Happiness. The show is undertitled «Happy / End». And as Jacques Derrida would say : « At the end, we know, all this will end very badly ! There is no way to reach the absolute good. Presence is always divided, split… » and even though one sells to us the dream of a possible happiness, thank god, we won't make it ! Because « It would be death, the absolute good would be identical with death ! »
BIG 3rd episode has this bitter taste of failure and death. Everything looks perfect though : the show is sort of smart and funny ; the women on stage are beautiful, healthy and sexy ; the men are mean and cynical ; the dialogs perfectly fit the image of a clever provocative Superamas´ entertaining program. But by using the strategies of repetition and decontextualisation Superamas digs under the surface of its representations. And what Superamas digs out is the power of this desire for happiness and at the same time its total vanity. These strategies applied to this topic create an auto-reflexive thinking process which leads the spectator to reflect its own parcours through the piece and its own expectations of happiness…
And it occurres that those expectations are predictable and predicted. Our more intimate desires are already calculated by social statistics and marketing. Therefore individual behaviour is nothing else than a copy of a cliché. The modern vaudeville is statistics!
Is the work of Superamas art? This artists collective is playing on the differences between art and kitsch, high and low culture, television and theatre… with such an ease that the almost forgotten phrase post-modern art seems to be useful again. But this thought is too easy. Superamas play a game with the differences between the art and her diverging environments (institutional, technical, social, mass cultural…) that is so complex that the difference between art and not-art is simply put offside. This artists collective is operating in the vague but fast growing zone of postart. In there, art in general merges into a strange mixture of seriousness and amusement, form research and reflexive allusions to well known genre codes – however in a completely different way than the better pop music of Radiohead, Tarantino's Pulp Fiction or the Compilation Work of Andy Warhol.
-Rudi Laermans (teaches socioculture at the University of Leuven, Belgium).-
