MSCHF: The Spicy Present

Step into the world of MSCHF, where boundaries are redefined and conventions are challenged with each daring creation. Based in Brooklyn, the avant-garde collective seamlessly blends culture, technology, and social commentary in works designed to provoke, delight, and challenge their audience.

From the hype-worthy Big Red Boot to the microscopic Louis Vuitton handbag that fetched approximately $63,000 at auction, MSCHF’s founders, Kevin Wiesner, Lukas Bentel, and Gabriel Whaley, drive their mission forward with unmatched imagination and more than a hint of irony.

hube: You remix and repurpose many different mediums and forms, creating works that transcend the categories of art and design. Do you perceive a boundary between the two?

Lukas Bentel: I don’t think we see it as a boundary; I think all spaces are good spaces to make art. And honestly, oftentimes, the ones that have the boundary around them are less effective to make good work.

Kevin Wiesner: I also believe that art, particularly conceptual art, serves as the overarching framework for all of MSCHF’s creations at the highest lev-el. Within this framework, there are diverse specialties, each serving the initial concept.Our creations are driven by whatever best serves the concept, which, in my opinion, is often rooted in art.

h: Your work is characterised by freedom, audacity, and irony. Do you consider how future audiences might perceive it?

LB: I think, to an extent, we’re much more concerned with the present. This is something that we’ve talked about quite a bit internally-whether or not we are making futuristic or sci-fi work-and I would say very much that we aren’t. We’re working in a way that is an intensification of nettle, and we’re not really concerned with what it will look like in the future. A term that we use frequently when discussing where our pieces fit is the “spicy present.”

KW: They’re essentially intensifications of what already exists, which, l’d say, offer a different perspective on the question. I believe you can contextualise MSCHF within broader historical art movements. Hopefully, in the future, there might be a progression from that.

We’re consciously structured as a business, utilising powerful tools for creating anything and everything. This project is conceptual, but we see the tradition [we are a part of] evolving linearly from various artistic move-ments, including factory production, critical speculative design, and experimental online artist groups like K-HOLE and DIS. I envision this kind of evolution continuing. While there are uncertainties about the future, MSCHF can serve as a link in that evolving chain.

h: We are surrounded by words, images, and symbols. Sometimes, poetry is born from such things, and it’s merely about arranging the words in the right order. Perhaps this applies to all forms of creativity. Do you agree?

LB: Yeah, this is very interesting. It’s sort of recombining different things that already ex-ist. In a sense, you could look at our practice as a bit of a sampling practice, where we take different parts of culture and just recombine various aspects from one thing and mash them into another. I think it makes sense.

KW: And there’s so much creative potential that you get from just switching context. I think the quote “move content from one context to another, get famous,” is a little reductive perhaps, but very apt. Sometimes, when we’re grabbing a brand or a product or an idea, and we’re smashing it together with something else, it’s the same impulse. I think there’s a lot of creative potential in constructing things in this way.

h: Some of your projects look like they are testing aesthetic models of the future. What do you think about the ethics of the future?

KW: A lot of what we are doing is satirical, poking fun at-| think-the bad or rapidly devolving parts of online life and life in general under capitalism. To Lucas’ earlier point, we’re not necessarily constructing futures, I think a lot of what we’re doing is exacerbating the present. So, there’s a degree to which I think Mr’s projects can be viewed as accelerationist, but I also think that we are trying to see. You satirise the present in the hope that the future couldn’t be better, and I think that sort of extrapolation to absurdity usually shows us bad outcomes, even if they’re kind of fun.

h: Given your use of irony to confront perceived truths and social conventions, are there any topics you consider too sensitive or inappropriate to address in this way?

LB: On one hand, we don’t like to say that anything is off limits. I do think there are a few spaces where it seems very hard to joke because they’re already so fucked up. I feel like, in politics, it’s just very hard to do anything. It feels really hopeless doing something that’s ironic or playing with something if it’s not actually going to change anything. So, unless we actually think there’s something that would be an effective intervention, in certain spaces, we might not play with them-but nothing is off limits or taboo. Categorically speaking, l think we don’t believe that there’s anything that is so sacred that we can’t touch it.

KW: In principle, nothing is off limits-but there’s no point in doing something if it’s powerless. I think the funny thing with satire is that it relies on being able to thread the needle between the believable and not believable, and different people will believe or not believe the same level of satire depending on how much they already know about the topic or what background they’re bringing to it. And there are places where there’s just nothing that is unbelievable any-more, and that is where satire really breaks down. And there are places where anyone will find anything as plausible as anything else, because there’s nothing normal that exists there, and in those places, that type of intervention is useless.