got milk?

Jens Settergren: Milk Plus, Viborg Kunsthal

Driving through the rural fields between Chicago and St. Louis, pulling off the highway, a small plastic sign on the grass above a single phone number reads: got landscaping? The idiom, a simple two-word question, borrows its linguistic format from what is widely recognized across the United States as one of the most concerted ad campaigns of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Launched in 1993 by MilkPEP (the Milk Processor Education Program), the ubiquitous commercials that donned the slogan got milk? dominated cultural consciousness across America for over two decades, unmatched in numbers by any other ad in the industry to date. In the corporatization of the dairy industry, milk, like money, no longer needed to adhere to the limitations of humanity. It could be something else that was not like us. It could be something beyond human, something immortal. It was milk plus.

In his largescale film installation Milk Plus at Viborg Kunsthal, Danish artist Jens Settergren (b. 1989) indulges in the many guises of milk and its role in visual culture. Across his sleek, minimalist, and refined simulations, Settergren traces how the aesthetic approach of globally shared strategies for marketing milk have altered its symbolism and contributed to the transformation of a technologically mediated world. What one could call the ‘erotics’ of milk—a manifestation of desire as the emotional and physical dimensions of the brain and body—are bound to capital. This was not always the case. The foundations of milk in collective human imagination of course has roots in perceptions of care and maternal nature—in creation myths, the milk of other creatures nourished the first human beings, such as the Norse mythology of Ymir and the cow Audhumla, or otherwise created the world itself, as with Hera’s breastmilk (γαλα, gala) that spilled to build the Milky Way (γαλαξία, galaxy). The got milk? campaign changed things by targeting the consumer through a deprivation strategy: rather than generating new customers, the sales of milk were encouraged by instilling an anxiety and fear among existing drinkers (despite questionable health benefits or statistics). Bodies lacking in milk were less efficient, and therefore, inferior. Departing from its understanding as an ancient life source across global cultures, milk was suddenly the leading influential symbol reflecting contemporary ideals for productivity and perpetual optimization.

What started as mother, turned into man, and ultimately machine. For those raised in the 1990s, the connotations of mother’s milk—a productive, protective, and nurturing substance—were transposed onto the image of a crisp glass of white liquid placed on a kitchen table, as seen through a television screen. Countless celebrities sported white moustaches made by drinking milk from a cup on roadside billboards and bus stops. Closer to the 2000s, commercials featuring milk poured against a single-colored backdrop that flowed into the shape of a person. Milk no longer fed the body, it was the body. Over time, the style of movement pictured in its broadcast animations developed from the maternal into something else—cascades of white translucent liquid adopting the behavior of its sexual counterpart, semen, in states suggestive of pleasure and virility. It was precisely through the novel non-binary gender associations of milk in the latter half of the twentieth century spurned by the got milk? campaign that its extraction and dissemination within global economic trade spread so rapidly. Not only did milk sustain life—it bred it.

At Viborg Kunsthal, Settergren presents a freestanding LED screen that dissects the space of the lower gallery surrounded by four cross-shaped pharmacy signs. Graphic animations in the characteristic bright green hue either pulse like a heartbeat or emit Doppler-like waves that emanate from the center. Against these rhythmic repetitions, the film takes us through the tube-shaped chamber of a vessel as it passes through a stream of cartoon-like blood cells, reminiscent of biomedical demonstrations enacting the efficacy of a new drug. Across the synchronized projections, we follow the abstracted narrative of a sentient baby—its heavily processed voice scoring the plot of Settergren’s quasi-science fictional realm. Unnatural flows of simulated milk rush across the screen, colliding into one another in slow motion. The smooth and synthetic edges of the baby’s eyelids open and close, before it addresses us directly—a way of coming into being in utero that evokes a futuristic world in which birth is no longer tied to the female womb.

In our current digital paradigm, the implications of health and consciousness are inextricably linked. Developments in the field of medicine unfold alongside advancements in artificial intelligence, each toward trans or posthuman ambitions of untethering the body-brain from the constraints of mortality. Milk Plus explores the brain as a cultural object—one that is informed by a ‘cognitive capitalism’ that considers the affective capacity of consciousness akin to assets, goods, and services whose use is rendered by the market. Across biotech and pharmaceutical spheres, the race to discover self-healing cells and “the imaginary of a brain that can hack itself” presents not only a challenge to thought—it threatens the extinction of consciousness itself. The will for machines to override subjectivity is mirrored in our changing approach to language—marked, among other things, by a pursuit in recent years to strip away the multifaceted meaning and collapse the nuance of words thereby transforming them into something AI can understand. To make the mind of the individual obsolete endangers not only us, but the future of art. 

Just as milk operates as the aesthetic stand-in for the non-human, Settergren’s work calls attention to the limitations of seeing the world through the capitalist consumer complex. In place of eradicating poetry—that which untethers from singular definitions—experiences that affront this commodification can arise from what humans have in abundance: their flaws. Our ability to misunderstand and mistake things, to decipher meaning subjectively and with great degrees of differentiation and error, may prove to be the ultimate resistance against technology’s triumph over man. The potential defeat of Big Milk stems from the misinterpretation of the dominant definition ushered by capitalist consumer culture—a purposeful act of misunderstanding what Harold Bloom terms in his book The Anxiety of Influence as “poetic misprision.” How could we conceive of false impressions as radical gestures that affirm, instead of destroy, life?

Perhaps instead of milk, one considers milkiness, and all the beautiful ways milk-like things behave. For example, the droplets of cloudy latex that secrete from a blade as it scores the surface of an opium poppy seedpod. The iridescent swirls of powdered rice that shimmer in a bottle of sake. Gently watching your foot disappear into the partial opacity of clay-blue water as you step into a geothermal spring. To milk, instead, associations held within one’s own memory in ways that only we can. To counter the automated paths of mechanical reproduction and possibly save ourselves, we could ask: what else could milk be?

—Stephanie Cristello