What Does the Number Say?

Elin Wikström 2001. The artist’s performance is broadcast live over the Internet. Real >>

Tues-Thu 11-14 and 15-18, Fri-Sun 11-16 during the course of the exhibition, Elin creates a performance that will be sent in real time over the Internet to the Kulturhuset. Visitors to the exhibition can see the process via a monitor. It can also be followed at the web address www.splintermind.com/beeoff/

Elin Wikström on the project:
My contribution to Money is a performance where I count and count. To count is to successively study persons, objects, or events. To research what, and how many, the people, objects, or events are. To designate something or someone to be or not to be something or someone. To compare the worth of something or someone to be the same as, higher, or lower than the worth of another. To keep track, of, for example, an economic relationship between one or more parties, how much one owes or is owed, or of seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, and years. To decide something or someone’s origin to be from a certain time, or starting point, the way the height of a mountain is counted from sea level. To count is also to keep someone accountable, to be a bother, but it can also be a way of caring for something or someone. In tricks, games, and magic, one sometimes counts backwards, or in another order than the usual. For example, while planning this project, I happened upon this magic formula: hold the cyst with all five fingers and count three and seven and nine and eight and one and none, and it will disappear; and this trick: one who is paralysed with excitement or rage shall count to twenty, and it will soon blow over.
In my performance, I play with the picture painted by the majority of representatives for the economic world, of economy as an exact science and force of nature. It needs no argument and no numbers. “Set the market free, and the invisible hand will solve all our problems.” I parody the role which I am given in a strict economistic mindset. Someone who takes every chance to study all the alternatives, and who always chooses the most economically advantageous. Still, if I were to ask my mechanic how long the rear axle of my car is expected to last, I would probably get a wishy-washy answer, even though exact measurement have been made on every little screw. Even if I, in a decision-making position, were able to digest each bit of relevant information, I would not make decisions which were primarily market-oriented; rather, I would choose something which was useful enough and with which I was pleased at that moment. But instead, I am expected to be a robot, dispensing of my resources in the most rational manner possible.
We use numbers to count things, to measure time, as statistics, to play, buy and sell, rank, and grade. The wares in the stores have barcodes. People have passport numbers and bank account numbers. My height, weight, age, body temperature, and IQ are measured in numbers. When I am asked my telephone number, I do not say twohundredtwothousandeighthundredseventyeight; and I do not say that it’s bigger than my Mom’s, which is only 81108, or my Dad’s, which is 16821. But what do they say and what do they hide, the numbers that move in the flow of products, services, and knowledge about people, things and the value of events? About how and where borders are drawn for what can be seen as yours, mine, or ours, and about the real exchange and utilization of resources?

Elin Wikström was born in 1965 in Västerås, Sweden, and lives and works in Gothenburg. Elin is one of Sweden’s most acclaimed young artists. She works above all with performance, and many of her works deal with odd economic realities. Such as the time she filled a gallery with items which she later returned, only to buy new items, only to return them, for the duration of the exhibition. Like Pina Bausch, she repeats small motions ad absurdum, making them monumental.

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