About Greifen (Chupetes)

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This piece is called Greifen (Chupetes). “Greifen” is a German word that means “to grasp something—to understand it through having it your hands.” And “chupete” is the Spanish word for “pacifier”—the kind you give to small children when they are crying. Greifen (Chupetes) is made of hand-wrought steel, created from metal mined and forged in Bilbao, Spain, where it was fabricated in 2019. The piece is part of much larger project that I will explain in a moment.

But first I want to tell you that normally, during non-pandemic times, when Greifen (Chupetes) is shown at a gallery, it is an option for you, as a visitor to the gallery, to arrange with a gallery attendant to take one of the objects on the rack here and leave your mobile phone in its place for certain amount of time. Here is what the piece looks like when that happens:

When you swap your phone for one of the chupetes, which are a similar weight and size to many mobile phones, it feels really different in your hand—it is smooth and solid, but in a different way than your phone is. Your phone—unless cracked—is perfect. Every surface and dimension is uniform, and it has no signs of the fact that it was assembled by human hands. The chupetes are irregular. They have odd angles, scratches and variations in color from being created entirely by hand. And of course, normally you don’t even look at the surface of your phone: you look into it. You cannot look into the chupetes, but people who have borrowed them have reported that when they put them in their pockets or bags, they feel exactly the same as their phones do there. They often forget that they have swapped their phones after awhile—until they pull out the chupete with the intention of taking a picture or checking the time.

Greifen (Chupetes) comes out of deep, year-long, international art-research project that took me from Boston, to Switzerland, to Denmark, to Belarus, and then finally to Spain, where the photos above were taken. The project, called Pure Luxury, grew out of living and working in parts of Boston where luxury housing was being developed at a rapid rate, and displacing people (that I knew and cared about) who had been living in the area their whole lives. I went to a few open houses for these new luxury apartments and felt like they were not so fabulous that they were worth what were asking people to pay for them, and that they were especially not worth destroying whole communities and people’s homes to build. So I became very curious about exactly what people want when they want something that is defined as “luxurious” and started interviewing and surveying people all around the world—Europe, the Americas, the UK, Scandinavia, India, Korea, Australia, Russia. My first goal was to find out what language people used in common to describe the things and experiences that they thought were luxurious and to describe the feelings that those things and experiences gave them when they had access to them. My second goal was to make objects that had the same characteristics, and to give people access to them for free, in contexts where we could discuss together afterwards what the least culturally and environmentally destructive ways for getting our needs underlying our desires for luxury experiences met.

The work is still in progress. A big segment of it was produced and shown in Bilbao, Spain in December of 2019, and you can see some images and descriptions of what went on there here. But there a comprehensive, participatory show has not been possible because of Covid restrictions. Greifen (Chupetes) was designed specifically based on interviews with people about their most luxurious belongings (you can hear some snippets from Zurich below,) conducted at galleries and community cultural spaces in Zurich (Switzerland); Minsk (Belarus); Aarhus (Denmark;) and Bilbao (Spain). I also photographed people’s objects if they brought them along to the interviews.

The project to date has been realized via support from Index Freiraum, ok16, Flux Factory, ARoS, Statens Kunstfond, The Tanne Foundation, The City of Boston’s Artist Opportunity Fund and BilbaoArte.