SMUGGLE (1989) The work Smuggle succeeded in seducing die-hard businessmen to exchange a (artistic) concept for expensive goods. It all started when I was invited to make a work for an art gallery that found residence in a building across the stock exchange building in Holland and from whom its participants had offices in that building. The economical system is based on an idea of a circular closed system in which goods and values exchange. But nonetheless even in the times of Aristotle’s one found out that somewhere in this closed system something starts to 'leak' and endanger its circularity. I've followed such a trace by changing the good-value circulation for another more symbolic one: a concept-value exchange.

After weeks of appearing in different meetings the plan got accepted and the factory was so kind to give me their old wooden hangers instead of the then current plastic ones. It was all hung up in a shape that's something in-between a sculpture and a wardrobe hallstand. Because of the image that all these businessmen look like club members I paraphrased the member signs by putting on the letters that form the word smuggle. Smuggling different hidden connotations in given symbolic systems: art into the realm of economy and the notion of circularity through using the form of economy into the artistic system. Both of them are now -beyond Romanticism- mutually disseminated forever.

Specifications Dimensions: 9.00m. by 0.80m. Material: Aluminium box letters, high quality acrylate.

Exhibited: Die Zunge am Eis, Nova Zembla, Den Bosch, Holland (1990).