It’s socially apt, but show tied to cooperative’s soft drink is flat

In the Gallery at REDCAT, a Danish artists’ collective has installed a show called “Superflex/Self-Organizes/Guarana Power.” The conservative work offers little to look at, less to experience and virtually nothing to think about. It’s just about as bad as art gets these days.

Superflex is a youthful team composed of Rasmus Nielsen, Jakob Fenger and Bjornstjerne Christiansen, founded in Copenhagen in 1993. (Currently they’re visiting faculty at CalArts, which operates the Gallery at REDCAT.) Guarana Power is the name of a soft drink that Superflex developed with a Brazilian farming cooperative in Maues, a small city in the central Amazon. The exhibition focuses on a makeshift bottling demonstration.

Crates, cartons and bottled water are stacked at one side of the room near folding tables, which hold empty bottles and a hand-operated press for capping them. Carbonated water is mixed with simple syrup made from guarana -- a berry found in northwestern Brazil and Venezuela that is rich in a caffeine-like ingredient -- then bottled and stored in a nearby refrigerator.

The tangy soft drink has a sour-apple flavor. It can be consumed while you watch fictional and documentary films projected simultaneously on three abutted screens along a side wall.

The three-screen composition is a modern secular version of the three painted panels in a traditional Christian triptych, which once promised salvation through religious faith. But there’s so much light in the gallery that many of the films are washed out. The cacophony of competing soundtracks -- only partly minimized by directional speakers and available headphones -- makes the room into the Gallery of Babel.

Popcorn is not offered.

The common subject of the films is self-organized communities. A self-organized community could be anything from a weekly poker game to an Al Qaeda cell -- not corporate or state-sponsored but grass-roots. The two films I sampled ranged from the thrilling tactics of Subcommander Marcos and the Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico, to the more equivocal goings-on in Christiania, Copenhagen’s hippie-anarchist enclave.

The other two gallery walls feature old-fashioned super-graphics. Painted green, red and black, they sport enormous white block letters that declare the show’s title plus “For energy and empowerment” -- a product slogan about their soft drink.

As social practice, the Guarana Power project is impeccable. As art practice, it’s innocuous.

Superflex practices a form of appropriation art, which gained some popularity in New York in the mid-1980s. (The three Danish artists, all under the age of 36, were students then.) Rather than adopt existing images from art or advertising to put into new contexts, as artists such as Richard Prince and Sherrie Levine did, Superflex appropriates existing products manufactured by multinational corporations. The technique is applied to communal situations, like the Maues cooperative of Brazilian farmers, so that corporate sovereignty is replaced by social democracy.

Brazilians have consumed drinks made from guarana for generations, and it’s a main ingredient in a variety of popular libations. In the 1990s PepsiCo and the Dutch food giant Wessanen formed a virtual cartel to drive down the price of the guarana crop in Maues, and the companies have launched global brands of guarana soft drinks. Their business threatens the independence and livelihood of farmers in the region.

Superflex designed their Guarana Power packaging (and their show) to mimic the look and color of the most established corporate brand -- green container with a red, white and black label. The aim of their appropriation is to get a leg up on the competition by creating brand-confusion. Like the old Japanese martial art of jujitsu, the little guy uses the superior strength of the big guy against him.

Superflex brands its projects with super titles. In the past they produced “Supercopies” -- for example, an exact duplicate of Lacoste’s famous alligator polo shirts, except for the word “supercopy” stamped across the front. Lacoste’s alligator shirts are said to be the first example of a commercial brand being worn on the outside of an article of clothing, rather than inside.

The project didn’t try to pass the copies off as authentic. Unlike designer knockoffs, Supercopies and Guarana Power are not frauds, and a small-time independent crook does not replace a big-time corporate bad guy. As I said, it’s unimpeachable social practice.

But it’s also insipid art practice. Ethical probity and moral authority are not very useful as a yardstick for measuring artistic worth.

On the contrary, the best appropriation art tends to be morally ambiguous and ethically dubious. Levine made watercolor copies of great Matisse watercolors, for example, and she photographed famous photographs by Walker Evans. These works get their aesthetic friction from having turned settled assumptions about originality into prickly questions.

Superflex, on the other hand, is not in the business of creating questions but of offering answers. Like G.E., it brings good things to life.

For art, an adequate response to answer-men is, So what? I might find their answers to be socially productive, and I can only hope that the farming collective in Maues prospers. But I also find “Superflex/Self-Organizes/Guarana Power” to be artistically flat, academic and poorly staged. Their actual brand is Corporate Conceptualism -- a dull, static, multinational art form maintained by an institutional cartel of establishment art schools, government art agencies, professional curators of international biennials and the like.

Superflex is a bore because it starts with appropriation art and, in the end, leaves it essentially the same as when it began. Visitors to the Gallery at REDCAT deserve more.

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‘Superflex’

What: “Superflex/Self-Organizes/ Guarana Power.”

Where: Gallery at REDCAT, 631 W. 2nd St., downtown Los Angeles

When: Tuesdays-Sundays, noon-6 p.m.

Ends: May 16

Price: Free

Contact: (213) 237-2800