Dr Harald "Zimmer" Fraem

Peter Hill

The Albury Wodonga Superfiction 1993

Collaboration Peter Hill and J.J. Voss (Photographer)

S U P E R F I C T I O N S

Dr Harald "Zimmer" Fraem

Dr Harald "Zimmer" Fraem, is, like Dr Willi Bongard, another of the art world's futurologists. A Museum of Contemporary Ideas press release explains hismodus operandi. "For the past five year's Dr Harald Fraem from the museum's Department of Computing and Electronic Networking has been producing his Top 100 Art Words and Phrases, to be sold to magazines, collectors and curators around the world.

Every issue of the world's leading five contemporary art magazines is scanned into the museum's computer system, including titles and text from gallery advertisements along with articles, interviews, and reviews. The magazines locked into the system are: Parkett (Switzerland), Kunstforum (Cologne), Flash Art (Milan), Artscribe (ex-London), and Artforum (New York).

The system is programmed to block out many thousands of words and phrases including prepositions, artists' names, and commonly occurring nouns and verbs, such as: gallery, paint, biennale, recession, museum, gestural, and pissed as a newt (see Legless).

Once the important task of sifting and elimination has occurred, Dr Fraem and his assistants are usually left with some 1500 art terms, the majority of which are discarded. The more appearances a word or phrase makes the higher up the listings it is placed. Generally speaking those words in the Top Ten positions have been working their way up the list through several seasons, while those in the final ten slots are either on their way in (and very fresh), or their way out (and very stale).

The following come from the 1991 list:

1. Post-modernism
2. Modernism
3. Fiction
4. Humor
5. Irony
6. Appropriation
7. Complexity
8. Fake
9. Deconstruction
10. Secondary Market
11. My Project is about
12. Situationist
13. City
14. Masturbatory
15. Un-American
16. Musealisation
17. Perestroika
18. Cynical Manipulation
19. Knight's Templars
20. Neo-Geo
21. Falsificationism
22. Linguistic Darwinism
23. Intelligent Gloves
24. Picollage
25. Death of the Curator