++++ Dirk Fleischmann. It is still too early to draw a final balance, but it is already apparent that the Danish artist, Lise Harlev, will make a good profit from Dirk Fleischmann's contribution to Manifesta 4, The Bistro. After all, she has chosen a highly popular and very usual product for sale at art events: Beck's beer in the bottle, a brand which, according to information from the artist, is drunk three thousand times a minute. In addition, the selling price is one hundred per cent hers.
The only question is, what does the sale of beer really have to do with art. The student at Städel, Dirk Fleischmann, has been investigating economic models since 1998 on the basis of simple economic processes. For instance, he sells kiosk products at the purchase price, but requests the buyers to make a personal supplement and thus creates a surplus-value which admits of an alternative perspective on concepts such as profitability and economicalness.
In his contribution to Manifesta 4, he is now offering his participating colleagues the opportunity of participating in his kiosk with a product of their choice and under economic conditions which they themselves choose. The precondition for this option was that they renounced their artist's fee of 250 euros and instead put their trust in making a speculative affair into the financial basis of their participation in Manifesta.
Hans Schabus, for example, has decided in favour of schnapps with a profit margin of 2.10 euros. Yael Bartana, by contrast, pockets only 70 cents for the sale of a slice of watermelon at one euro a piece. Maria Papadimitriou turns her contribution into a critical statement by selling her symbol of capitalism, Coca-Cola, at 4 euros each, whereas Fernando Bryce with his product rather tests the readiness of customers to experiment: his recipe is "one banana served like a sausage with honey and mustard," available for one euro.
The artist, Dirk Fleischmann, who was born in Schweinfurt in 1974, asks in his project in a modest and persistent way, what it would be like if the economic structures were organized differently. By setting a foundation of unusual parameters, he adopts a perspective which allows the laws of the free market economy to appear as an intentional distortion of the relationship between value and commodity.
Fleischmann's continual economic field research shows that the given circumstances are in no way necessary. It is merely the case that this obvious misrelation has developed into a social consensus without ever having been questioned in daily practice.