For a moment I actually thought I might win the Frieze Writer's Prize -- but let's be real.
In presenting a cross-section of 'micronations, sovereign independent states, concept nation states, and secession movements,' Peter Coffin's artist project at Palais de Tokyo, Grow Your Own, not only presents a world in which filial membership is dictated more by taste than circumstance, but also, and perhaps more exuberantly, taps into long-dormant childhood fantasies of turning ones' bedroom into an autonomously governed monarchy, exempt from the social mores of the rest of the house -- not to mention the world around it. As a continuation of the Palais' curatorial emphasis on the worldly, in a broad sense, and of inversion, Grow Your Own succeeds with both: Although it may not turn the world on its head, it certainly tips it over a little bit too far.
The exhibition, an extended version of one installed in 2005 at Andrew Kreps Gallery in New York, We Could Have Invited Everyone, marshals together a microcosmic order of maverick nations, collocating them into a secondary world culture; a smaller, although arguably fuller, world full of dissidents, tax evaders, secessionists, and self-crowned kings and queens. Among the elusive, but burgeoning, constellations of sovereignty represented are the short-lived Conch Republic, John Lennon and Yoko Ono's Nutopia, the Principality of Vikesland, the dominion of British West Florida, the Kingdom of Elgaland-Vargaland (which claims all the borders of the world), and the Principality of Sealand, a quasi-legitimate concrete island off the coast of Suffolk. Some of these happily manoeuvre in the interstices between the great powers, while others, lacking non-psychic territory, seem to be nations-in-waiting. In this anarchic and fictional parallel world, the viewer is thrust into a dynamic relationship with his or her own nationality, becoming in these new terms an alien, the citizen of no principality, and part of a rapidly inconsequential old guard.
The project, as earnest as it is grave, plays on the always-already latent arbitrariness of nationality. After all, what constitutes a country? If the answer is seals, anthems, languages, mottos, coins, and constitutions, then none of Grow Your Own's nation-states should be exempt from the formal definition; practically overwrought with flagpoles and passports, the exhibition seems to regale in the pap of iconography. If, however, sovereignty is something beyond categorization, an essential nationhood mostly based on other countries' perceptions of your own nation, then this project articulates, too, this glaring absence: That ineffable quality that makes a nation such an explicit, and bloodily defendable, notion.
Coffin, who also built a greenhouse-cum-concert-hall in the Palais, forcing musicians to consider what kind of music plants might like, tips his hat to Edwin Strauss, a science-fiction author of dubious repute whose forthright How To Start Your Own Country seems to have been the impetus for more than a handful of these self-populated provinces. Strauss' presence in the otherwise demurely insurrectionary Grow Your Own is about the only thing, surprisingly, which smacks of extremism; Thankfully, his advocacy of basement nukes to garner independence from the state slips by largely unnoticed among the plethora of droll flags and the murmur of looping documentary films.
These countries, however, seem to be more than just dilettante vanity projects; some appear to be products of the culture-as-file shuffle of a distinctly non-museum going class, and it is precisely this, rather than the plant-your-flag ethic of the countries involved, that makes Grow Your Own so recklessly subversive. To a certain extent, now that aesthetics can be entirely reconfigured with a click of the Refresh key, and information is amassed, piled everywhere, rather than sublimated, anyone could have created this installation.
Certainly, the museum context is not necessary to Grow Your Own; all of these countries have websites.