You Are Not Here

Juan Ortiz-Apuy’s Fountain Mist is disorienting, like the moment a dream snaps into a nightmare. You are not here. A spectre haunts the mixed-media installation, stalking through the sheen of blues, oranges, and yellows—the spectre of someone else’s dream being imposed on you, also known as advertising.

The dream is at its eeriest in a series of six framed digital collages (96 x 73 cm) that line two of the walls of the Owens Art Gallery. Each collage in the series of alternating Sunlight-yellow and Windex-blue backdrops foregrounds a glittering silver hand, with fingers slathered in paint. The thumb and middle fingers touch, pinching as if to snap, presenting objects ranging from a perfume bottle to a parrot. The formulaic goal of advertising—to produce new desires and promise their realization through a proffered commodity—is superficially obscured given the absence of brand names and inclusion of various other seemingly random objects in the frame. These collage images are unified by their origin in the stock databases from which Ortiz-Apuy downloaded them.

“One of the important things about the installation I think is the logic that I used for putting it together. I was interested in this idea of stock,” Ortiz-Apuy remarked in an interview with the Owens Art Gallery. “Stock, for me, represents this idea of mass production of something that is equally reproduced ad infinitum.”

“Fountain Mist” sounds like the name of SodaStream flavour, and of course it is one. It is also the name for the colour of a paint. Two additional product names are inscribed in the exhibition, “Bestå” and “Olov.” Ortiz-Apuy has combined the Ikea products—a storage unit and a desk, respectively—into a disjointed white display table, which sits atop a 6 x 8 x 1 foot black box at the centre of the room.

Various objects have been placed on the table. A small yellow-green pot with three artificial bananas rising out of it like preening dolphins. An unlabeled lime shampoo bottle. Two 3D-printed sculptures of amalgamated stock objects, shaped like skeletal models of knee joints, doubling as desk lamps or hour glasses. The only organic item, a bonsai tree, is also the only one that rests on the black box.

The black box’s presence in the centre of the room makes it harder to know how to navigate the space, though you do not long for the floor arrows that direct your movement through Ikea showrooms.

Ortiz-Apuy has left the Ikea stickers on the white display table, perhaps since the Swedish names are so suggestive in light of the exhibition’s interest in how commodities speak. Bestå translates as “remain” or “consist of” and Olov as “ancestor’s descendant.” Ortiz-Apuy complements these connotations by including two small stone talismans from his native Costa Rica, which are each more than 400 years old. This gesture of including the artifacts situates the commodity form in a larger historical frame. It might likewise hint at the hopefully damning question of what future anthropologists could glean about capitalist social relations through the mass consumption of—and reverence for—global, yet Swedish, standardized furniture that is produced on the only kind of supply chain possible, i.e., one that simultaneously concentrates and disperses exploitation. The stickers say “Made in China” and “Made in Poland,” referencing Ikea’s two biggest suppliers of cheap labour.

The hands in Ortiz-Apuy’s digital collages do not “make” anything; they are ornamental, there only to present objects. Assembled elsewhere, the prefabricated objects on display produce an intense feeling of dislocation that resonates with how commodities are produced and circulate within
capitalism.

Such dislocation is integral to the commodity form, given the nightmare of commodity fetishism. As Marx famously describes the phenomenon in Volume 1 of Capital (1867): “the definite social relation between men themselves […] assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things.”

Ortiz-Apuy’s objects interact, though not so much in the obfuscating, sense of exchange-value, but rather through replication and juxtaposition. Ortiz-Apuy describes the associations between objects in terms of the archaeological concept of “sympathetic magic.”

“I’m interested in mimesis or, more than anything, sympathetic magic,” Ortiz-Apuy told the Owens. “This idea of something sort of drawing power from something else by means of likeness or imitation.”

Power coursing through and between objects…might this be how an advertiser dreamily repackages the nightmare of commodity fetishism?