By Elaine M.L. Tam

Bikini Bottom is an installation by Amanda Moström that comprises a peculiar flock of hide-clad objects arranged and then re-arranged on successive days, including: a tissue box, an edutainment card game, a perching stool, an S-shaped office chair, a rotating disco ball, a garland of LED flower-lights, a devil mask, a straight-handled umbrella, poolside photographs of one topless blonde.

The work is titled Bikini Bottom after the underwater town where the cartoon series ‘SpongeBob Square-Pants’ takes place, and which the artist sometimes watches with Mylo, the 7-year-old that lives upstairs. A loveable, happy-go-lucky sea sponge that works at a local food joint called the Krusty Krab, SpongeBob, the show’s titular protagonist, models an unconditional ‘can-do’ attitude and a naïve propensity to self-exploit. Situated at Frieze, Moström’s new work leverages the occasion of the art fair to reflect on ideas of trade relationality, performative labour and the destiny of surplus.

The particular collection of second-hand objects in Bikini Bottom was procured from buyers at market-places – a setting that garners intimacy through direct, seller-to-buyer exchange and the personal negotiation of use-value. To the objects, sections of billy goat hides have been added; these come from Maria, a dairy farmer neighbouring Moström’s sister’s home in Sweden, from the redundant male goats that are routinely dispensed with. Seemingly disparate elements discover new relation in Bikini Bottom, each issuing from the brutal consequence of something not quite profound.

Moström’s installation takes cues from the radical dramatist Bertolt Brecht and occupies a low plinth cum open stage, the design of which both mimics and complements the open construction of fair booths through which actors of the ‘art world’ circulate. Known for his revolutionary use of theatre, which sought to break with illusion rather than conjure it, Brecht tended towards minimal, open staging as a reflexive device and critical forum. Forcing its viewers to the booth’s perimeter, Moström’s stage-display in turn cordons off a fictive space, one not unlike Bikini Bottom and the speculative maps of it people have drawn and then posted on a certain Reddit thread. Here, the adapted objects appear in different configurations that allude to an undisclosed narrative arc, all the while patterned by an exuberance of light reflecting off the disco ball – a choreography that is likewise a cartography. In their staging, the objects’ inherent properties are amplified if not personified: the lopsided bulk of the umbrella is protective but awkward; the geriatric’s ergonomic perching chair boasts adjustable legs; the poolside blonde accommodates every conceivable angle, radiating youth and endless smiles.

The bikini was invented in the mid-1940s by French engineer and designer Louis Réard, who named the then-risqué swimwear after the Bikini Atoll in the Pacific, a site for US nuclear bomb testing. Réard, allegedly, wanted his design to prompt an ‘explosive’ reaction when it hit the market. Bikini Bottom refers, in part, to this stunt of attention-grabbing sensation- alism, relating it to the uncompromising demands on artists to produce objects of spectacle. If we are what we consume, then it must follow that to spend is to be spent.

In its own subversive gesture of kindness, Moström’s installation cautiously gathers up surplus and gently tailors it. ‘Like a house gnome’ she works quietly on and off-stage, her daily re-arrangements yielding a shifting field of relations that express another kind of rhythm, another kind of life. Speaking of the entwinement of expenditure and exhaustion, but equally community and care, Bikini Bottom questions the infinitely serviceable put to work in the ideal that ‘to love is to labour’. But if the flock exists to consider the ways in which artworking cleaves to high-performance culture, what even constitutes performance if ‘the show must go on’?