The “subject” of Herman Asselberghs’ Dear Steve is the most dependable of foot soldiers manning the machinery of our presentday culture industry — the laptop. Most of us have one, and their relative invisibility within the field of cultural production — how often do we actually get to see laptops in exhibitions or films, or as artworks even? — contrasts starkly with the indispensability of the mobile personal computer in our present-day globalized cultural economy. For instance, it is difficult to even imagine the current exhibition (or publication) having come about the way it did without this singularly trail-blazing invention. Dear Steve, however, is obviously much more than a lyrical portrait of this pedestrian icon of what Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello have called “the New Spirit of Capitalism”. What we are witnessing in this work is the ruthless, smooth dismantling of a brand-new MacBook Pro, and the act of literally turning inside-out the digital work station cannot help but reveal the irreducible materiality of the one “tool” that plays such a pivotal role in the triumphalist rhetoric of so-called immaterial labor.
Herman Asselberghs
Born 1962 in Mechelen. He’s a Belgian artist whose work focuses on the questioning of border areas between sound and image, world and media, poetry and politics. His installations and videos have been shown at Centre Pompidou, Paris; documenta X, Kassel; Deitch Projects, New York; CGAC, Santiago de Compostela; hartware, Dortmund; Witte de With, Rotterdam; Netwerk, Aalst; M HKA, Antwerp; Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; International Film Festival Rotterdam; Internationale Filmfestspiele Berlin; FID Marseille; EMAF Osnabrück; Medien- und Architectur Biennale Graz; Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin/Madrid. In 2007 he won the Transmediale Award in Berlin. Herman Asselberghs, who has published extensively on film and visual culture, teaches at the film department of Hogeschool Sint-Lukas Brussels. He lives and works in Brussels.
