What does it matter how many lovers you have if none of them gives you the universe (installation, 2012) A transcription for the mechanical piano of a lecture by the French psychoanalyst Jaques Lacan. The lecture where he talks about the language as a foundation for our understanding of our surroundings. He is abruptly disrupted by a student that ruins his lecture notes with flour and water as a protest against society. He is a situationist, inspired by Debord. They start discussing before he ruins Lacan`s tie and is thrown out of the lecture hall. Lacan then starts lecturing about the protesters views about people and society, about revolution and love.
In art discourse both Lacan and Debord are central, this is a meeting of their views upon society. The lecture held place in 1971. The happening is highly colored by the context, the student protests in France in the late sixties, and revolution as a frequent used word in discussion.
The choice of the piano is intended to both be a critique and a homage to Lacan and postmodern thinkers like him as they first started with theories that revolutionized and transformed how we experience our world, and ended up as virtuous theoretical performers. The audience knew exactly what they were getting when they entered their lectures
The title is a famous quote by Lacan. Here it refers to the two «ideologies» in the piece: the situationist and the psychoanalytic.
Bjørn Erik Haugen (b. 1978 in Tønsberg) — a Norwegian visual artist. He graduated from the National Academy in Oslo (2007). He works mainly with compositions, sound— and video installation. I relies on a conceptual platform where the idea of work comes before the material, media or any other way of expression. His works have been shown at the annual national autumn exhibition in Norway, and have been screened in Vienna, Barcelona, Sweden, Germany, England and in the USA. He exibited at Transmediale (Berlin, 2013). Received «Honorary Mention» at Prix Ars Electronica 2012 in the section Digital Musics & Sound Art. He lives and works in Oslo.