Leif Elggren Thomas Liljenberg THE ANSWERS In 1996 Elggren and Liljenberg published Experiment with Dreams, a book comprised of letters the artists had written to a selection of celebrities, autocrats, governments, and commercial and cultural institutions. In sometimes bizarre, often hilarious letters the artists describe how the addressees have appeared in or affected their dreams, and as a result, "because these people profit themselves on everybody's dreams and possibilities for the future", demand monetary compensation. Writing in awkward English, the artists often take on different personas and alter egos, sliding between first person singular and plural. The relationship between the analyst and analyzed becomes effectively blurred and extended onto a collective social unconscious. The result is a poetic, hallucinatory, sinister and comical text, which is ultimately hopeful in its search for identity and affirmation against the economic and social forces of global capitalism. The Answers is the follow-up publication of this project, in which the artists will present the letters of reply they received. This collection of "personal and indignant" replies from people in positions of power and influence should prove to be as intriguing, amusing and unsettling as the initial letters. "In the course of earlier historical events the center of the market and commerce was symbolized by the town square, and power was symbolized by the church. Today these determining ideas are part of a global economic system, abstract and incomprehensible to the individual. But they are still cruelly present in our everyday affairs. They are in the images of TV's hallucinatory eye, in war, in blood and money as well as in white laundry, in our food and unemployment. With insight into the frighteningly unjust distribution of human opportunities that continue to occur on earth, despite seeming hopelessness, the potential also exists to turn disadvantage into its opposite. We are all born like Jesus Christ." Back