Nobody Wants to Come Home from the Supermarket With a Bagful of Mouldy Bread

In the supermarket where I have been forced to pick up my parcels ever since the local post office closed down, I found a baguette in a plastic bag – the pre-baked kind that you bake in your own oven – which had passed its sell-by date by months. The plastic wrapping was nibbled, as if by a mouse, and the bread inside was covered in mould. In the same shop you can buy milk at half price if the date is the same as the best before date on the carton.
I never buy food there. I only pick up my parcels.

Nobody wants to watch yesterday’s news.
The news is by definition date marked. Legitimacy is achieved through people’s desire and ability to be receptive to the news content at a certain point in time. We are surrounded by the temporarily valid, what we call trends in everyday language and what will also, per definition, soon be dated. It could be anything, from TV programs to music to fashion. Permed hair, PLO scarves, vegetable dying, New Romantics, football player’s haircuts, shoulder pads… Next year’s summer hit will of course not be La Vida Loca and we won’t see as many young women wearing kerchiefs around their heads.

Everything has its own time.
Even the phenomenon which claims to be timeless and eternal seems to be affected by some sort of involuntary best before date. Ideologies and social experimentation, ideas and thoughts, philosophies. In hindsight they may be judged as dangerous, destructive or just hopelessly outmoded, even though their advocates may find it hard to agree. The less extensive the claims of the phenomenon, the easier it seems to be to accept that it has a best before date.

And it all may come back again, gain new currency and renewed influence – depending on the times, the desire and the ability to listen and absorb the information. Few people reacted to the involuntary sterilizations carried out in Sweden between 1935-76, at least a lot less than the critical voices which are raised today when it has once again been brought out in the open. We can only guess what the great mistakes of our time will be. The lesser mistakes are also difficult to predict. Dyslexia? Contact lenses? Ostrich meat?

Best Before is the title of this art project initiated by artists Åsa Andersson and Karin Hansson. The project has resulted in an exhibition, a catalogue and a web site which together constitute a whole. Each part can also be seen and read independently. The participating artists in the exhibition at Tensta Konsthall are, apart from Åsa Andersson and Karin Hansson, Anders Boqvist, Johan Fowelin, Mikael Lindgren, Kari Mjåtveit and Ola Pehrson. The artists are presented in this catalogue by freelance critic and writer Milou Allerholm.

Several of the participating artists focus on some of today’s more sensitive Best Before areas: advertising, information technology, and the market place. Since the project started with a general discussion on today’s information technology, the texts at this web site developed in this direction. As the work went on, it has come to focus on time, the mass media, and how reality and memories are created.

We approach a new century and also a new millennium. It is easy to submit to thinking in clichés when you want to say something about the times we live in. To say that we are living in a society where images and messages are pumped out at a rapid pace. That it is difficult to find your way through the informational buzz. That you have to ask yourself more and more often who you can trust. And that we are increasingly looking for our roots, our identity, our history.

Our memory consists of chosen fragments of history, regardless of whether it is our personal or our mutual history. We choose what will represent that which we call reality. And regardless of whether history is written by the winner or the loser, there is always somebody writing it. There is no objective truth. That may be our only remaining incontrovertible fact.
So who did create our history, and who was it invented by? What is real, what is the truth, how do we know whose information is the most reliable?
Who chose what at which time?

We have not tried to find answers to all our questions, our attempts have rather been to understand how reality and truth is constructed. We asked a number of people working in different professions to contribute. An archeologist, two artists, an art theorist, a scriptwriter for soaps, an author, and researchers on psychological warfare as well as the media. Our opening questions have multiplied and are approached from various points of view. Questions about reality and how we create it, depict it, capture it, disseminate it, about the relationship between our dreams and the mass media…

Translation Erika Johansson-Cowell

the project