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Tobias Madison Do It To Do It One could interpret the historical development of the avant-garde as an accession of probable economies; strategies that sidetrack the conventional trade of taste and aesthetic judgment towards an advanced understanding of value. What the avant-garde has shown us is that the ambition to modify or undermine aesthetic taste does not necessarily lead to a relevant work of art; one needs to identify new trades of taste in order to make it so. Even the increasing dematerialization in art production by the conceptual artists of the 1960s wasnt able to escape this branding, when afterwards its strategies where labeled as both questioning and supporting the economy of aesthetic capital. With this in mind, moving ones attention from the production of physical objects to an instantaneous attraction to the context of value seems a logical development. Especially when all classic media have merged their historic criteria towards a continuously expanding and endless playing field of the visual arts; the identification of a public trade structure (intellectually and cultural) have become essential in visualizing an artistic practice as art. A work of art today is not only identifying a trade structure alone, it has become a trade structure in itself. Looking at the art production of today one can notice that value is joined by wide, fluctuating or even random coordinates of quality of say, institutional context or the private interests of the artist. The artworks of Swiss artist Tobias Madison (born 1985) seem to embrace this continuation of the avantgarde and merge it with corporate methodology in favor of self-sufficiency and creative independency. His numerous collaborations, not only instantaneously construct smallscale contexts of intellectual and material trade, they also enable his artistic production to access continuously new streams of production and definitions of quality on a continuous basis. This allows Madison to find interesting complexities in todays art production and in cultural conventions of taste, value, and utility. In the run-up to the exhibition Do It To Do It, Bart van der Heide met with Tobias Madison to talk about collaboration, seduction, and artistic value. Interview between Bart van der Heide and Tobias Madison, July 2010:

Bart: Tobias, your work shows numerous collaborations. We just went to the studio of artist and collector Ruedi Bechtler, with whom you are currently producing a work. Can you tell me a bit about how this collaboration came about and why it is important to you? Tobias: Well, it all sort of started by coincidence when Ruedi Bechtler bought a work that I had produced for a Ettore Sottsass 1987 prototype table in October 2009. Since the original Sottsass ensemble included a vase, we ended up looking for vases together and eventually bought six broken ones. After restoring the broken vases in Bechtlers studio, a professional photographer will reproduce the various details and views of these artifacts, along with another Memphis table (since the original prototype wasnt included in the work). We will cut high-tech passe-partouts that follow the outlines of the objects and present them in chromed, frame-like boxes. So one could say we decided to put them back into the stream of production as enhanced design objects. What makes this particular collaboration (or any collaboration, for that matter) so interesting to me is that it offers a new, complex context in which one can produce or re-produce an object: a context in which one can explore even irrational methods, whilst still legitimizing its production. It is a position in which I dont criticize or affirm anythinginstead, I try to speak a certain language, but speak it better. In the case of the current collaboration with Bechtler, it offered a chance to work with someone who is dedicated and interested. In addition, the collaboration granted the opportunity to work with original objects by Sottsass. Even though Sottsass isnt a clear reference in my work, his whole approach to the making/designing/production of objects is important for understanding contemporary production. B: And why is Sottsass (or the Memphis group) interesting for understanding or developing contemporary strategies in artistic production? T: As a designer, Sottsass was educated in the 60s, so one could say that his approach was still rooted in Modernist ideas that give design a responsibility to affect our everyday lifestyle, or vice-versa. This already archaic starting position led, in the 1980s, to the creation of objects that were meant to be affordable for everyone, using cheap materials that mimicked a bourgeois lifestyle (marble laminate, perforated plywood, etc.). Despite the fact that this led to its own contradiction (creating objects that in the end were extremely expensive), it did however create a change in the production processes of the 1980s that still influences the way we look at objects today. The Sottsass designs were exemplary for the way they drew on certain cultural artifacts and remodeled their surfacing aspects into something else, i.e. an object. For example, Sottsass did a series of vases based on shapes he developed with a Japanese calligrapher.

B: When you describe Memphis as a strategy of finding the right suppliers, which would include intellectual suppliers, would you then describe your approach to contemporary productionin particular, your numerous collaborationsin a similar way? Could you also elaborate on the visual understanding of these works? T: The cultural system in which I see myself working is one where an overwhelming amount of things are available: knowledge, materials, funds, etc. So in order to produce, you need to extend your supplies to certain power structures, company structures, or even social contexts that you must find access to. This leads directly to the visual quality of objects. We operate in a visual landscape that is highly defined by brands and companies that use powerful strategies of seduction. I think that identifying these strategies can lead to unexpected complexities within artistic production. The more time I spend with artifacts of hyper-seduction, the more they present questions about my own affinity with them. Seduction, designed by and for a bourgeois lifestyle, brings out ambivalence in regard to the general relationship we have with visual artifacts. We are constantly in the miserable situation of loving things when, in fact, we hate the mechanisms behind them. When we look at brands such as North Face, for instance, they show you a whole approach to how you should lead your life (i.e., fleeing into nature), when, in fact, theyre just selling you a jacket. Products that do not differ significantly from any other brand are given meaning and prestige by the exotic context of climbing a volcano on a tropical island. B: In a recent collaboration with Swiss artist Kaspar Mller, you actually use climbing ropes in a way, continuing your North Face reference to an outdoor lifestyle? T: The sculptures and objects that I produce with Kaspar are based on our research into the material and cultural qualities of bambooa material that has an interesting background in its status for us. In Asian mythology, bamboo is a symbol of life and luck, and at the same time, is used as a scaffolding material to construct skyscrapers in Hong Kong. Somehow in the West this material is connected to an idea of the exotic, the tropics, which led us to work with the climbing ropes that (metaphorically) support this idea of exoticism. We bind the bamboo shoots together with the climbing ropes, elevating them from the ground like abandoned scaffolding, or turning the materials into ambivalent suggestions of furniture. We drill holes in the materials and fill them with glass marbles, comparable to the little objects one expects to find in a crafts market in Indonesia. They made us think of the relationship that beads have to a colonial trade: made in England and exchanged for ivory in the Congo. One could say that this is comparable to the way we aim to make use of these very works. The sale of these works will finance a land art project we hope to realize on Bora Bora (French Polynesia) together with Emil Michael Klein and Emanuel Rossetti, which would involve shipping freshly-cut green bamboo from Japan to Bora Bora via Tahiti, and building various utilitarian and non-utilitarian structures on the island between the palm trees and the coral reef.

Currently we are talking with various hotels, asking them to sponsor our stay on the island in exchange for us returning the favor with cultural benefits: staying on the island isnt cheap! B: Staying with this somewhat controversial and almost non-hierarchical coalition between two forms of capital (i.e. corporate sponsorship and artistic production), it is a small step to a different kind of partnership you started with yet another hotel chain, the Radisson Group, to be precise. T: Yes I Can! is an advertisement slogan used by Radisson Hotels that communicates its standard of service and dedication to fulfilling every wish of its guests. I started to work with the flags that communicate this corporate identity and commissioned different artist friends to paint them. One can see these flag/paintings as a self-made trade structure, in the way that I appropriate the brand into my own artistic practice in order to heighten its exchange value. One flag doesnt cost a lot to produce (maybe not more than 50), but the added artistic gestures that somehow relate to art (to Abstract Expressionist painting, for example) put the artifact back into an alternative stream of production, a public collection, for example. One of the Yes I Can! paintings is currently on display at Kunsthaus Zrich. The fact that it hangs here creates an interesting position with respect to the role of artworks in an institution, as well as an almost beneficial position for the brand from which the merchandise was taken. For the brand, the institutional space becomes yet another opportunity to advertise in a space that is supposed to be autonomous. On the other hand, it offers accessibility to the idea of selling the intangible value of the work back to the company again. B: Could you elaborate on your position towards value, for instance when it comes to the Yes I Can! works? Has the art institution become, in your eyes, merely a tool for corporate sponsorship and market enhancement? Looking at the many sponsored spaces within big institutions, this thesis doesnt seem to be too far-fetched. T: To me, the value in Yes I Can! lies in the fact that these works provide access to further structures. In order to steal a flag from the Radisson Hotel, you sometimes have to stay in the Radisson Hotel; and in order not to pay for your stay at the Radisson Hotel, you have to find a way to appeal to the company so they let you stay for free; and in order to do that, you need the backup of institutionalized collections that (a) pay for the work and (b) confirm its cultural value. So in the end, it is less about criticizing the fact that big brands get access to cultural institutions, and more about being aware of this fact and making use of it. B: This is why I find the argument of value so fundamental when thinking about your work: a topic that nowadays seems just as open-ended as the limitless possibilities of production that the conceptual artist has on hand today. What is your artistic responsibility, as you see it? And to whom? Is this something that you even consider relevant?

T: One of my goals is to take on a contemporary language, a language of value that surrounds us and penetrates our bodies and minds: I try to repeat it in order to speak it better; I try to speak it with spelling mistakes; I try to rhyme or speak it rhythmically; or I even try to speak it as a poem. I see my responsibility as being towards a sense of artistic poetry that nowadays depends on streams of production in order to exist. With this in mind, the canons of value in art and in corporate marketing seem equally standardized to me.