Screaming at the top of his voice, Surasi Kusolwong wants to sell us something. In his homemade market he is CEO of the retail trade as well as its main salesman. Sometimes disguised in a blonde wig, slipping out of the mild, clichéd Thai character, the artist becomes the desperate, but still entertaining, shopping MC.

His goods are all sold at the same low price (€1, $1, etc.), all plastic, all 'throw-away', all 'Asian' and all at their most desirable just at the moment of purchase. As the market sells out, the physical structure of the sales point gradually emerges. Primary-coloured, geometric tables lie revealed, a simple patterning that might, given their appearance in a gallery, recall a certain legacy from modernist art and design. The money from the market similarly stands mute in a Plexiglas cube, a Robert Morris collection box from a minimalist's bazaar.

As soon as the market starts, push through the crowd that's already gathered round the tables. You reach out to grab what you want as quickly as possible. Ideally you've sized up the goods before the opening and checked your route to the most beautiful/kitsch item you saw. Listen to the music, the rhythm of the voice screaming for your custom, the enchantment of the multitude in movement, collectively striving for their singular choice. Think about not paying the charge, after all it would be easy to get away with it in this melée. For a long moment, as this whole process unfolds, your consciousness of the artfulness of it all almost vanishes. This is simple happy consumption, a game to play, a better prize than your neighbour to win. As it calms down you start to wonder about the symbolic, the representational, the visual and the critical but that's for another moment. Now it's pure bus(y)ness.

When we attempt to conceive possible action in the public sphere of post-
Fordism, we find ourselves in a completely new situation. The modern
distinctions among instrumental action (action to attain a certain result and,
to simplify it in the following text, we identify this action with labour),
political action (action in response to the action of others) and artistic
action (action in which the resulting work is linked to open and indeterminate
creative process) do not exist anymore.¹

Kusolwong's markets make us act and, like his other substantial works, they combine and transgress the borders of utility and aesthetics, design and concept, art and living. The lack of separation that Lazzarato describes above is evident the moment you become involved in a Kusolwong work. There is a slippage or confusion between analysis and experience, theory and physical presence that makes any single approach less than adequate. It demands to be looked at in terms of East and West, capitalism and critique, image making and audience participation, theory and happiness - without privileging any one view. A proposed title for an upcoming exhibition is 'No Conclusion' and this sense of indeterminacy is crucial to getting under the skin of Kusolwong's work as a whole. It has to be written about in parallel.

As a Thai artist, Kusolwong's relationship to western modernism has to contain a degree of irony. Thai education, as in much of South East and East Asia, relies on a knowledge of art made by and for a very different context. To learn about it is also to learn about where the world's fate is decided, who decides it, and perhaps how. Kusolwong certainly draws on a stock of European and North American modernist aesthetics in ways that could be interpreted as an homage to western success and appears to be done in a spirit of celebration. Yet by giving such objects a function (or recon?guring their function in the case of design products) the defining significance of the non-utility of 'fine art' is undermined. The works seem to question the necessity and appropriateness of such aesthetics within a global economic and cultural context where much of it is now consumed.

Let's look at Happy Gwangju or Happy Berlin, two related works by Kusolwong that involve a free massage environment constructed in an art institution. The masseurs are local Thai people who provide a service for which the institution pays rather than the client. Kusolwong arranges the space with the required mats, rolls, work and waiting areas often divided by colourful Thai silk blinds. The action is played out during the period of the exhibition. Visitors can book an appointment and relax in public, manipulated by knowledgeable and presumably well-treated workers. The Thai massage parlour is, like the market, a parody of Western expectations of Asia. Both contain some or all of the ingredients that read 'contemporary East' for the Euro-American audience that forms the core of Kusolwong's fan base. The market is all about intense capitalism, non-stop activity, productive entertainment. The massage parlour has all the stereotypes of Asian slowness, concentration on the body and its health, not forgetting the western-orientated sex industry.

So much, so obvious perhaps. This is precisely the kind of worthy, politically charged work that contemporary artists are expected to produce. On that level, it succeeds. But imagine or, if possible, go see a piece such as Happy Berlin for yourself because it changes all your expectations.

Make an appointment for a massage. Already you've made a different kind of commitment to an art event. The languid coolness of classical art viewership is replaced by something more physically and psychologically engaging. Step up onto the soft, mattress-covered area and meet your masseuse, a middle-aged woman who asks you to lie down, loosen your clothing and try to relax. You try, closing your eyes to shut out the view of other, passing visitors who haven't (yet) chosen to follow your step into the work. They look at you and the woman as what... art performers, service providers, found (moving) objects? Maybe they see a simple transfer of one ordinary activity to an unordinary location or vice versa? Now, you have to respond, not to them but to the hands on your body, to pushes and pulls, squeezes and stretches, slaps, chops and physical pressure. Hopefully, probably, you begin to relax, the sensation of the massage takes over the awkwardness of the situation. You keep your eyes closed and feel what you want to feel. (If you like massage, this moment is sheer heaven, especially for regular art attenders). You don't look, think, reflect, consider. Once again, the level of the symbolic and representational is temporarily abolished. The work is the action.

Back to Lazzarato for a moment:

The conditions for economic production, artistic creation, and political action
have entered a zone of indifference where they are linked through a series of
reciprocal presuppositions. I think that this new situation is based on the
fact that labour no longer represents a special, separated practice that is
structured according to different criteria and procedures than artistic and
political practice. Labour tends to be expressed through the powers of
desire, the powers of thought, and the application of generic human faculties:
language, memory, aesthetic and ethical competencies and the ability of
abstraction and learning. Thus, from a formal point of view, labour does not
exclusively produce commodity-objects but also social relations,
forms of life and modes of subjectivation.²

The labour and identity of the Thai masseuse, as played out in Kusolwong's installation, is precisely what Lazzarato refers to here. She is part artist, part healer, part image of the globalised political stage, part exploited wage slave - all conditions co-existing. We, as invited participants, are just as implicated in parts - as exploiters, humans in search of comfort and images of creative relaxation. Both the market and the massage installation involve a commitment to the idea of work, production, consumption and action as simultaneous activities. We can no longer divide our leisure life (free) from work life (controlled) as the classic identity divisions of Fordist production. Thus, the structures of human life defined by Hannah Arendt in terms of labour, work and action in The Human Condition are blended and destabilised. We are no longer able to say as she did that 'labour is the activity that corresponds to the biological process of the human body... the human condition of labour is life itself. Work is the activity that corresponds to the unnaturalness of human existence... The human condition of work is worldliness. Action, the only activity that goes on directly between men without the intermediary of things or matter, corresponds to the human condition of plurality.'³ Instead the contemporary human condition is one where all these are present at the same moment. At one level this challenge can be met in political terms, but at another it can be dealt with only in terms of a revised personal identity, a process that Kusolwong's works both highlight and attempt in a perverse way to reconcile.

To receive a massage is therefore potentially to be a worker, to act politically and to behave as though an artist. What this means for the identifiable territory of art is almost anyone's guess. Once the protective veil around the production and presentation of art is removed, or once the concept of non-utility is put into question, then the kind of products that art creates and the kind of audience it requests can no longer be presumed. Kusolwong seems to suggest that art can disappear into service provision but his adaptation of classic modernist aesthetics also points out what is lost as well as gained by this effect. Hardly mournful, his work is a radical shift towards art's integration with non-art, yet it retains something potentially highly critical of the very movement it suggests.

The Emotional Machine is a more recent work that builds on tendencies in his previous productions. Kusolwong has spoken about his childhood growing up on a river boathouse in Ayutthaya as the work's inspiration, wanting to recreate the comfortable rocking and swaying of his home. Aligning this subjective experience with the trajectory of his work, Kusolwong adapted one of the icons of twentieth-century European design. The history of the Volkswagen Beetle is well known, beginning as a personal commission by Adolf Hitler. Its survival and transformation into a beloved symbol of freedom and humane car design is extraordinary. Kusolwong literally inverts the body of this car, recasting it as an organic sculpture and then converting it into a cocoon-like sofa suspended from the gallery's ceiling. Surrounding it, he places Coca-Cola machines, computer terminals and comfortable beanbags on a green carpet. The themes of the modernist object given new purpose is apparent, as is the recurring idea of turning a mute object of desire into a 'comfort machine', an object in which emotions are no longer projected but created and experienced at the moment of their contemplation.

This notion of experience should however not been seen in any way as primary in ordering the understanding of the works. Kusolwong constantly oscillates between positions in a way that can only be seen in terms of contemporary political theory. Not least Giorgio Agamben has extensively questioned the ontology of 'raw experience':

The question of experience can be approached nowadays only with an
acknowledgment that it is no longer accessible to us. For just as modern man
has been deprived of his biography, his experience has likewise been
expropriated.⁴

As social creatures within the gallery, our experiences here are probably more expropriated than most. All too quickly we are compelled to ask about the artist's intentions, its critical position, its authority as art. Agamben again:

...it is the character of the present time that all authority is founded on
what cannot be experienced, and nobody would be inclined to accept the validity
of an authority whose sole claim to legitimation was experience. [...] Of
course the point is not to deplore this state of affairs, but to take note
of it. For perhaps at the heart of (this) senseless denial there lurks a
grain of wisdom, in which we can glimpse the germinating seed of future
experience.⁵

As you climb into the car, take a coke from the nearby machine. Try to relax. If you forget the situation you can almost start to enjoy it. Inside, wrapped in blankets and composed on cushions, you can watch a Hollywood movie, a natural act in a contemporary state of repose. You are being entertained and invited to drift out of the formalities of exhibition visiting. This is fun. Yet, at the back of your mind, a consciousness of the location won't quite dissolve. Are you depriving the next visitor of their turn? How long can you stay, surely not for the whole movie? Are you really sure you are allowed in here?

Kusolwong gives us permission to behave in ways that the traditional art context always denies, but he never goes the whole way, probably because he can't. Art always jumps back into the picture and starts up the whole simultaneous perception of work, action and production all over again.

Lastly, let's take a single, small photograph by Kusolwong that serves to remind us that the inspiration for most work is neither theory, experience nor context but something much more autobiographical. The photograph is of the artist's mother standing in a Thai landscape and holding a broken, skeletal umbrella that offers no protection from either wind, rain or sun. She smiles straight at us - charming, exotic, beautiful and extremely personal - for viewers it is slightly disturbing, as though we are breaking in on a very private family moment. Attached to the photograph is a three-dimensional copy of the umbrella, this strange icon of no use now located in the gallery. On an intimate level, it contains all the elements that make Kusolwong's work worthwhile - happiness, privacy and comfort - alongside a savvy awareness of the status of art, the role expected of the Asian artist and the playfulness of slight, understated subversion.

— Charles Esche