#382 Collection

On top of the panel, there are eight egg cups from my private egg cup collection.

A collector item is not defined either by its use-value or its exchange value. As such, it is slightly offset to the market logic. But it is nevertheless connected to ownership. It is the owner's emotional investment that makes up its worth. Any object is collectable, but artworks might be the collector item per se. Thus art can also never be entirely positioned within a utility or market system. It both exceeds it and comes up short. Art, as collecting, is dependent on the rules of desire as described by psychoanalytic theory to become meaningful. Desire signifies the primordial lack at the kernel of the subject - the very missing piece that pushes it into existence. The subject is, much like any collection, never complete.   

The series features works with an appendix placed on top of the work or close to it. This object is exterior to the image plane, the illusionary "window" in the picture, but is still an intrinsic part of the whole. It connects or makes visible the two dimensions of an artwork - its inner logic and the relation to its surrounding.
The title references both the famous campaign by Coca-Cola and Immanuel Kant's notion of the thing in itself. It means that subjects can only experience the phenomenons as they present themselves, through perception. It is always fundamentally different from what the things are outside the barrier of language - in themselves.

Res Ipsa is a compilation of works made by an act shaping the filler once it is prepared inside the frame. The works thus function as a recording device and give a statement of the event taking place while the filler was still wet.

Res Ipsa is Latin for "the thing itself" and is part of the juridical term "Res ipsa loquitur" (the thing speaks for itself), used when an injury or accident in itself clearly shows who is responsible, such as an instrument left inside a body after surgery.