TO FREEZE THE TIME
BJÖRN DAHLSTÖRM,
INDEPENDENT CURATOR
2007

Frozen 45” by :mentalKLINIK transports us into an era yet to come, the Biot technosociety where we can model our own bodies becoming the actor and the subject simultaneously. Indiscernible in its application, Frozen 45” is a treatment of the future whose effects are discerned through the Biot transformation process and it offers to fix the transformation of the skin. The faces of the visitors become then an invisible sculpture disclosing the way the museums may exhibit the Biot when the frontiers between humans and objects no longer exist.

This is the principle of this miraculous product, a cosmetic, regulator of time and portrait sculptor, conceived by :mentalKLINIKand praised by the mini guide of Tomorrow Now when design meets science fiction exposition for which Frozen 45” has been imagined. The public is invited to experiment it at Mudam, Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Luxembourg until the 25th of September 2007.

It is around the theme of pharmacopoeia that  :mentalKLINIK takes advantage of the secular sweaty dream of humanity: to master the time and its effects. Psycho-pharmacy is largely addressed in the exposition, notably with the presentation of Hans Hollein’s architecture pill, a representative project of homeostasis at the service of modified environments. A simple colored pill in a transparent wrapping, «control kit of the non-physical environment» to quote the expression of its author, that takes responsibility - with irony- for creating a sane equilibrium between the environment and its occupant. With Frozen 45” the medication no longer works orally but through spraying onto the face, the solution effects in priority the body and no longer the spirit immediately. The subject receives the treatment leaning against a conical octagonal stupa which looks like a trans-door and which becomes a treatment cabin. Also a thermo-sensitive, self-sticking pastille applied again onto the skin, controls the effects of the medication on the patient during 45 minutes, the amount of time required to visit the Tomorrow Now exhibition, as indicated by the product. All is at the cost of 3 €.

Is Frozen 45” a placebo? What matters is the predisposition of the patient- A Dorian Gray feeble for three-quarters of an hour-in the naive follow up of the ceremony imagined by the Turkish Collective which takes the visitor into pleasured anxiety. What is the validity of the treatment and its potential danger? Is the museum still today one of the last places where such experiments can be conducted?

One is tempted to believe that it is the case, abandoned to the treatments of the mediators of the museum who apply the process literally, activating humor and conviviality, the relational esthetic as defined by Nicolas Bourriaud, or the esthetic of communication as initiated by Fred Forest in the 80s which queries the problematics attached to our perception of time and space, and even more here, to our relation to art as a model of simulation against powers- the salesman of eternal youth, their industrial cosmetics and their possible placebo effect which may be even nocebo. As it is exemplified in their global projects GAME, COPY, SELF..., that is where :mentalKLINIKis situated, beyond the merchants of systems and institutions of art in a world where everything happens as if art evades the traditional modes of diffusion and takes possession of everything.