PEACH TREE, AMBIGUOUS

Peach Tree, Ambiguous is a research project mapping production processes of value and meaning in the spiritual void around luxury goods. It operates as a speculative department-store, selling fictional design objects created by Anouk van Klaveren. Embracing the deranged logic of today’s marketing- and communications cultus, the brand fully outsourced its products’ raison d’être by hiring an international team of sales experts, content creators and e-commerce models.

Doused within the realm of commercialized daydreams, Anouk portrays today’s e-environment and its inherent consumer myths. Simulating a tribalized department-store, the exhibition shows a wide range of purposefully advertized objects, all blurring the thin line between need and wanting; cause and effect; the voyeur and the exhibitionist.

Visit the showroom 24/7 at www.peachtreeambiguous.com.


De Fabriek 
Baarsstraat 38
5615 RG Eindhoven (NL)

Femke de Vries in conversation with Anouk van Klaveren about her project Peach Tree, Ambiguous.

In preparation for our telephone call, Anouk shares a Google Drive link with me. The main folder contains folders with titles like ‘Magnificent Obsidian images’, ‘Elite Form of Home Decor images’ and ‘Leather in Harmony images’. Beyond alluding to images, these titles give me very little clue of what could be inside.


Opening a folder, I find a video of a nondescript object, dark-grey and clay-like. I would call it a blob. Several metallic-looking marbles are placed randomly on its bumps and in its dents. The marbles stick to the clay blob. They both stick to and repel one another. They are magnetic. Seemingly with some effort, a hand moves them around. The marbles randomly connect, disconnect, move and reconnect. There is no end or beginning. There is no goal.



Another folder contains a video of a woman standing behind a table with a flat black box atop it. The box contains an object made of sticks in a light-coloured type of wood. The sticks look like broomsticks. With several 90° bends, the object takes the shape of a… Well, what is it? Consisting of two objects in one that are connected at a single point, you can move each piece individually. With rotation, the flat object becomes 3D and can stand, while the wheels make sure you can easily move it around. Though I’m not sure why you would want to do that.

The woman demonstrates and describes the object for the viewer. She doesn’t explain what it is. Well, only that it’s a ‘decorative object’. She describes the material (pinewood and brass castor wheels), but mainly stresses that it’s a ‘luxury prestige decoration’, that wood is ‘meaningful and beautiful’ and that it ‘helps you stand out in the crowd’. Firstly, it’s not clear what the object is. Secondly, the connection between the object and the textual explanation is lost. They are connected in the sense that they are spoken and handled simultaneously, by the same body and recorded in the same video. But that’s about it.



This video is part of Anouk van Klaveren’s latest project titled Peach Tree, Ambiguous, which is a fictional brand whose name has been automatically generated. In this work, which takes the shape of a webshop and showroom, she explores a system of what I would call ‘value production’. A system that is very familiar to me from the fashion industry and its accompanying media. 


In fashion, meaning and value are created by combining various elements. In regards to that, I would like to refer to Roland Barthes. In The Fashion System, he refers to the following three elements: the ‘real garment’, the ‘written garment’ and the ‘image garment’. These elements can be combined as follows: you take a dress (real garment), put it on a beautiful woman and photograph her in romantic scenery (image garment) and pair the words ‘dream’, ‘ethereal’ and ‘forever’ (written garment) with it. Taken together, they create a whole, something that seems natural and logical. The dress becomes the dream, let’s say. 

Over the telephone, Anouk and I talk about how fiction, such as marketing texts, interact with the reality of the object. 


A: It isn’t true, but it’s not untrue either. But well, it’s not meant to be true in the first place. 


F: Because the connection between these elements (that, in fact, have nothing to do with each other) leads to something ‘whole’, it seems to make sense and starts to become logical and ‘natural’. These ‘realities’ are mainly disseminated through (fashion) media and are at the core of how value and fashion are created. In The Assembled Self, Part II: Ruins in Reverse, Camiel van Winkel describes how the glossy surface of the fashion photograph smooths out all the seams and joints in the construct of fashion. A construct that is made up of body parts, garments, accessories, atmospheres, styles, moods and cultures, etcetera. Surely this system does not apply only to fashion. This is how products are put on the market; this is how marketing works. 


The documentary series The Century of the Self portrays Edward Bernays, the founder of what we call branding today. The series explains how he persuaded people to behave irrationally by linking products to their emotional desires and feelings. So, the idea that this wooden object in one of Anouk’s folders ‘helps you stand out in the crowd’ and ‘gives you confidence’ or that the grey blob is ‘exclusively designed to bring about good vibes only and to reinvigorate your energy via art’ is irrational. 
However, the linking of the phrases with the object makes it seem logical. The documentary also makes it clear that this is not just a fun game. This propagandistic approach — as we well know — has been a very effective tool in war and, according to the documentary, has been deployed to turn active citizens into passive consumers. 
(Roland) ‘Barthes maintained that the fashion industry needs the production of writing and images in fashion magazines in order to create the illusion that the newest fashion trend is a natural fact, not only an economic law, thereby deceiving consumers into buying new clothes even if they do not need them (Barthes 1990 [1967]: xi).’ 

Anouk has a background in fashion and now uses all types of materials and media to (re-)create situations or systems with the aim of offering insight into our real-life systems. 


A: My goal is to do this without being cynical. I don’t want to impose a certain opinion. Instead, I want to create methods and systems that facilitate conversation. 


With this work, she decided to explore the way meaning and fiction are created around objects by embracing and utilising this branding or marketing system. To do so, she has followed various marketing steps and employed the media fit for these steps, hoping to reveal the inner workings of the system by letting it bounce around in its own mechanics. 


As a first step, she gave herself the assignment to make a series of objects that would set the process of value production agoing. The main criterion was that the object should be ambiguous. It shouldn’t have any practical user function or other goal in and of itself. Although the objects were supposed to be ambiguous, they should have the slick look of a product that could have come from an industrial production line, just to reference ‘product design’. Instead of being highly functional, however, the object should be hollow. The object’s main role was to act as a tool that facilitates the value production process. 


A: Initially, I was really looking forward to this freedom in the production process. To not having to think too much about the object’s intrinsic goal or function. But very quickly it turned out to be rather difficult and not that much fun. A bit frightening even, because where do you even start? And, when is it good enough? When is the object suitable as a hollow tool, as a figurant?

With these nondescript ambiguous objects, or figurants, Anouk approached content creators and advertising experts on Fiverr.com (an online platform where various freelancers, ranging from musicians and writers to designers offering their services) and asked them to write a marketing text about her objects. She sent them a photo or a short video of the object, indicating that she was an artist-designer who needed a catchy description for her webshop and showroom Peach Tree, Ambiguous. It was important to her to mention the target group, in this case the luxury market, as that is often one of the first steps in marketing. Sometimes, she would be asked about the purpose of the object or if it was a solution for something. Which she would answer by providing specifications about the material and the mechanics. Often, the writer would come up with the term ‘decoration’, which was good enough. 


F: What I really like about this approach is that, by leaving out specific references to the functionality of the objects, the value production process is narrowed down to the more ambiguous, implicit meanings and subjective interpretations. As there is nothing to say about the functional dimension (except, perhaps, about the materials), this forces the content creators into the fictional dimension. 

Anouk describes that this was a bit of a painful process because, once she had received the texts, she soon realised that she actually wanted this fiction to be true. 


A: You want the object to keep its promise. However, as a maker, you know the object is in a way ‘empty’ and that this promise is created afterwards. At some point, I wondered whether it was immoral to ask content creators to write about these ‘empty’ objects that they had neither seen nor tried themselves. But the reality is that they probably haven’t tried the face cream they are advertising in another video, either. 


F: I think it is very similar to how the fashion industry works: a dress is produced, it is fitted on a model (the designer probably won’t try it on her or himself) and then a photo is taken and sent to a writer who subsequently writes about it. The writer will most likely never see the real garment, let alone wear it. If we expand upon this thought, we can consider workers in the fashion industry, who produce a belt loop or pocket but do not know what the final garment (a pair of trousers, a skirt or jumpsuit, a coat) will look like. This alienation is essential to the success of the fashion system as well its destructiveness. It is exactly this disconnect between the various steps that creates space for the fashion industry and media to manufacture fiction or myth, you could say. And this myth is a vital driver for consumption.


For the next step in the process, Anouk sent someone from Fiverr one of her objects with the textual description, asking the person to produce a short promotional video using this information. While this individual performed her or his part, just as the writers had, she or he was only involved in a small part of the greater fragmented process in which no one was accountable for the end result. 

It might seem like Anouk has created an absurd system (with its automatically generated brand name, ambiguous objects and abstract translations into promotional texts and demonstrations). Yet, in response to that, she says:


A: You could call the objects that I made absurd, but I subsequently inserted them into an existing system.


With that, she points out that this system, however absurd it might seem, is an existing one. The infrastructure of this system and the way she has used it is very similar to the system and workings of the fashion industry. Objects might seem a bit less absurd in the fashion industry because we recognise the garments, their functionalities and the bodies wearing them. But the process, the system, is just as absurd. Fragmented, cut into various pieces, activities, people and places, it creates a situation in which fiction can flourish into an absurd ‘reality’ that seems natural. 


Because Anouk has pushed it just a bit further, leaving the function and logic of an object completely behind and withdrawing herself as much as possible from the value production process (by outsourcing it to other people or technology), you can feel that something is off. And it is exactly this feeling that brings the absurdity of the reality of the system to the fore. 


A: When working with the people from Fiverr, the best interactions were the ones with people working from their living room, not the ones before a green screen. In this way, you become aware not only of the actual production of marketing, but also that the fictive layer is very brittle.


F. This yet again reminds me of Camiel van Winkel describing the ‘glossing over’ of the joints and seams in the fashion photograph. The ‘realness’ of these makers from Fiverr breaks open the seams and joints of the ‘glossy’ fashion industry and makes it possible to peek behind the scenes into the living room, into the back-end of marketing. These glimpses or even glitches, let’s say, reveal that this is a man-made system. Though you’ve now seen the back-end, it just as effectively keeps you wondering what is fiction and what is reality. 


A: What I find most interesting about the approach is that it undresses the fashion industry and its media of its glossy layers, leaving us with an amateur, a tinkerer in her or his living room. With this, I’m referring to the model and the writer, but also to myself. 

As the initiator of the work, Anouk is thus also confronted with her own position. Because how will she promote herself? She considered asking someone from Fiverr to do it for her, but then wondered where the process would end. 


F: This is where I come in.


A: You become aware that, as an artist, you are also a system of value production and you function in one. Am I acting from the position of the fictional brand, keeping in mind the intentions of the brand? Or am I doing this as the founder of the brand? It’s a web in which you can get lost.


Kindly supported by Stroom Den Haag and Creative Industries Fund NL.