sculptural installation or security consciousness?

Night duty staff at the institute were thrown into confusion on discovering this Mobilo scooter lock, later photographed in the light of day. Were younger members of the institute set upon transforming everyday life into an art installation, reshaping the lived as resonances of plastic and plasticity? Or was the threat to private property so pressing as to suggest a need for security locks inside the institute?

Somewhere deep in the annals of critical theory, Max Horkheimer recalls overhearing a child in California saying to their father, ‘Daddy, daddy, what’s the moon meant to advertise?’ Horkheimer might have felt this apparent commodification of the life-world as a painful pang. (The line re-appears somewhat translated in Drew Milne’s poetic sequence ‘How Peace Came’ (1994).) For a radiator to be seen as a means for securing the domestic life-world against perceived threats to property could be said to indicate a comparable and worrying internalisation of security consciousness.

The institute prefers to discern an emergent trend in relational sculpture, a Duchampian twist on the colour field of plastics. The living room floor of the institute often resembles a rather anarchic installation by Tony Cragg and the institute would willingly throw open its doors for Richard Wentworth to give a talk on the implications for the animation of domestic spaces as situationist galleries.

Mobilo lock installation detail