Democracy and Desire
Encyclopedia
Democracy and Desire is an evolutionary exhibition project by artist Per Hüttner
that develops as it travels. It has been shown in various public and private venues in Europe
since November 2006. The project takes its inspiration from Zen Buddhist Koans by pairing the incompatible words democracy and desire. The project investigates how the intellectual freedom of the mind is connected to, inhibited by social order
and how the human body can both support and undermine the search for mental and social liberty through social interaction.
The project uses different forms of interactions with the public to change as it travels, drawing on Hüttner's previous experiences with exhibitions like I am a Curator. In the preparatory research for the project, the artist was collaborating with a group of young creators called The Mob
working within the framework of visual art research network Vision Forum
. They set up an interactive website to collect material from the public and a wide variety of audiences. The website has since been closed, but much of the material that was gathered, is available in the catalogue that was published in conjunction with the second incarnation of the exhibition project.
, Spain
. The exhibition consisted solely of photographic work by Hüttner. But throughout the run of the exhibition, The Mob organized various public events that were open for audience participation; a night of performances with local and international artists like Julio Jara, Antonio Arean, Nuria Mora, Anita Wernström, Jean-François Robardet and Marie Husson; video screenings with video art
from around the globe and various semi-private training programs particularly related to gender
issues.
The photographic work, that was also the point of departure for the public events, was clearly inspired by the life and work by Francisco Goya
both in expression and in content. . Hüttner used the contradictory relationship between political powers and private desires that can be seen in many of the great master's paintings and created images that investigated the relationship between us as individual human beings and the interacting systems that surrounds us. In a text dedicated to the exhibition it is stated:
The quote shows how clearly the artist is influenced by Deleuze’s
assemblage theory and its impact on social ontology. The relationship between individuals and social structure in the and public space in Hüttner's earlier work became the impetus for Democracy and Desire. French writer Laurent Devèze has written about the 2006 exhibition Repetitive Time and the constant re-negotiation between the two becomes evident. :
This goes hand in hand with Manuel DeLanda's definition of the assemblage
:
In November 2007 the second version of Democracy and Desire opened at the Romanian Cultural Institute
in Stockholm
, Sweden
and included public talks and discussions. For the exhibition the artist had created a series of drawings that were specially made to accompany each photograph. The work on paper underlined the search for personal freedom of the mind in spite of social conventions by focusing on how imagination
, sexuality
and creativity
can liberate human beings
. The work is greatly influenced by Soviet/Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin
:
The drawings presupposes a kind of timeless Carnival
where the social roles were turned upside down. The work and also suggests, just like Bakhtin writes that the whole paradigm of temporality
needs to be reformulated for humans to achieve freedom. But the images also connected back to Goya's work. Human violence was introduced as possible and darker form of liberator and thus raising issues of the relationship between victim and perpetrator. The artist writes in the catalogue:
Hüttner invited a group of young Swedish artists to create performances, film screenings and discussions to go along with the installation. After two months of preparations, the group declined the offer and opted to create a parallel exhibition at with the same title at Museet för Glömska (The museum of Forgetting) in the neighbouring town of Norrköping
. The exhibition's curator
, Giorgiana Zachia responded by arranging a series of discussions at the gallery that included the artist and fellow curator Niclas Östlind.
For Nothing to declare, 4th. Oberschwaben Contemporary Art Triennial in Friedrichshafen
in Germany
, English Curator Barnaby Drabble asked the artist to develop the themes from Democracy and Desire’s second incarnation. The artist responded to this invitation by creating an installation using photos from the project along with new drawings. The photographs dialogue with the large mural drawings, further underlined the contradictions between the private and public realities depicted. They filtered out the individual's alienation to its own surroundings and the cultural clashes that we are faced with in contemporary life. The curator
writes:
In keeping with the conceptual foundation for the project , he created drawings that worked like contemporary, western shanshui paintings underlining the artist's interest in issues of alienation and inclusion. Trees drawn in the ink of modern, urban graffiti
were metamorphosing into aeroplanes and then back into a wooden ladders in a stand-still morphing
of traditional eastern art. The trees, connected to the mountains, paths and rivers depicted in the photographs. The clear references to traditional Chinese painting underlines the fact that Hüttner's focus never strays far from the human mind and how philosophy shapes the formulation of our reality.
The influence of mysterious and contradictory Zen koans became even clearer in the third version of the project at Abecita Konstmuseum in Borås
. Here Hüttner returned to using mathematics
and physics
in a very free and creative way, just like he had done in his work from the early 1990s. By mixing theories of contemporary science with reflections on the spiritual
qualities of our existence
he was able to deeper into the illogical logic of the Koan. Hüttner imagined alternative pasts and through that alternative futures for democracy and desire in a mural painting and poetic texts that went around the circumference of the museum
.
The visual impression of the piece was very scientific and rational. But the content was filled with absurd and fantastic realities that can only be imagined and never represented. The mural dialogued with the drawing
s and photographs
and allowed a far deeper understanding of the mysteries of the soul that only irrationality and contradiction can highlight. In the fourth incarnation, Democracy and Desire approached the wisdom inherent in Zen philosophy and paired it with the very contemporary questions that spin in string theory by making it both more abstract and concrete than before.
In May and June 2009 Lillian Fellman, director of Kunsthalle Luzern organized “Behavior Workshop for Idiots” and the exhibition “Love in the Age of Postponed Democracy” . For the latter Hüttner showed a new version of “Some Other Histories of Democracy and Desire” where the texts had been both developed and translated into German. The approach to Zen Koans in this form was much less austere. The content was pushed towards a more blatant idiocy, humour and with a further shift to the carnivalesque and holding back the mysterious and nonsensical approach of the Buddhists. The contrast between the cool appearance of the installation and absurd content of the texts shows that the artist takes a more positive and proactive approach to the issues at hand. He moves further in the research to see how contemporary science and its outlook on temporality can be used to inspire life and art.
The artists and curators: Fatos Ustek, Hristina Ivanoska, Yane Calovski, Mari Brellochs, Albert Heta, Sixten Nielsen and Martin Rosengaard, participated in the workshop which dealt with many of the issues treated in the previous incarnations of Democracy and Desire. Hüttner also arranged a collaborative performance with the other participants. They were each given a copy of the catalogue of the exhibition and were asked to find alternative ways to read the catalogue while traversing the town and then climbing a mountain. Each participant found a different way to approach the task. Mari Brellochs for instance cut the entire catalogue into heart-shaped messages and gave them to people and left them in strategically chosen places in nature.
for his Utopia
on the cover as well in the pages of the book.. Which was developed from a collaboration with Dent-de-Leone
and Aurélien Froment where the entire 1516 novel
is set in the typeface developed by Moore and thus virtually impossible to read.
Per Hüttner
Per Hüttner is a Swedish visual artist who lives and works in Paris, France. He graduated from Konsthögskolan in Stockholm 1993. He also studied at Hochschule der Künste in Berlin 1991-1992. He is mostly known for his photographic work and for his interactive, changing and travelling exhibition...
that develops as it travels. It has been shown in various public and private venues in Europe
Europe
Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...
since November 2006. The project takes its inspiration from Zen Buddhist Koans by pairing the incompatible words democracy and desire. The project investigates how the intellectual freedom of the mind is connected to, inhibited by social order
Social order
Social order is a concept used in sociology, history and other social sciences. It refers to a set of linked social structures, social institutions and social practices which conserve, maintain and enforce "normal" ways of relating and behaving....
and how the human body can both support and undermine the search for mental and social liberty through social interaction.
Structure
The Mob
The Mob may refer to:* The Mafia, an Italian organized crime secret society* The American Mafia, an offshoot of the Italian Mafia and also an organized crime secret society* Irish Mob, the first organized crime group for which the term was used...
working within the framework of visual art research network Vision Forum
Vision Forum (art organisation)
Vision Forum is an organisation which organises contemporary art events that transgresses the boundaries between performance, exhibition, workshops and education...
. They set up an interactive website to collect material from the public and a wide variety of audiences. The website has since been closed, but much of the material that was gathered, is available in the catalogue that was published in conjunction with the second incarnation of the exhibition project.
The First Public Incarnation
On November 23, 2006 the first version of Democracy and Desire opened to the public at the gallery Vacio 9 in MadridMadrid
Madrid is the capital and largest city of Spain. The population of the city is roughly 3.3 million and the entire population of the Madrid metropolitan area is calculated to be 6.271 million. It is the third largest city in the European Union, after London and Berlin, and its metropolitan...
, Spain
Spain
Spain , officially the Kingdom of Spain languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Spain's official name is as follows:;;;;;;), is a country and member state of the European Union located in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula...
. The exhibition consisted solely of photographic work by Hüttner. But throughout the run of the exhibition, The Mob organized various public events that were open for audience participation; a night of performances with local and international artists like Julio Jara, Antonio Arean, Nuria Mora, Anita Wernström, Jean-François Robardet and Marie Husson; video screenings with video art
Video art
Video art is a type of art which relies on moving pictures and comprises video and/or audio data. . Video art came into existence during the 1960s and 1970s, is still widely practiced and has given rise to the widespread use of video installations...
from around the globe and various semi-private training programs particularly related to gender
Gender
Gender is a range of characteristics used to distinguish between males and females, particularly in the cases of men and women and the masculine and feminine attributes assigned to them. Depending on the context, the discriminating characteristics vary from sex to social role to gender identity...
issues.
The photographic work, that was also the point of departure for the public events, was clearly inspired by the life and work by Francisco Goya
Francisco Goya
Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes was a Spanish romantic painter and printmaker regarded both as the last of the Old Masters and the first of the moderns. Goya was a court painter to the Spanish Crown, and through his works was both a commentator on and chronicler of his era...
both in expression and in content. . Hüttner used the contradictory relationship between political powers and private desires that can be seen in many of the great master's paintings and created images that investigated the relationship between us as individual human beings and the interacting systems that surrounds us. In a text dedicated to the exhibition it is stated:
" Some images in the series depict the traces of great despots’DespotDespot may refer to:* Despot , a Byzantine court title* Despotism, a form of government in which power is concentrated in the hands of an individual or a small groupPeople with the surname Despot:...
megalomania or locations where books have been burned and innocent people have been killed. All the same, these places have witnessed marriages being consumed and great loves being born. Democracy and Desire acknowledges that the system is not the same as the people who perpetuate it. It asks to what degree our lives change when the political system changes and who are the people responsible for these changes? More importantly, however, it asks to what degree the system changes when the people within it change? When you grow as a human being, what does that mean for the powers in your townTownA town is a human settlement larger than a village but smaller than a city. The size a settlement must be in order to be called a "town" varies considerably in different parts of the world, so that, for example, many American "small towns" seem to British people to be no more than villages, while...
, cityCityA city is a relatively large and permanent settlement. Although there is no agreement on how a city is distinguished from a town within general English language meanings, many cities have a particular administrative, legal, or historical status based on local law.For example, in the U.S...
or countryCountryA country is a region legally identified as a distinct entity in political geography. A country may be an independent sovereign state or one that is occupied by another state, as a non-sovereign or formerly sovereign political division, or a geographic region associated with a previously...
?"
The quote shows how clearly the artist is influenced by Deleuze’s
Gilles Deleuze
Gilles Deleuze , was a French philosopher who, from the early 1960s until his death, wrote influentially on philosophy, literature, film, and fine art. His most popular works were the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus , both co-written with Félix...
assemblage theory and its impact on social ontology. The relationship between individuals and social structure in the and public space in Hüttner's earlier work became the impetus for Democracy and Desire. French writer Laurent Devèze has written about the 2006 exhibition Repetitive Time and the constant re-negotiation between the two becomes evident. :
"Little by little, by stopping us running around even for a short moment in time, we are forced to think about the past. Or rather to reflect on the whole paradigm of a memorial: an object built in a space specifically to remind us of something that happened at a moment in time. It is this that gives your [Hüttner's] altars such a strange intensity. They hold no indication to help us understand what they represent. Was a man killed here? Did something strange or extravagant take place here, something interesting enough to be remembered? The question is pertinent because, in our old cities overburdened with history, it is very likely that any and every point could be marked: here, a man died; here, a traffic accident occurred; here, a divorce was maybe agreed or a marriage proposal was accepted or some secret love affair was begun. It is a vertiginous thought: every point in the spaces that surround us has to be remembered; they are all worthy of it. There is not a single inch in the urban landscape that, if looked at through the prism of the past, should not be remembered. Which means that we could easily be surrounded by innumerable memorials, since everywhere we turn, something happened, something essential to someone.
This goes hand in hand with Manuel DeLanda's definition of the assemblage
Assemblage
An assemblage is an archaeological term meaning a group of different artifacts found in association with one another, that is, in the same context...
:
The ontological status of any assemblage, inorganic, organic or social, is that of a unique singular, historically contingent, individual. Although the term 'individual' has come to refer to individual persons, in its ontological sense it cannot be limited to that limit scale of reality. Much as biological species are not general categories of which animalAnimalAnimals are a major group of multicellular, eukaryotic organisms of the kingdom Animalia or Metazoa. Their body plan eventually becomes fixed as they develop, although some undergo a process of metamorphosis later on in their life. Most animals are motile, meaning they can move spontaneously and...
and plantPlantPlants are living organisms belonging to the kingdom Plantae. Precise definitions of the kingdom vary, but as the term is used here, plants include familiar organisms such as trees, flowers, herbs, bushes, grasses, vines, ferns, mosses, and green algae. The group is also called green plants or...
organisms are members, but larger-scale individual entities of which organisms are component parts, so larger social assemblages should be given the ontological status of individual entities: individual networks and coalitions; individual organizations and governments; individual cities and nation states. This ontological manœuevre allows us to assert that all these individual entities have an objective existence independently of our minds (or of our concepts of them) without any commitment to essences or reified generalities.
The Second Exhibition
Romanian Cultural Institute
The Romanian Cultural Institute is a state-funded institution that promotes Romanian culture and civilization in Romania and abroad. The ICR was formerly set up through reorganization of the Romanian Cultural Foundation and Romanian Cultural Publishing Foundation...
in Stockholm
Stockholm
Stockholm is the capital and the largest city of Sweden and constitutes the most populated urban area in Scandinavia. Stockholm is the most populous city in Sweden, with a population of 851,155 in the municipality , 1.37 million in the urban area , and around 2.1 million in the metropolitan area...
, Sweden
Sweden
Sweden , officially the Kingdom of Sweden , is a Nordic country on the Scandinavian Peninsula in Northern Europe. Sweden borders with Norway and Finland and is connected to Denmark by a bridge-tunnel across the Öresund....
and included public talks and discussions. For the exhibition the artist had created a series of drawings that were specially made to accompany each photograph. The work on paper underlined the search for personal freedom of the mind in spite of social conventions by focusing on how imagination
Imagination
Imagination, also called the faculty of imagining, is the ability of forming mental images, sensations and concepts, in a moment when they are not perceived through sight, hearing or other senses...
, sexuality
Human sexuality
Human sexuality is the awareness of gender differences, and the capacity to have erotic experiences and responses. Human sexuality can also be described as the way someone is sexually attracted to another person whether it is to opposite sexes , to the same sex , to either sexes , or not being...
and creativity
Creativity
Creativity refers to the phenomenon whereby a person creates something new that has some kind of value. What counts as "new" may be in reference to the individual creator, or to the society or domain within which the novelty occurs...
can liberate human beings
Human
Humans are the only living species in the Homo genus...
. The work is greatly influenced by Soviet/Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin
Mikhail Bakhtin
Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin was a Russian philosopher, literary critic, semiotician and scholar who worked on literary theory, ethics, and the philosophy of language...
:
“What is the character of these ornaments? They impressed the connoisseurs by the extremely fanciful, free and playful treatment of plantPlantPlants are living organisms belonging to the kingdom Plantae. Precise definitions of the kingdom vary, but as the term is used here, plants include familiar organisms such as trees, flowers, herbs, bushes, grasses, vines, ferns, mosses, and green algae. The group is also called green plants or...
, animalAnimalAnimals are a major group of multicellular, eukaryotic organisms of the kingdom Animalia or Metazoa. Their body plan eventually becomes fixed as they develop, although some undergo a process of metamorphosis later on in their life. Most animals are motile, meaning they can move spontaneously and...
and humanHumanHumans are the only living species in the Homo genus...
forms. These forms seemed interwoven as if given birth to each other. The borderlines that divide the kingdoms of nature in the normal world were boldly infringed. Neither was there the usual static presentation of reality. There was no longer the movement of finished forms, vegetable or animal, in a finished and stable world; instead the inner movement of being itself was expressed in the passing of one form into the other, in the ever incompleted character of being. This ornamental interplay revealed an extreme lightness and freedom of artistic fantasy, a gay, almost laughing, libertinage.”
The drawings presupposes a kind of timeless Carnival
Carnival
Carnaval is a festive season which occurs immediately before Lent; the main events are usually during February. Carnaval typically involves a public celebration or parade combining some elements of a circus, mask and public street party...
where the social roles were turned upside down. The work and also suggests, just like Bakhtin writes that the whole paradigm of temporality
Temporality
Temporality is a term often used in philosophy in talking about the way time is. The traditional mode of temporality is a linear procession of past, present, and future....
needs to be reformulated for humans to achieve freedom. But the images also connected back to Goya's work. Human violence was introduced as possible and darker form of liberator and thus raising issues of the relationship between victim and perpetrator. The artist writes in the catalogue:
" We cannot continue to ignore the presence of our violent drives. Culture, conscience, and rationality cannot suppress the violence that is inscribed into our genes. Marlon Brando’s rendering of Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse NowApocalypse NowApocalypse Now is a 1979 American war film set during the Vietnam War, produced and directed by Francis Ford Coppola. The central character is US Army special operations officer Captain Benjamin L. Willard , of MACV-SOG, an assassin sent to kill the renegade and presumed insane Special Forces...
virtually incorporates all these principles or at least what can happen in an extreme situation when they have been repressed for too long. The final section of the film, which you might describe as a contemporary filmic paraphrase on Goya’s Disasters of War is an incredibly forceful investigation to humanity’s relationship to violence. Kurtz is a violent madman and is on the one hand so appealing and on the other incredibly repulsive. His acceptance of his violent drives approaches or embraces insanity. He asks Willard, the man who will shortly kill him, 'Have you ever considered any real freedoms, freedoms from the opinion of others, even the opinions of yourself?' Those are crucial words from one ruthless warrior to another – but even more so for the artist. If the artist is not liberated from his or her inhibitions, it is also impossible for the audience to live a moment of freedom, since the humanness of the artist is veiled by doubts."
Hüttner invited a group of young Swedish artists to create performances, film screenings and discussions to go along with the installation. After two months of preparations, the group declined the offer and opted to create a parallel exhibition at with the same title at Museet för Glömska (The museum of Forgetting) in the neighbouring town of Norrköping
Norrköping
Norrköping is a city in the province of Östergötland in eastern Sweden and the seat of Norrköping Municipality, Östergötland County. The city has a population of 87,247 inhabitants in 2010, out of a municipal total of 130,050, making it Sweden's tenth largest city and eighth largest...
. The exhibition's curator
Curator
A curator is a manager or overseer. Traditionally, a curator or keeper of a cultural heritage institution is a content specialist responsible for an institution's collections and involved with the interpretation of heritage material...
, Giorgiana Zachia responded by arranging a series of discussions at the gallery that included the artist and fellow curator Niclas Östlind.
Another Format of Democracy and Desire
Friedrichshafen
This article is about a German town. For the Danish town, see Frederikshavn, and for the Finnish town, see Fredrikshamn .Friedrichshafen is a university city on the northern side of Lake Constance in Southern Germany, near the borders with Switzerland and Austria.It is the district capital of the...
in Germany
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
, English Curator Barnaby Drabble asked the artist to develop the themes from Democracy and Desire’s second incarnation. The artist responded to this invitation by creating an installation using photos from the project along with new drawings. The photographs dialogue with the large mural drawings, further underlined the contradictions between the private and public realities depicted. They filtered out the individual's alienation to its own surroundings and the cultural clashes that we are faced with in contemporary life. The curator
Curator
A curator is a manager or overseer. Traditionally, a curator or keeper of a cultural heritage institution is a content specialist responsible for an institution's collections and involved with the interpretation of heritage material...
writes:
" In many of the works the artist appears to stage his own ‘otherness’ proposing the modern city and the thinking behind modernismModernismModernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes the modernist movement, its set of cultural tendencies and array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society...
, as the backdrop against which this theatreTheatreTheatre is a collaborative form of fine art that uses live performers to present the experience of a real or imagined event before a live audience in a specific place. The performers may communicate this experience to the audience through combinations of gesture, speech, song, music or dance...
of alienationSocial alienationThe term social alienation has many discipline-specific uses; Roberts notes how even within the social sciences, it “is used to refer both to a personal psychological state and to a type of social relationship”...
is being played out."
In keeping with the conceptual foundation for the project , he created drawings that worked like contemporary, western shanshui paintings underlining the artist's interest in issues of alienation and inclusion. Trees drawn in the ink of modern, urban graffiti
Graffiti
Graffiti is the name for images or lettering scratched, scrawled, painted or marked in any manner on property....
were metamorphosing into aeroplanes and then back into a wooden ladders in a stand-still morphing
Morphing
Morphing is a special effect in motion pictures and animations that changes one image into another through a seamless transition. Most often it is used to depict one person turning into another through technological means or as part of a fantasy or surreal sequence. Traditionally such a depiction...
of traditional eastern art. The trees, connected to the mountains, paths and rivers depicted in the photographs. The clear references to traditional Chinese painting underlines the fact that Hüttner's focus never strays far from the human mind and how philosophy shapes the formulation of our reality.
The 2008-09 Presentation
Borås
Borås is a locality and the seat of Borås Municipality, Västra Götaland County, Sweden. It had 63,441 inhabitants in 2005.- Geography :Borås is located at the point of two crossing railways, among them the railway between Gothenburg and Kalmar, and is often considered the Swedish city gaining the...
. Here Hüttner returned to using mathematics
Mathematics
Mathematics is the study of quantity, space, structure, and change. Mathematicians seek out patterns and formulate new conjectures. Mathematicians resolve the truth or falsity of conjectures by mathematical proofs, which are arguments sufficient to convince other mathematicians of their validity...
and physics
Physics
Physics is a natural science that involves the study of matter and its motion through spacetime, along with related concepts such as energy and force. More broadly, it is the general analysis of nature, conducted in order to understand how the universe behaves.Physics is one of the oldest academic...
in a very free and creative way, just like he had done in his work from the early 1990s. By mixing theories of contemporary science with reflections on the spiritual
Spirituality
Spirituality can refer to an ultimate or an alleged immaterial reality; an inner path enabling a person to discover the essence of his/her being; or the “deepest values and meanings by which people live.” Spiritual practices, including meditation, prayer and contemplation, are intended to develop...
qualities of our existence
Existence
In common usage, existence is the world we are aware of through our senses, and that persists independently without them. In academic philosophy the word has a more specialized meaning, being contrasted with essence, which specifies different forms of existence as well as different identity...
he was able to deeper into the illogical logic of the Koan. Hüttner imagined alternative pasts and through that alternative futures for democracy and desire in a mural painting and poetic texts that went around the circumference of the museum
Museum
A museum is an institution that cares for a collection of artifacts and other objects of scientific, artistic, cultural, or historical importance and makes them available for public viewing through exhibits that may be permanent or temporary. Most large museums are located in major cities...
.
The visual impression of the piece was very scientific and rational. But the content was filled with absurd and fantastic realities that can only be imagined and never represented. The mural dialogued with the drawing
Drawing
Drawing is a form of visual art that makes use of any number of drawing instruments to mark a two-dimensional medium. Common instruments include graphite pencils, pen and ink, inked brushes, wax color pencils, crayons, charcoal, chalk, pastels, markers, styluses, and various metals .An artist who...
s and photographs
Photography
Photography is the art, science and practice of creating durable images by recording light or other electromagnetic radiation, either electronically by means of an image sensor or chemically by means of a light-sensitive material such as photographic film...
and allowed a far deeper understanding of the mysteries of the soul that only irrationality and contradiction can highlight. In the fourth incarnation, Democracy and Desire approached the wisdom inherent in Zen philosophy and paired it with the very contemporary questions that spin in string theory by making it both more abstract and concrete than before.
Love in the Age of Postponed Democracy/Behavior Workshop for Idiots
The artists and curators: Fatos Ustek, Hristina Ivanoska, Yane Calovski, Mari Brellochs, Albert Heta, Sixten Nielsen and Martin Rosengaard, participated in the workshop which dealt with many of the issues treated in the previous incarnations of Democracy and Desire. Hüttner also arranged a collaborative performance with the other participants. They were each given a copy of the catalogue of the exhibition and were asked to find alternative ways to read the catalogue while traversing the town and then climbing a mountain. Each participant found a different way to approach the task. Mari Brellochs for instance cut the entire catalogue into heart-shaped messages and gave them to people and left them in strategically chosen places in nature.
Publication
A catalogue with the title Per Hüttner: Democracy and Desire designed by international design group Åbäke was published in 2007. It uses the special typeface developed by Thomas MooreThomas Moore
Thomas Moore was an Irish poet, singer, songwriter, and entertainer, now best remembered for the lyrics of The Minstrel Boy and The Last Rose of Summer. He was responsible, with John Murray, for burning Lord Byron's memoirs after his death...
for his Utopia
Utopia
Utopia is an ideal community or society possessing a perfect socio-politico-legal system. The word was imported from Greek by Sir Thomas More for his 1516 book Utopia, describing a fictional island in the Atlantic Ocean. The term has been used to describe both intentional communities that attempt...
on the cover as well in the pages of the book.. Which was developed from a collaboration with Dent-de-Leone
Dent-de-Leone
Dent-de-Leone is a small independent publisher located in London, distinctive for the fact that it collaborates directly with artists and designers to produce its books. It was founded by Martino Gamper, Kajsa Ståhl and Maki Suzuki in 2004 with the publication of the book What Martino Gamper did...
and Aurélien Froment where the entire 1516 novel
Novel
A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....
is set in the typeface developed by Moore and thus virtually impossible to read.