Renewable Energy

The immanent demise of eO inc. was given greater poignancy with the announcement of an exhibition at Malmo Konsthall, The Hamsterwheel.

“The Hamsterwheel is an exhibition initiated by the Austrian artist Franz West, and was originally presented at La Biennale di Venezia, 2007. The exhibition has since then travelled to the Festival de Printemps de Septembre, Toulouse, and Centre d’Art Santa Monica, Barcelona. At each exhibition venue the presentation of the works and relation to each other changes dramatically.

The Hamsterwheel can be seen as a playful comment to the wheel of life – the life as an artist. A wheel where we struggle to go forward, to get ahead. That always takes us forward, and still – at the end – nowhere. The exhibition attempts to show art as turbulence.

Having for many years watched, and been part of, many artists initiatives driven by committed, energetic, optimistic artists, that finally collapse under the pressures of a huge voluntary workload with little financial support or return, the “hamsterwheel” seems an apt metaphor.
But is the impassioned energetic activity simply wasted? One suspects that there is a drive mechanism attached to wheel, which, as artists instinctively struggle to go forward, generates power to keep the top heavy apparatus of the art industry lurching onwards.

Replica of a human hamster wheel, used in the 1700s to 'put the sick person back on the right track'. From the Glore Psychiatric Museum.

It is amazing that an activity carried out by a group of people, the majority of whom cannot make enough money from it to earn a living, can give rise to the huge infrastructure of well paid administrators, managers, cultural planners, curators, critics and writers, academics, gallery operators, government officers etc. We are of course grateful for the contribution they make to the industry.

Designed by Swedish physician Gustav Zander in the late nineteenth century