Oliver van den Berg: Drift

»Only Value Criterion is the Price«

»The fact that something can be learned about the nature of human beings from their products is the initial hypothesis of Oliver van den Berg, who has become known for his objects made on the basis of technical devices such as radar, flight ­recorders, and star projectors«, writes Hilke ­Wagner. The resulting sculptures have a futuristic-technoid appearance and, reduced to their perfect surface, they are stripped of their function and ­returned to the prototypical model. Oliver van den Berg tends to use wood, the sculpting material par excellence, and it is in the contrast between material and function of the technological high-gloss models that he thus reduces the utopias of progress ad absurdum and simultaneously centers on the question of original and copy. »This artistic appropriation, the reduction to aesthetic quality, offers the possibility of disinterested reflection, because every technical invention is simultaneously a projection of human dreams and inadequacies. As such, his work can be positioned within the cultural-historical tradition of man-machine analogies.« The artwork survey since 1990 presented in this volume is categorized by the artist himself under headings such as mock-up, documentation, doubling, memory, narrative, model, imitation, ­parody, replica, deception, translation, experiment, further development, repetition, and citation. His motto: »You do what you do.«