“The Young-Girl doesn’t age. She decomposes.” Tiqqun, Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl, Paris, Semiotext(e), 2012, p.45
In 1976, architect and writer Bernard Tschumi conceived a series of postcards for his project Manifesto 3 : Advertisements for Architecture. One read: “The most architectural thing about this building is the state of decay in which it is. Architecture only survives where it negates the form that society expects of it. Where it negates itself by transgressing the limits that history has set for it.”
Tschumi’s pithy aphorism re-imagines a building’s decay or time-based transformation as part of its measurable quality and inherent value. The implication is that newness is not necessarily a structure’s ideal and only perfect form.
If architectural practices of “restoration” and “preservation” are ones oriented around returning to or maintaining an “original” or “authentic” state, then we see similar efforts engaged against the patrimony of our bodies, faces, and their innate impermanence.
The currency ascribed to youth, and its positioning as the optimal state in which to exist, lies at the core of Linnea Skoglösa’s solo, Ultra Currency, at NEVEN. The exhibition expands upon the artist’s investigations into preoccupations with self-optimisation, consumerism, and their impasses with performances of contemporary femininity. Skoglösadraws from French collective Tiqqun’s concept of the “Young-Girl”, the avatar of the model citizen within and as defined by consumer society. The Young-Girl is the product of consumer society’s colonisation of youth and sexuality; she is capitalism’s ultimate form of merchandise. The Young-Girl is not a real woman. She is, in fact, not necessarily a gendered figure, nor even a youthful one. Rather, she is the socially-constructed image of total integration in a disintegrating social totality, a vehicle for product, a machine for desire, a living currency and, therefore, a cypher for the many pressures and rewards promised by an economy of perpetual consumption, conservation, restoration, and, increasingly, amplification.
Skoglösa’s exoskeleton-like sculptural assemblages combine deconstructed fitness equipment, domestic furniture, mechanical hardware and car parts in often anthropomorphic combinations. In Ultra Currency, the artist presents an aquarium, elevated on a cabinet, containing a single, floating metal appendage, a bionic femur, enhanced, preserved and on display. Dormant behind glass, it still pulsates with high function and performance potential. In its vitrine, the object becomes both artefact and product-like, a specimen for display and consumption. The vitrine as apparatus is defined as having four functions:
1. Conservation
2. Security
3. Preservation
4. Enhanced Viewing
As such, it could be considered an exemplary infrastructure to house – and create – desirability. In this context, an object is to be conserved, amplified and displayed to its ultimate seductive potential, exemplifying the ideologies that Skoglösa observes animating the cosmetic, wellness and fitness industries, the currency of the Young- Girl, and the appeal of “transgressing the limits that history has set for [us]”.
Skoglösa’s paintings in turn grapple with the pressures and neuroses that accompany the pursuit of increasingly unachievable standards. A suite of frenetic canvases traverse two of the gallery wall, their gestural, expressive painterliness positioned as an angsty, human counterpart to the slick sculptural installation which is largely composed of industrially-manufactured parts. With their layers of paint, scratched and worked away, the paintings unwittingly reveal what lies beneath the surfaces, beneath layers of skin, or – in the case of Ultrasmooth – beneath the thick coating of an Aztec Clay face mask, speaking to the thin veneer that is perfect, high-performance totality.