The title of the installation is a re-statement of the expression “the pure products of America go crazy”, found in “Spring and All” (1923), a Dadaist treaty on imagination written by William Carlos Williams (born 1883).
Empty stalls, blank signboards of institutions offer a plain structure; structure with a potential, structure to be filled in. A hybrid of the market and institutions, as well as public offices represented by the signboards, is a pure product of late modernity. This is a deserted market of ideas awaiting the supply of new products. These are mock institutions which have run out of goals or lost their purpose. It is an empty space waiting for new residents, legal or squatters, to move in. They will decide with what to fill this space in: whether these will be cheap frocks and trinkets made in China intended for tourists and aimed at replacing previous products offered by a modern state? Or alternatively, will the market offer newly-born public institutions offering to all of us the freely accessible public good, such as public healthcare, education and social insurance?
Maybe these empty signboards will be filled with names of new forms of what we idealistically refer to as the common good. It is a question about institutions of the future.
Or maybe this is just a symbol of the black market of vacancies and positions in public institutions that each time unwind anew depending on fluctuations of political power.