Any pedestrian wears cage sensations. Money frames, money and fame. The eventuality of being caught blindfolded is generally around the corner. I was thinking of possible kinds of urban camouflage the other day, a situation where the finest option would be resorting to a mimetic match.

But now, I go for mine. I got the shine. Because I’d rather be an egoist in the morning, a porn star in the afternoon, and a critical critic at night. To reduce (wo)man to one thing, to one function, is just one facet of the alienation we’re struggling against. If you walk down the street, you know that life shouldn’t be about repeating the same gesture endlessly, regardless of whether it is as a factory worker or an artist. People as they carry themselves, have the power to manifest new attitudes.

The outside is always a new outside, constantly – a big scare for non-pedestrians, for those ones handling from above. The work of Debo Eilers is what double-tracks the outside with about as much moral agony as a tape recorder. Solid representations made out of what the streets provides, expensive binding materials to hide layers of composed stuff so that eyes can’t see. And this is no new thing, but a still-warm slice of the archetypal bread of modern art.

Though when art goes on as a conscious production of hints, it may alternate realities and bring them to another level. And sometimes, art goes there where popular culture can be deprived of its predictable contexts and promoted as a clue that could lead anywhere in anybody’s fantasy. A practice that overlaps its previous engagements in order to always construct a delivery of diversity. More to the point, its a coming up with a new synthesis of personal conduct: to wallow in luxury, to junk it through with absolute abandon. Leaving out all the aspects of what it is to be human, intellectual, emotional, physical, and living them as one.

All capitalistic canalization overflown. Here production follows a different agenda. During Berlin winter 2007, Eilers and Xedro happened to be resident in a nearly empty post-soviet flat. A large side window was the master wall. There was this amazing space whose restroom area took more floor than it should have. A series of sculptures made out of scrap were expanding from the bathtub, set in the shower box like in a ready-to-be-alarmed vitrine. As previously told, any piece that entered that royal toilet was about to be demolished in a couple of hours. Hopefully there is a documentation of the smash – a film yet unknown at this present date. In the main room: an inflatable used as a bed, a tent used as sporadic depo, and a cage zone hosting a vertical, imaginary alcove for a music I had never heard before.

You see, the cage trope comes back. Like in Coolhaus, 2008, which makes you snoop into a fly-through cell scenario. A cell quite expensively studied, maybe a hotel room. This whole body of works had a sleazy entity, not truly disturbing, not classifiable, and strange enough, not at all absorbing the vacant freedom of the environment. Assemblages of matter raising from the pavement, some hanging from the ceiling.

Initiated canvases were suspended like flags or rolled open like portrait carpets. Everything I saw in there had been generated, brought together to remain in fieri: conceptually and physically movable. Possibly slowly. Tentatively a convenience. In some way, that studio can determine in my memory a quality that blends discretion and eminence.Just tell me one thing, one infinite Kurt Schwitters column, how would it look today? Transparent cans filled with garbage to support a table desk. Pieces of everyday life communication are converted into art objects and thereby de-literalized – illusionistic spaces, a computer interface collage, rural economy:

Screen grab, 2008 – are they content or are they form? They are neither. As I recall, I know you love to show off. But I never thought that you would take it this far. What do I know? Flashing lights, lights. Flashing lights draw multi-layered grids: colorful cages are captured to remain on t-shirts.

I’d put on a pair of sprayed Kanyes right now. They feel right as a fine fit. Did I hear the word flat? Well, try to out-flat this. Mighty cool: UN research in the 1990s found many of the states declaring themselves in a state of emergency had presented their emergency as permanent. As one of the UN reports pointed out, “ if the list of countries which have proclaimed, extended or terminated a state of emergency were to be flashed onto a map of the world… the resulting area would cover nearly ! of the Earth’s surface”, three quarters of the Earth’s surface in which states have derogated from fundamental human rights obligations, on a more or less permanent basis. HAVE THE BODY is what I’m talking about: Habeas Corpus, the touchstone of liberty, nothing less than the ‘writ of liberty’ embodied in legislation – very much a seventeenth-century invention, peddled by liberal thinkers ever since. But the original purpose of habeas corpus was not to protect the liberty of the people from the sovereign in general and from wrongful imprisonment in particular, but to secure their presence in custody. And this is now the right of the state to derogate from human rights norms and “have” whichever bodies it wants. Such derogation is rooted historically in martial law, and for contemporary liberal democracy, it is embedded in emergency power and national security.

Being a pedestrian can be a luxury, so why not to flaunt the grace of this state. We are all potential detainees. But you, you keep your love lockdown and let American art go straightforward. I’ve got $3,000 dollars in my wallet.