I picked this bag up somewhere, for practical reasons I think, but I can’t really remember. I guess I kept it because I find it cute, even if I was never myself a young anarchist when I was a teenager. The act of scribbling left-activist messages on an army bag is in itself a beautiful act of resistance, I think, but it also hints at the desire for active and forceful change. Such as the army is good at implementing. Especially the statement “Fuck the Norm!” speaks volumes. Is this not just the expression of another norm, of politics as a fashion within a specific subculture? If someone writes “W Bush is a c..t!” on their jacket, I suspect a real and personal dislike for that particular person, which I can believe in. “Fuck society!” on the other hand, sounds a bit lame to me. What society, or at least what part of it is it that you so dislike? I can’t respect generic and general statements in activism any more than I can in art, I guess. But it’s still cute.

But what is a call to “Fuck the Norm!” other than a desire for war with society, for revolution? And what is revolution other than the destruction of the values and dignitaries of the past? To explore this tendency is angry, young expressions, I wanted to focus in a bit more on the effects of revolution. And for achieving that, who could be better than Louis XVI? I made a passable copy of his death mask (and yes, it does seem he had a huge nose) recreated from all those images I could scourge from the web of course, and then impressed this on the bag, with the help of a resin cast. I then painted in the new shape into the fabric of the bag, and there, I had the cause and effect of revolution efficiently captured in just one fashion garment. The bag still opens and could thus be used, even with its new hard-back, but it also hangs nicely as a sculpture. I hope that apart from being a cultural statement of contemporary art and taste, it also helps remind those who now see it, that when the revolution comes, not even those highest up are safe.