A few years ago, after we had first created the fictional world of XPT, my brother (who’s a lot more familiar with the art world than I was then or now) alerted me to Finnish artist Alvar Gullichsen’s Bonk Business Inc.

…a multiglobal industrial enterprise at the forefront of 3rd millennium technologies. The company is the world leader in fully Defunctioned Machinery, Cosmic Therapy applications, Advanced Disinformation Systems (ADS), Repacked consumer products and LBH (Localized Black Hole) technology.

All this began when an anchovy fisherman’s family more than 150 years ago discovered an ancient recipe for Garum, a “mildly stimulating condiment made from the anchovy” and anchovy oil, which “greased the wheels of Nordic industry for many decades until overfishing by interlopers in the Baltic caused the Great Oil Crisis of 1883″ (all this and more from the hilariously deadpan Bonk History page). Bonk’s re-definition of R&D as Repacking and Disinformation seems like a good definition of what we’ve been doing at XPT in the last few years too. (Personally, I’ve always wanted to repackage an airline, turning air travel into something much more transformative - like Kahuna Airlines in Pynchon’s Vineland - and for a while Tim and I worked intermittently on an idea called LA Jet (La Jetée without the ‘e’s…) along those lines. Perhaps it’s time to start working on the livery again.)

The machines, photographs, products, artifacts, graphics and written history that made up the world of Bonk were exhibited widely in the mid to late 90s and the company even featured in the first issue of Fast Company in a 1995 article entitled The Finnish Company that’s Never Done. Also worth checking out are Bonk team member Magnus Scharmanoff’s images of the various Bonk machines.

I was reminded of all of this when I discovered (by looking up the exact meaning of the cycling term Bonk on Wikipedia!) that Bonk’s web presence hadn’t stagnated as a bunch of first-generation websites and that there’s now a shiny modern website for the Bonk Museum in Uusikaupunki.

I’m not really a big fan of custom desktop backgrounds, generally prefering to stick with the default ‘Aqua Graphite’ image that I’m used to, but if I was, one of John Maeda’s food images would be my first choice. Perhaps this Damien Hirst’s shark-in-the-tank influenced “geometrical paradise of dried anchovies”:

It’s that time again: Copeland Borough Council presents The World’s Biggest Liar Competition, held annually at The Bridge Inn, Santon Bridge, Cumbria. This years contest will take place on Thursday, 20th November.

In 2000, Tim and I took part in a Festival of Lying organised around the competition by artists Anna Best, Karen Guthrie, Nina Pope and Simon Poulter. Other speakers included crop circle maker Rob Irving, magician Peter Lamont, author Jon Ronson and Elvis. The event was compered by Ralph Spours, a local estate agent, and every time he came on stage the organisers played Adam Ant’s Prince Charming. The entire track. The winner of The World’s Biggest Liar Competition that year was five-time winner John Graham, but the following year he was defeated by George Kemp (who also won last year) with a story about “his grandfather’s greyhound, which gave birth to pups in the middle of a race before going on to win, followed by the puppies” (CNN).

These guys have been working together since 1979, and in 1987 made a film called Der Lauf der Dinge (The Way Things Go) the inspiration behind Honda’s recent Cog TV advert. Watch the trailer for The Way Things Go and be amazed.

(I’m reminded of Mehdi Norowzian’s film Joy which was the starting point for Guinness’s Anticipation, a hugely popular advert we at NoHo Digital turned into a hugely popular screensaver. Norowzian brought a copyright infringement case against Ark, the agency responsible, which he lost. He also lost the appeal. But the process did bring about some changes in the interpretation of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act (CDPA) previously under which film was only ever viewed as a recording of a dramatic work, but not a dramatic work in itself. In this case, the Court of Appeal decided that the content of a film could also be a protected as a dramatic work: “a film (including a cartoon), is a work of action; it is capable of being performed before an audience and is therefore capable of being a dramatic work under section 1(1)(a) of the CDPA”. This from Margaret Briffa’s site. Margaret was Norowzian’s attorney, and coincidentally was engaged by us at NoHo in 1999 to help us wrest back control of Online Caroline from Behaviour Communications.)

Sadly there are no trailers available for either of Fischli and Weiss’s ‘Rat and Bear’ films Der Geringste Widerstand (The Point of Least Resistance) 1981 or Der Rechte Weg (The Right Way) 1983.

Fischli and Weiss’s new show is on in London at Sprüth Magers Lee was reviewed in the Guardian recently by Adrian Searle.

Jason Salavon’s work is just sublime. Especially his visualizations of “statistical data tracking the US domestic production of shoes and slippers from 1960-1998 in 31 categories”. And the nudes (he should enter these for Miss Digital World).

At the Damien Hirst show I was struck most by perhaps the smallest and least conspicuous piece in the exhibition, a small ‘pills and dead flies’ canvas in White Cube’s reception. I think this demonstrates what I like most about Damien’s work, the economy of some of his ideas - I mean what two small objects of more or less the same size could be more different than a perfectly-formed white pill and a dead fly?

The rest of the show aims to “examine, dissect and recast the story of Jesus and the Disciples” but to me all these cases full of blood, guts and medical instruments always look as though Hirst is doing Francis Bacon in the style of Joseph Beuys, his own version of One Song to the Tune of Another. The butterfies are always lovely though.

We did get quite excited about all the kitchen knives that Hirst (or perhaps his assistants) used to stab the four cows heads in formaldehyde tanks upstairs (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John). I’m pretty sure these were all Henckels knives. Henckels, or Zwilling J.A. Henckels, have one of the oldest trademarks in the world, a ‘twin’ symbol and as Tim has noted Damien definitely has a thing about twins.

Tim has been thinking about creative partnerships again, after we joined the crowds at the Hirst show at White Cube yesterday. I followed this up today by going to see Candice Breitz’s video installations at Modern Art Oxford. One piece in particular struck a chord: Double Karen (Close to You) 2000 which samples video of Karen Carpenter singing a stripped down version of (They Long To Be) Close to You. One of a series of ‘duets’ (the others feature Olivia Newton-John, Annie Lennox and Whitney Houston), the work consists of two identical monitors facing each other over a stairwell, showing one Karen singing only the words “me-me-me” to the other Karen who sings “you-you-you” in reply.

Partnerships, it seems to me, are always like a bit like this, and remain healthy for as long you get to sing both sides of the song from time to time.

Jim Bengston, my uncle, has a new show. Most of these images are from the three months of any year Jim spends traveling the US in his Airstream (he’s originally from Illinois, but has lived in Oslo since the 70s) but there are a few from times and places I recognise, like the one from New Years Eve in Berlin (we all climbed the Teufelsberg, a hill made from all the rubble left in the city after WW2).

Jim spent a significant chunk of all our childhoods turning family photos into art - as they say: “disse bildene hadde familien og venner som tema” - which were published in two books Afterwords and Slow Motion.

Slow Motion’s cover is an image of my feet, and as a kid I always enjoyed the fact that this image is in the collection of the MOMA in New York City. Mind you, considering they have 25,000 works dating from approximately 1840 to the present and constituting one of the most important collections of photography in the world, it’s not as if I’m ever going to go there and see it on the wall. But I have it on my wall at home, and that’s what counts.