To approach the work of the Institutt for Degenerert Kunst (translates to the Institute of Degenerate Art) is to see almost every single technique, topic, fascination, proclivity and visual/textual strategy known to the 20th century avant-gardes adapted to the logic of two highly singular media formats: The blog, on the one hand, and the interior design photograph on the other.

Between these two formats, you can have it all: messed-up performative bodies, blurry video art, conceptualist elaborations, 1950’s formalism, painterly self-referentiality, dynamic sculpture, a love of the art-crime connection, a return to the aestheticism of Huysmans and the Gauthier brothers and the Mexican Dadaism of Roberto Bolano.
 
You can have a punk-style fascination with Nazi identities (recall Hitler’s exhibition of degenerate art), anarchist celebration of idleness, countercultural critique of the school system and the culture of obedience and aesthetics of bureaus, offices and institutes.
 
You can have arts & crafts, 1980’s industrial noise, the beauty of ephemeral gestures and random details, chaotic environments, dark mysticism, Beuysian disintegrating objects, futurist simultaneity and found film materials.
 
You can have moments of musical meditation, breakdown of the separation between the senses, George Bush quotes and yet another instance of the tendency to speak of your art movement in the third person feminine, as a vaguely outlined and attractively evasive persona. “She”– the Institutt for Degenerert Kunst – will be this and that and the other thing, except whatever might serve to pin her down.

On first appearance then, radical heterogeneity, a free-for-all that refuses to explain or excuse itself.

But what mobilizes this first appearance is a definite structuring principle, a design format whose ramifications work perfectly alongside some of the most pervasive features of the contemporary mediascape. One could of course use a technical term like “convergence” to describe the way in which avant-garde practices that would otherwise be completely incompatible – technically, strategically, philosophically and politically – here seem to coexist peacefully on the same platform, in the way digital technologies unite preciously separate media technologies through the language of algorithmic code. But this is not precise enough. For it is, more specifically, the logics and aesthetics of the blogosphere that underlies IDK’s seemingly unprincipled combination of practices – and not just because of the fact that they do actually present their many activities through a number of blog spaces.

The blogosphere – the interconnected spaces of currently more than 133 million individual blogs – is a realm in which a variety of interests, perspectives and fascinations are shared with a rapidity and dynamism that present new challenges for the science of infometrics (the study of the quantitative aspects of information). These days, businesses and political bodies need help to predict and respond to what is referred to as the “wildfire” spread of emotions across the world. The dynamics of public media attention is in other words compared to the reaction patterns in so-called excitable media – nonlinear dynamic systems that have the capacity to propagate a wave formation of one kind or another. Wildfires are excitable media, but so are pathological activities in the brain or swarms of insects – the trick is in other words to both control and feed off the wavelike surges of emotions that take over the world with unprecedented speed and efficiency.

However, as significant as the dynamic wave patterns of collective emotions is the fact that the blogosphere compresses affective materials into four standardized formats: photographs, videos, sound files and texts. And these are all contained within the equally standardized format of a scrollable screen image. Whatever is outsize, slow, messy, unformed, unwieldy or just plain untimely is compressed, shaped and contained within these four neat formats – as seen for instance in the constantly updated blog named Contemporary Art Daily, which tracks a myriad art exhibitions around the world through an endless series of deadpan installation shots. For everything having to do with art, this formatting implies a tremendous privileging of visual information – in fact a type of purely visual focus, wit and intelligence that shares a number of features with standard design capacities. This is the actual principle of convergence under which previously incompatible avant-garde practices meet up and join forces in the work of IDK. And this is the principle according to which their offerings might – at least on a technical level – be termed “degenerate”, since a value neutral definition simply describes degeneracy as the loss of some property, order or distinctness of structure that was previously present. Hence the fragments of a long, complicated, antagonistic and radically multimedial and multi-materialist avant-garde history are smoothed out and recombined so as to comply with the rapid flow of digitalized visual information that serves the equally rapid dynamics of public fascination.

Or, put differently: Smoothed out and recombined so as to comply with a predominantly emotional form of address.

This is not to say that IDK’s output only exists in the digital realm and has no other material grounding. On the contrary, the productions of the institute include highly elaborate installations and actions where the tangibility of materials, color effects, movements and spatial manipulations are absolutely central. Painterly and sculptural skills are much in evidence, framing a reality of things that range from the obviously “artistic” to the ordinary. And – as if to further underscore the issue of real-world physicality – their installations often present themselves as scenes of minor catastrophes, cleverly mining the repertoire of destruction in art for added sensorial impact. A tiny bit of chaos is always a tiny bit of a wake-up call. As the Johan Berggren Gallery in Malmö was subjected to a pandemonium of half-destroyed objects that had been slammed against the wall or burned or subjected to other kinds of violently spontaneous treatment, the local critic was predictably impressed by the “baptism of fire” the gallery had had to go through.
Yet, if one thing unites all these demonstratively physical scenarios, it is – above all – photogeneity.

No matter how chaotic, IDK’s installations are guided by a unique sense of design, a feeling for just the right color combinations, just the right distribution of density and spaciousness, just the right mix of banality and cleverness, with great attention to lighting effects, centerpiece objects and spatial rhythms. It is, in fact, as if every installation, every action had been designed for being photographed, the spaces organized according to visual/formal principles the way interior photographers reorganize and prune an interior for maximum pictorial impact, adding colorful details that will “tie the room together”. It is this fundamental photogeneity that feeds back into the overall blog logic of IDK’s project, where installations are presented as just so many attractive interiors worthy of a potential “Destruction” issue of Wallpaper magazine. And it is also this basic photogeneity that feeds into the speedy dynamics of excitable media, where the force of instant emotional appeal is taken to the nth level thanks to what 19th century sociologist Gabriel Tarde described as the ontological basis for any definition of social life; notably the diffusion and imitation of ideas, beliefs, thoughts and emotions.

Any critical idea of aesthetics depends on the identification of a mode of construction that reflects the particular forms of subjectivation to which the work – explicitly or implicitly – attests. From such a perspective IDK’s compression of all and anything into an almost provocatively diffusion-friendly type of formatting could be said to be constructed alongside a more general principle of sharing that differentiates itself in important ways from the two main modes of subjectivation associated with modern art. On the one hand, it stands in marked contrast to the appeal to individual aesthetic appreciation associated with modernism’s formalist exercises. But on the other hand, it also distinguishes itself from the addressing of social collectives through (more or less violent) interventions in public space – the strategy associated with the avant-garde’s performative operations. The emphasis on the dynamics of sharing and its connection to a social ontology of imitation and invention then contrasts with a definition of sociality founded on the notion of a capitalist public sphere split between passive individual consumers and newly activated or politicized collectives. In their recklessly visualist compression and displacement of the work of the 20th century avant-gardes, IDK may – just possibly – outline the promises and problems of a new type of public sphere.