M y life is better than yours”, it says with hand-painted letters on a big piece of paper. However, the melancholic setting of the photograph, showing the artist a bit sad and thoughtful looking, sitting on the floor next to her text piece, makes the assertion seem somewhat empty or untrustworthy if not pathetic. “texts by annika ström” the artist collected a series of photographs of her text pieces like: “This work refers to no one”, “I love to live but not with me”, “I am a better artist than I deserve” and “Everything in this show could be used against me”. The photos seem like they could be stills from one of her videos and the phrases could be lyrics from one of her love songs. Far from being a straightforward reproduction of her work, the text pieces are presented in various “lived” settings, often within an intimate context of her private surroundings and in the company of friends presenting her work or doing whatever they were doing, when the picture was taken. The way Annika Ström chooses to represent the text pieces transforms her book into a collection of verbi-visual poems, which play with images and words. The fact that both systems are open to multiple significations, i.e. that one and the same sentence can be perceived as an empty formal phrase as well as a heartfelt existential outcry, depending on the context. But Annika Ström’s text pieces and their visual context are hardly pointing in the same direction. Text and image are not trying to coax the viewer or anchor the meaning of the message. In fact, they rather seem to display a semantic gap, which has to do with a general confusion or openness regarding: Who is speaking? To whom? From which position? About what exactly? There is often a good deal of irony and especially self-irony in Annika Ström’s work. This is no exception when the text pieces are talking about themselves, their own making, their value and reception, commenting on the art market and addressing the viewers expectations. But the irony and apparent lightness are accompanied by an earnest tone. With the “staging” of phrases like “please help me” it seems as if the addresser is already beyond the point of rescue.
LOTTE MØLLER, Berlin.
laire Staebler reports on the serious artistic update given to the cozy nostalgic world of radio at radiodays.org, which is broadcasting over the internet for 26 days from De Appel Stichting and includes curatorial work by Rael Artel, Kathrin Jentjens, Jelena Vesic, Huib van der Werf and Veronica Wiman as well as Claire herself. Internet and digital capabilities have not left the world of radio alone of course. We remember the fi rst time we listened to New York radio live here in Paris over an early broadband connection- hairs stood up all over the place. And a lot has sure happened since then. So here’s Claire’s take on this audio enterprise.
inault’s IPO for the Palazzo Grassi marks without contest the apothe-osis of relations between the luxury industry and contemporary art. As is often the case with apotheosis, this moment may also signal the beginning of the end of this relation. After ten years of happiness, the honeymoon between art works and fashion money is already over. Certainly, art and fashion are an old couple. “Things have been worse,” you’ll say. Around Cocteau, the emblematic figure of their union, Pablo Picasso and Coco Chanel found themselves at home with Anna de Noailles or Louise de Vilmorin. That’s a fact. But it’s also a fact that art and fashion are an old couple who have already separated and have no reason to do so again. The first divorce between art and fashion was in the 60s. Until the 50s, about, fashion designers and artists were taking orders from the same people and had the same interests. Rich patrons, enlightened aesthetics, and protectors of art enjoyed dreaming that their good taste could incarnate indifferently in paintings or sculpture, dresses, furniture or houses. There were theater costumes designed for avant-garde plays the way avant-garde motifs fi gured on fabrics, without contradiction. But starting in the 60s, these rich patrons, if they continued to be the principal support of art, which they continue to be today, then they also stopped being the essential suppliers of funds for fashion. In fact it was at this time that high fashion realized it had industrial potential. Pierre Cardin, using new fabrication techniques and a vast system of franchises that remain unsurpassed today, was one of the essential initia- tors of this revolution. The consumer’s money mine, yours was progressively substituted for that of the patron, and fashion, becoming the bridge head of prêt-à-porter, could for the first time free itself from the guardianship of art. The modern union of art and fashion that we are supposed to celebrate as if it had always existed is in reality a recent phenomenon, which even follows in fact other, circumstantial unions, each of which lasted about a dozen years. The fi rst of these unions was that of fashion and the high and mighty. Because the young fashion industry was called upon to seduce a public demanding that from then on it be a rare and inexpensive prod-uct, an auratic product and at the same time a product for large-scale consummation, it had no other choice than to in turn call upon it’s former financial supporters to become the models who would seduce the new public at large. Thus the public at large found itself in ecstasy before the outfits of Jackie Kennedy in the still young Jour de France.The second of these unions was that of fashion and cinema. May 68 cruelly obliged the former crowned heads to get down off their pedestals. At a time when Giscard played the accordion and had breakfast with street sweepers, the stars of cinema came along to occupy the empty place of dreams. Grace Kelly, at the juncture of two worlds, incarnates the ideal icon of these years. But in the 80s, probably the fault of the massive arrival of television, cinema stars gave way in their turn to the mermaids of normality. 
