GENERALLY
Rules and games and coins are harbingers.
Chance is a director,
and the machine is manufactured.
It is a bearer and interface for unknown outcomes.
A white cube is a dice with no dots.
Here is the humour and instinct.
Here is the dogma and the construction.
The Centre is a receptacle of open-ended eventualities premised on a willingness to call oneself a gambler.
Structures are games.
Games are gambles.
Gambles are desires.
Desires are anti-intellectual.
Hard work and a silver spoon are not the only options.
Anti-formal and improper gestures pivot with repetition until unofficial activities win.
The historical avant-garde found antagonism between art and capitalism. This still exists.
I do not eat antagonism.
No.
Is it possible to recreate the ready-made?
Luck means being recognised as a material of art.
Start high and then go low.
The permacrisis is on the corner, and so is a salesman.
Where do we show and what?
There is no desire to be static.
We move towards full automatism.
Both charlatans and fortune tellers pursue knowledge.
Machines are an overdetermined concept,
so are institutions that work as machines but lose the brutalism of mechanics and hands of the multiple.
Praxis and play.
Parasite. Parasite.
Cellular.
Collect, examine, catalogue, edit, study, research, change, cross reference, number, assemble, classify, conserve, document.
For the fans and academics alike.
There is a keen interest in appalling behaviour.
Call for narratives of any kind—anti-narrative, non-narrative, para- narrative, semi-narrative, quasi-narrative, post-narrative, bad-narrative, striving-narrative.
No waste.
The spectacle is ingrained,
it is addressed with little invitation or explanation.
Art should be laden with humour and violence (when either is necessary) and softness (when calculated).
Political-erotic-mystical.
Non-precious art.
Peculiar and queer,
banal and mysterious.
There is a quotidian sense of loss and hope.
A focus on the singularity of a win.
A brokerage and a bedtime dream.
Art Brut is nice.
Multiples are stunning.
Objects are flytraps: they want interpretation and possession.
They are epistemic generators and models for permanent conferences. Institutions recede joy, but instituting may concede.
Vegas to the Vatican; art should be entertaining.
Presentations should be thematic.
Simulation, gossip, and scandal are useful materials
Manipulate comes from ‘manus’ – Adam Smith’s and now this.
Direct and misdirect.
Misleading.
Tell compelling stories.
“Works - Concepts - Processes - Situations - Information” Chancers - Artists - Situationists - Humorists.
Adverse to clever reticence and insubordination,
make the most of the spatial privilege of a white cube.
A MacGuffin.
This is beyond the shoplift protocol; the darlings have all been killed.
In service to the artist;
consider it all an experiment. Making is winning.
I refute the word gimmick,
and create the analogue spectacle of a techno-utopia.
SPECIFICALLY
The Centre for the Fictitious Ante Facto is a playful praxis and assemblage determined by mechanics and game logic, which are apparent in art and intuitions. This includes, but is not limited to, fads, flings, or fates.
The Centre for the Fictitious Ante Facto is a fully functional art centre or parasite institution
of Stockholm University. It is embedded in the University’s Curatorial Programme and Department of Culture and Aesthetics. It may be curatorially dispensed but must be artistically available and instrumentalised. The Centre is mobile and emphasises conviviality and deep sociality. It may rove on good merit and by application.
The Centre for the Fictitious Ante Facto’s architecture must be fully utilised because here is the invitation to move dead art into the hands of the masses. Thus, the machine and its arm or grabber may act as a curator, an editor, an artist, a collector, an oracle, an assistant, a researcher, or merely a container. The Centre is intentionally a white cube; however, its infrastructure is and will never be wholly neutral and should be approached as such.
All objects, artworks, experiments, games, and performances exhibited at The Centre for the Fictitious Ante Facto must invite a level of play and participation, noting that chance can be somewhat programmed but also outwitted by the visitor’s skill (which may result in damage or winnings). Its contents is up for grabs via the grabber at 10 SEK (minimum buy- in or ante). The outside market and inflation, which are the typical winners, are momentarily at bay. Thus, the commercial art market is not the appropriate fiction.
The Centre for the Fictitious Ante Facto premises experiments, especially at the boundary of craft, design, and found media, to establish new information systems while creating conditions for disagreement and desire. Projects within the space must render some distribution. Functional and non-functional boundaries matter, as do materials, size, weight, and shape, given that they control the probability of winners and losers. Artists can tend towards impossibility or possibility by programming the grabber and thus setting the value of their work by increments of 10 SEK and slippage. Editioned works are favourable, as are ephemeral ones. There is no desire to be flippant here, but its contents must be obsessive.
The Centre for the Fictitious Ante Facto is a construction whose producers are sometimes a fiction.
The Centre for the Fictitious Ante Facto’s visitors are players, knowers, and dupes; this is their quotidian attempt. Stockholm University does not have an ATM. Sweden is cashless. Winners come prepared.
The Centre for the Fictitious Ante Facto can be read as an ergodic text.
The Centre for the Fictitious Ante Facto believes that small celebrations are the most important entity of art.
The Centre for the Fictitious Ante Facto is learning within the closed system of the machine’s instinct and the expansion of chance encounters. We note that contemporary art does not obey one programme, so there are no real restrictions (except outright painting – which is unacceptable). Thus, we contravene the internal rules of the para-institution for play.
ADDITIONALLY
Like the ready-made of Marcel Duchamp.
Like the ready-made sounds of John Cage.
Like the ready-made actions of George Brecht and Ben Vautier.
Like Musée d’Art Moderne, Départment des Aigles of Marcel Broodthaers.
Like Disneyland for Jean Baudrillard.
THE MACHINE IS FOR RENT
The centre for the fictitious ante facto is of the opinion that habitual desire and humour are inherent to art, neither of which can be understood without chance.
If it is an irrevocable failure, then it has met its potential.
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