place every moment life lasts."
Quoted from "Matter and Memory. An Essay on the Relationship between Body and Spirit" (1896) by Henri Bergson.
When we speak of memory as an act of the will, we refer to the will to repeat, or perhaps more precisely to replay or look over, an event or a place ("a fact") that we have in our bodies, in the present, as a possibility.
Memory is therefore often understood as a kind of interactive film that we can stop and start and enter and exit as it suits us, but that has a serious fault: it cannot (yet) be recorded and reproduced directly from our cells. It must be communicated actively, be materialized by the subject or die with the body.
My will is a medium. Room Service shall not die. The work of art, Room Service, Studiestræde 5, deserves an eternal, electronic, cable-conducted life on the net. The work is dissolved. My cells live. And with them, memory: You walk across the street, a little way down the road, up the stairs, and ring the doorbell. You are received by a man or a woman who is sitting reading a newspaper at a table in a small room. You write your name in a book and go inside.
Farlier you have received an invitation by mail. You have, because you are considered to be a part of the Danish art world. You are probably a young Danish artist, Academy student, teacher or an acquaintance of one of the three girls who have created the work. Altogether only 200 invitations were sent out, and you would never imagine that there would be a work of art here if you did not know the address and hours. Nothing could be done about that, the artists thought. The most important thing was that the work functioned as it was intended to, and besides this was a research project financed by the artists themselves, so there was no money or surplus for a lot of PR work. Out of consideration for the integrity of the work, no opening was held either.
It is clear that you have entered an apartment, but whether it is a business locale that had been converted into living quarters, or just an ordinary apartment that was used for some sort of business, is a little unclear at first. Later you realize that it had housed a business, that the business was closed, and that it was then converted into living quarters, but that now¬once again¬houses some kind of office, clinic, or some other form of practice. The space is thus public in some sense, but is has also been abandoned, in fact it has never actually been used. The thought of religious sects, black-market cleaning companies and the Russian Mafia crosses your mind. The most important pieces of furniture are five chairs with red seat-cushions from Paustian (an exclusive Danish furniture store), an unused massage bed and a polished mahogany desk.
Fortunately you soon return to earth. You know, of course, that it is a work of art, that you are standing inside of a work of art, and that the whole thing is only art. But look there: a little tiny silver pig, a speaker lying on its side, and four refrigerators stacked on top of one another two by two. A safe and a paper elf. Yes, yes, yes! Ready-mades, installation, appropriation, assemblage, postmodernism. The art-analytical repertoire has replaced the socio-analytical, and art is recognized!
Even so, the body does not want just to stop the social game it is forced to play by the rooms' importunity. Space is power over the body and over perception. We cannot avoid the feeling of how it would be to sit on the chair (the fabric against the body, the red color close by, the angle on the room), lie on the bed (what will they do to me?) or sit at the table (where is the chair?). We cannot escape our habitual opinions of paper elves, crassula plants and Aalto vases, or resist routinely staring at the pictures on the wall and trying to look out the windows even though the blinds are closed. As a matter of fact, this art is a bit difficult to take seriously (as art), since, even if the stage is set for contemplative behavior (quietness, solitude), your perception is caught up in it, and you cannot help laughing at yourself, because the whole thing is so formal, and yet so foolish at the same time, and you cannot really escape your brain, where it feels like you body keeps holding your thoughts to something unimportant that is not what it's about, which is art.
And then there are pictures on the wall, a kind of series, five black and white interior photos, in roughly A3 format, framed. Very formal here too. The rooms in the pictures are also empty, but it is a different type of room, a catalog room: two kitchens (or two views of the same kitchen?), a meeting room, two living rooms with rugs and double curtains. Staged rooms like those you were standing in? Yes, or on second thought, no. Upon closer inspection, you cannot get around the thought that these rooms are conceived neither as works of art nor as props that will only be taken down again when the picture is in the box. There are no artificial details, no knickknacks. The rooms are too large and too pure. The conclusion almost surprises you: these room exist, each on its own, or have existed at least, somewhere out in the world!¬they have just been cleaned thoroughly, very thoroughly, in honor of the photographer; and the photographer, I know¬that is, the photographer we bought the pictures from¬is an ordinary good photographer, who first and foremost photographs what he is asked to. What I cannot recall, oddly enough¬not even with the best intentions¬is whether we ever asked him where and why these pictures were taken, or whether he just told us that he in fact could not remember. (We found them buried away in his contact-sheet archive, which we had been permitted to rummage through, but he did have the negatives, so he surely must have taken them!?)
It's nice to have pictures on the wall, so that you have something to look at and a chance to escape the room you are in when there are blinds on the windows, so you cannot let your gaze wander off that way. These were only photographs without proper depth and, in the end, without independent meaning, which caused you always to be thrown back to the work again, since you had to see if there was an answer to the pictures in the room, a resistance, a dialectic relationship. There was not. The only real resistance that could have been present in Room Service was the spectator's own, and that was, as already mentioned, difficult to maintain for most (one actually sat crying).
Of course proper folk would never think of renting such a stupid apartment, buying such stupid furniture or hanging such stupid pictures on their walls. Stupid art. Stupid pictures. And now they are gone. One of the few objects in the work that we had both bought and paid for!
THE PHOTOGRAPHS
The furniture in the rooms is like works of sculpture. Vertical, horizontal and curved surfaces propped up against one another in mutual play. Soft and hard surfaces. Fabric, wood, metal, foam rubber, plastic, silver. The light's reflections on the polished surfaces and its way of being absorbed by the dull ones, in the gray of the carpet. The flawlessness of the absurd lamps. The telephone's curves. The authority of the bed.
The photographs make the work speak the majestic language of minimalism and formalism. No snickering in the pubs is heard, and no entirely too large trucks rattle past down the narrow street. Finally the work opens itself undisturbed for the contemplative gaze, and we effortlessly attain the desired degree of distance, as we mentally project our bodies around between the objects and examine them in the light of our own cool present. What freedom, what disinterested pleasure!
No wonder that photography's era of greatness coincided with high modernism and the subject's democratic liberation from habits and dogmas. Sapere aude¬ dare to be wise, as Kant loved to say, but how do you be wise, if you are constantly being disturbed by what is taking place in space and time, and to which we react automatically? Museums were the first step along the way toward the new era's realization and popularization of the possibility of ideal, undisturbed contemplation, and modernist and formalist art was created for this space. Yet photography must, of course, be even better at promoting disinterestedness, as it offers the viewer an (almost) complete independence from space and time. Just look at these pictures! If anyone should be doubting, the photographs prove it: Room Service was a genuine, finished and very minimalist inspired installation: ¬Of course it was a work of art¬and nothing else!
Even now we can speak of the body as a boundary in the movement between the future and the past, as a movable point that our past incessantly drives into our future. Captured by a single artificial moment, our body is a guide that is placed between the objects that influence it and the objects that it influences, while it, when observed in its actual place in flowing time, finds itself just there where my past is released in an act. .
Quoted from "Matter and Memory. An Essay on the Relationship between Body and Spirit" (1896) by Henri Bergson.
THE END
