B.A.G in the American Embassy (ex) The Hague
In the Movie Theater no less, where the film 'Incredible Journey' DDV referred to in his AI discourse might have been shown in those heady sixties sci-fi days... Now we find ourselves facing the other way – confronting the projection-booth with stares usually reserved for the screen – detournement d'un lieu de cult cinematographique spectaculaire – against the grain.
Been watching Danny Devos for quite a while now – since my arrival in these parts – and I must admit he is one of the most constant methodical no-nonsense and enigmatic artist I know – doing his thing without being in the slightest buffeted by the storms whipped up by the cultured gentry – in fact irritatingly so, not pandering to the ups and downs of artificial hyperbole – not even participating in the rat-racing ruminations of the marketeers and speculators – but using their wares to reflect upon our condition...
As chance would have it there was just a resurgence in attention to the Rote Armee Fraktion as we heard about DDV's B.A.G. Projects – Bastard Art Gruppe – with the arrest of a thrird-generational RAF member Daniela Klette in her petite-bourgeois flat in Berlin, or at least what might seems so apart from the weapons and explosives she still kept in her cupboard... being anyway more of a bank-robber than hardcore lefty, as quite a few of the RAF were, especially the later ones...
...all things (come to) pass,
so too this embassy close to the seat of Dutch government – once a mainstay transatlantic ally and now chastising itself with an unworkable reactionary coalition – even the famous Dutch libertarian attitude down the drain with the rest of thinking Europe – even the Greens in Germany howling for more weaponry... (I for one am of the anti-missle generation of Pertra & der General – today's generation seems to me to be more olive drab than juicy green... but yes)
So too DDV, after having dug as far down as he could to find Gordon, filling up the hole with shredded literature – I myself partook in some of the soil from that hole transported all the way to Finland, and assisted in the shredding of the rabbit-hare (“einem zerissenen hasen die Performancekunst erklären”) – as well as the spray-painting of an absent presence in Saint Nicholas town after art-pope Hoet refused to let Danny play – ah those wonderfully repressive times!
Now he has embraced AI while others shirk fearfully as they did with his serial killers in welded cold frames and the softly spoken Thai-boy Slim – for he never gets stuck in one or another rut, but constantly and conscientiously changes - as the weather with it's high and low pressures, sun, sleet and snowballs. Now, after some initial projects with canine portraits and similar dis-figuration, DDV has created a series of automates announcements of his (or rather the system's) work at various important international museum venues around the globe...
Not in fact having anything to do with it at all- and so we too have nothing to do with any of it as well as being ourselves ready-made fodder for the insatiable hunger of marketing mentality's most preposterous dreams – we can be whatever we don't want to be, and nothing will stop us from becoming our worst own nightmare.
All that is left for us to do is to spot the posters at a venue near you – yesseree-bob, take a selfie with you very own DDV exhibition poster at your leisure, become part of a world-wide webbed conspiracy to incorporate yourself in to a n automatically generated reality far from anything that smells of natural habitat, or god forbid, artzoo!
