Rewind: Instant Coffee
69 Pender, Vancouver
69 Pender, Vancouver
When the Toronto-Vancouver collective Instant Coffee declared last year "The Year of Love," few Instant Coffee watchers expected any eventual project to be very much about love. Instead, we expected lots of purloined pornography, tongue-in-cheek (and mouth) Valentine's celebrations and a few well-designed bits of ephemera (stencils, stickers, posters) made to poke fun at the very idea of affection.
Instant Coffee, after all, have made a career out of being playful party planners, of putting as little effort into actual (they would argue "traditional") art-making as possible.
Imagine my surprise, then, when I stumbled on the installation BASS BED—a giant, pillowy platform designed for snuggling, caressing and the inducing of hickeys. Instant Coffee made art! Real, physical art that you can look at and touch. I guess love means never having to say you spent your materials budget on beer.
The BASS BED is a simple enough affair (pun intended)—a really big horizontal couch equipped with hidden subwoofers and an ancient rumpus-room turntable. The gag is, you put on a sexy 45, hop in bed and, as the band Shriekback sang in the '80s, let your spine be the bass line. Hardly the most complex device, the BASS BED reminded me of those vibrating recliner chairs furniture stores sell at the Canadian National Exhibition. However, the carefully chosen accompanying decor showed that IC were offering more than a quick rub-down.
Aging, fibrous (and very ugly) afghans covered the bed, making it look like something from a seniors'-home TV lounge. There is something relieving about an ugly afghan—it mutes all questions of taste and restraint. Also on hand were a truckload of attractive, decor shop-worthy stencilled pillows, a specially made romance-novel wallpaper and dozens of neon-coloured doily posies and crotchet squares constructed from the itchiest of nylon fabrics.
The collision of flowery (grand)maternal culture and sex play in this work is provocative and charmingly goofy—it's as if the collective seeks to deconstruct its own bedroom-farce naughtiness with tea cozies and sachets, to both acknowledge and undermine our baser libidinal drives while thwarting our romantic attachments to the idea of Romance.
Cecilia Berkovic's clever romance-novel wallpaper succinctly conveys this attraction-repulsion. Depicting the spines of hundreds of bodice-ripper paperbacks and cassettes—the titles of which have been attacked with a black marker until only the word "love" is visible—the wallpaper is both a tribute to and a literal erasure of the corporate love industry.
Not content to simply assemble their love shack and leave the romance to chance, Instant Coffee staged a series of events with the big bed acting as centre stage. For a couple of cold mid-winter weeks, a down-at-heels end of Vancouver got its groove back.
Summer 2005
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