A SALE
SANNA HELENA BERGER
8th Sept 2018, 13.00, Platform 8
Vanderborght Building, Second Floor
Rue de l’Ecuyer, 50 Schildknaapsstraat
1000, Brussels





























'A sale' is a situation specific performance which through the medium of performance places, on sale, the concept of performance.
This is a work in response to the criteria for proposals set by 'A Performance Affair', a new art fair
specifically for performance which took place during Brussels Art Weekend, 2018.
Represented by SUPER gallery, performed by Marie Lüder.

The work directly entered into dialogue with these guidelines.
One of the requirements to participate in "not yet another fair", on a "flexible platform” to
"stimulate discourse around the economies of performance" (quotes from the information pack) was that the work was on sale.
Berger who does not make commercial art works, proposed a work that was A sale (performing a sale as the sale of a performance).
The call to explore "the economies of performance” then became "the performance of economies”.

The sale of “A sale’ is in itself a potential perpetual income.
The purchase of ‘A sale’ is the purchase of the concept of performance, not the content of this performance.
As the sale has been finalised the buyer will enter into a production of its rhizome scheme.
The performance purchased is the exact same performance re-produced. ‘A sale’ could in theory,
loop into a never ending advertisement, purchased, promoted and resold without ever producing a product.

The fair which this work is in response to advertises itself as an exclusive exhibition.
A platform where one can co-exist with the major fair in Brussels reaching a new audience.
The pleasure of which you pay a fee for and engage in exactly the same structure as any other fair, even as it claims to be “not yet another fair”.
The art-actors extraordinaires who organize the fair advertise themselves as movers and shakers in the Brussels art scene and promise large amounts of visitors.
On the day of my performance there is a total lack of support.
We ask for a chair to use as part of the performance but the fair does not see it as their responsibility to lend us any.

There are several chairs aimlessly strewn about the space.
Once my performance starts the ‘live feed’ which was advertised as one of the main groundbreaking features of the event enters in 5 minutes post performance.
It is a girl filming with an ipad.
Halfway through they start to scramble up chairs into the area because people are leaning against walls, crouching down, some of them elderly. It creates a ruckus.
The filming is choppy and shaky and cuts out several times.
The audience is scarce and seems scared, people are not sure where to stand. On the ground floor of the grand cement palace - The Vanderborght Building,
which undoubtedly felt good in the mouth of the fair director, sits a chichi cafe which serves champagne and croissants.
There is a rope which separates the paying customers to the very important people, both spaces are entirely linked except for the rope.
I enter under it and grab croissants and champagne for friends.
Black box cars sponsored by the Brussels art fair pull up to The Vanderborght Building -
a group in black steps into the building and cross the rope as we exit and leave. The private event awaits.

On 9 Aug 2018, at 18:44, Sanna Helena Berger wrote:
...a challenge of their narrative fallacy. This begins with their own statement of being "not being yet another fair".
Immediately one must question how it can collect under another domain,
when one of the requirements for partaking is that the works can be bought.
Is this not the epitome of a fair?
Something on show - for sale. The audacity of this implied moral hierarchy of art that is shown in "not-another-fair"
milieu whilst outlining the requirements set for just-another-fair - a booth fee disguised as a cleaning fee,
all works on show; for sale.
This is the kind of neo-materialist humour that should be commented on, the farce of
contemporar-
y situations
that is the sawing off of the legs of a structure which one is standing on.
(Representatives of Fondazione Prada capsizing into the Venice canal comes to mind)

What is the "economies of performance"? There is the value which cannot be remunerated -
experience,
there is the value that can accumulate - sensationalism, documentation, repetition and then there is the value that
inherently is the value of art, immediate implied intellectual interest / investment.
To economise is to carefully manage available resources.
Surely this is the opposite of how we treat performance in a contemporary setting?
The experience of the performance appears on par (if not secondary) with/to the documentation of the performance which flows in
abundance into the ether, not only post-performance but contemporaneously, as an extension of the live event (experience),
highlighting one’s presence, one's abilities to jet-set.
The documentation of the performance is usually the medium through which a live performance is experienced,
attendance will always be limited, this can of course be applied to most art experiences,
but the performance is the even more illusive,
it is the fleeting, the temporary, and so the possibility to document,
thus gather proof of one’s presence, at this fleeting event is of even higher value.
This creates a schism; a crevasse that splits open the experience which makes it impossible to reactivate the performance without the spectacle;
a sensationalist structure.
The value of the work is generated and determined by its aesthetic compliance to a contemporary general aesthetics -
i.e of its appeal to add to one's lifestyle - one's representative imagery of one's lifestyle; one's feed.
One claims the documentation of the performance as a shard in the mosaics of the performativity of one’s life.

I am selling a basic category, the experience generative material produced by experience generated material.
I am the item.
I am both the instrument and the environment.

I am the indefinite article as indisputable presence; a product as the result of a process.
I have come to Brussels to facilitate a particular experience. The particular experience as the ultimate value.
This is a temporary creation, an already outdated information-artifact.

I am the persuasion of merits. I abandon the principles for reasons of expedience. A cause for blind enthusiasm, a bind.

Can you sense this scent?
The almost non-perfume.
I am a free sample!
The synthesised by-product, an unintended but inevitable secondary result. I am the representative body.
If I perspire from commercial activity it is with the fragrance of this instant.
This very intimate instant.



As a consequence of other parties going well beyond the maximum, I become both subject and object,
a long list of accolades of which I simultaneously nominate and award the act.

This is an act.

The artist that I represent is the use-value, this hour is indistinguishable from work from life from life’s work.
We’ve paid 300 euros to the organisers of this fair to be able to tell you this. To sell you this.
This is a sale of ‘A sale.
The limited edition of 5 is a scarcity. A reflexive commentary.

I am the potentially perpetual income, relaxing in the permanent. I am a so-far unknown cost.
I am the exchange rate of work for work, a labour that is a rarity.
I will climb as a finite stock as prestige on an aspirational index.
I am the obscure and I am the potentially perpetual income, relaxing in the permanent.
I am a so-far unknown cost.

I am the exchange rate of work for work, a labour that is a rarity.
I will climb as a finite stock as prestige on an aspirational index.
I am the obscure and the unlikely owned in a market of pedestrian products.

I am an executive toy, a promotional tool.



This piece is hard. As it is not a piece. A piece is a something completed, fixed and consequently dead. The stasis of forms.

The ritual, socially rendered, culturally reproduced is a convention, a routine, the habitually conservative.
The monumental becomes monotonous.
But I am the limited. I’ll unfold as a purchase signalling the aspirational self.
I will exhaust the single narrative as a rapid complexity, the vast coherent incoherence as antidote to the handheld object.

I am not the I, I, singular, I am the I opposing the neutral experience.
I introduce the materially non-existing, base-notes heavy with richness of unbridled independence.
But initiated into the style of society, with material blessings, I am a sparsely decorated private-property, the air refreshed.
I am then, could be, the transparent catalogue, a carefully considered corruption, the desired discreet. The fabrication of fetish.



I am shifting tactics now. Instead of the she that was the I.
I am now a gift wrapped.



A figure fixed within a ceremony of fancy fascinations. I am the cult of value and rarity, I am the established taste.
I reflect the raw material of corruptibility. This, then, is the it of it.
It is the artful representation of the I. It is the imminent desire, desired with the intensity of presence.
It is the unique value, the one off, without equivalence.
It is the body just underneath.

It is expectation.
It is the sweet and lacerating being of beings. It is the private perversion.
It is the piece.
The work-stop, sex-stop, self-stop.




I am now the shown everything through the non-revealing of anything.
I am carefully woven heavy wool, actually, maybe a cashmere blend. I speak with the privilege of behaving as if I am the privilege of it.
Appearing and disappearing with the promiscuity of bloated ambition, excessively wealthy and pampered.
I am the escort of things, of events on display in a private sale.
I am the superfluous elegance and the lucrative accumulation of obligation.
I am, now not here, but in a room, within a room within a room.
Grey minimal sofas with soft and supple seating obstruct the circulation of this room, clink, clink,
a murmur is heard of talks about the-non-stop-travel as the exhaustive must to enter this room.



This is the there that will never be what it seems.
Manifesting as the presence of super essence, the high-brow back room is stuffed with cleaners.
Sanitising the arena with purifying distance from the potential non-member.
My being-the-someone-through-socialising is a lucrative act.
The extravagant pay-off of a well-managed system. Authenticity parasitism.
I am the sensational over the substantial.

An intimate act performed during a private audience, a tete a tete, and in this inside is where I passionately exploit the rituals of machinery.
I am the violence, the capitalism of time, work-time, life-time, all time. The rhizome doesn’t foster separation or passivity.
But I am the triangle that expands our world and reduces it to nothing. A central organ in a complete vacuum.

An advertisement.



I produce and consume and produce and consume and produsume and coduce and pronsuce and cronsume,
I produce nothing. I am the culture of owning things.
The every-day life of pure consumption. The every-day life is pure consumption.
I am the it!
The no return policy.
It is a slippery narrative but trust in its incomprehension.



It is on sale in the sale, ‘A sale’.
It is not the author or the maker but the infinite price of unbelievable presence.
It is unique value, the pricelessness for sale.
It is the original, a one-off and a re-generative experience, the singular generating the singular.
The impossibility of virtuosity.
It is an experience-of-youth-generator. Refresh yourself!
You know it, the process of normalisation, the facade of freedom. You can own it, what you own you own yown, (yawns)
A sale is never a whole-truth, even as an uncovered secret, the known con, the lying producer is a natural presence in the social life,
the socialite. There is no truth in the presence of the presentation of truth.
A product is the product of a productofaproductproooooddductprr –

To be clear – this is a sale, I am selling something – you can buy this performance.
You can buy the concept of performance not the content of performance.
‘A sale’ by Sanna Helena Berger is a situation specific performance.
The concept of performance is for sale according to the criteria of the call for proposals by A performance affair.
The work directly enters into dialogue with these guidelines.
One of the requirements to participate in “not yet another fair”, on a “flexible platform” to “stimulate discourse around the economies of performance” is that the work is for sale.

Sanna Helena Berger does not make work on sale so she proposes a work that is a sale (performing the sale of the sale of a performance).
The call to explore “the economies of performance” is then “the performance of economies”.

A percentage of A sale will be donated to ‘23102015’.
The performance will thus “stimulate the acquisition of performance while finding solutions for its development and sustainability.”
23102015 is an Endowment Fund created by Guillaume Maraud, based in Paris dedicated to promoting critically engaged art practices
and a Research Platform on private philanthropy.
This will support the development of works that “stimulates discourse around the economies of performance”.
The purchase of the performance is the buyers want to purchase the concept of performance, not the content of performance.
The sale will be managed by SUPER and finalised in ‘A private event’.

.. and then there is the Artist’s statement.

Confused, angry but pleasing. One wants it both ways.
A presence endlessly oscillation between self-censoring and self-circulating, between invention and negativity.
A steal within the economy of presence. Awake to the illusion that one could remain at a purifying distance from the marketable object hood of self.

It might all seem like anti market sentimentalism and this is after all
the high period of the manageably, moderately skeptical.
The skill of appearing aloof whilst being an urgent object.

My self is codependent on the obligatory circuit of centrality.
I am trying to maneuver the booth, but – and – this is the self – comes into the position of the object.
Is the vitalism of this performance a superfluous elegance wasted on the abstract event on display?

Is my narrative a long and monotonous effort to advance the dialogue a facade of freedom?
This is an exhausting labour to perform, it is a submission to an obsession with the ideal form of matter. vThe matter of the scripted turning into a spatial existence.
There are immaterial barricades, pit falls and trap doors in attempting pure performativity without products.

Sex is nothing much, intellect only reach as far as it is the familiar uncanny power of nothingness,
much like art is still claiming a special privilege and behaving as if it had one.

We desire value and we value desire but we de-value desire as fetish, the non-trade of transactions. I can’t make a living like this.
There is no pure form, there is the purely formal which imitates form. But it is the constant rearrangements of things. Things on sale.

A presentation, an artful presentation of the referential archive, rearranged so as to give the illusion of something new,
not something borrowed or something old, but this is a lack of sensibility
which gives the commercial mass the material values of the bourgeoisie culture of things.

Attraction is referential, my proposal is the other voice.
The parallel narrative. You are not the lack of sensibility in the life-world, it is the ones
who possess the ability to be logos. The popular reception of works of high culture should arouse sceptiscm.

You gaze at the other with the gaze of the other, role playing cultural agents of an elite mass.
Which is dense and dull and thuds when you beat upon it.

Like the hollow drum pounced on with conservative force.
It is almost the not- performing of a non-performance but then only-sometimes does dialect change a word, you knew the meaning of, into the sound you don’t recognise.

I don’t only perform sometimes; I sometimes only perform.
I surrender myself to champagne, or it is usually not champagne, we just call it what it isn’t as we call almost nothing by its name.
A scent named heavy musk feels like sweet sickly vanilla so what weight does a name have?
If I give myself a name, what names me? What is the I in the pronoun of they? I give myself the name of richness of focus,
I am a statement piece of jewelry; I am the purely temporary of forms.
One day something so entirely something and then rearranged,
as discreet arts that imitates that which pre-exists them and distract from the abstracted cross marketing of collective infatuation.
Through individualism you recognise my characteristics.

I can tell one black thick rim of acetate from another since materials is the mimicry of capital.
Shades of dark blues and black, once a faux pas,
now an appropriated code, a known accent for all that is dry clean only.

One way to sell something is to scandalise but this is a
provocation which in a contemporary setting completely lacks meaning.

An appendix of the performance was the private event.

In a one star hotel in the red light district of Brussels a private event was held. To mark the most private of domains.
An allegorical absoulte anti-Deutsche Bank V.I.P room.
A shortened version of the monologue was performed alongside aperitifs.

A PRIVATE EVENT
SANNA HELENA BERGER
8th sept 2018, 20.00 - 23.00
Hotel Albergo, Square Victoria Régina
11 Saint-Josse-ten-Noode,1210, Brussels