Helmut Smits: Water is the ‘Realest Thing’
By Marco Margaritoff
Photo by Ronald Smits.
If you ask Dutch multidisciplinary artist Helmut Smits whether he is a socially engaged activist or an artist, he would tell you, “It doesn’t work that way.”
With an artistic piece like The Real Thing — a distillation machine that turns a bottle of the all-too familiar Coca-Cola product into clean drinking water — Smits points out how misplaced our priorities are as a culture.
“There are a lot of countries in the world that don’t have access to clean water but they drink Coca-Cola because they know if you drink the local water you get ill,” he says.
Smits commonly subverts the identities of the items he uses in his art. For example, 0.26 Gallon of Oil is a bottle of Coca-Cola filled with oil instead of soda. It looks the same, but plays with your expectations. In the photo A Plastic Plant Acting Like a Real One by Losing its Leaves, Smits presents you with a plant that seems real, replete with leaves strewn beneath it. But if you look closer you’ll see a price tag on one of the leaves.
The Real Thing began, like all of Smits’ works, with a curiosity and fascination of the status-quo regarding a normative, accepted maxim of contemporary life. In this case: Coca-Cola is made, packaged, and sold all over the world while access to clean water is still not universal.
“I got the idea through looking at Coca-Cola as if I’ve never seen it before. Like, if you were an alien or a child,” Smits says. “And I found out that to produce one liter of Coca-Cola in the early days you needed about six to nine liters [of water]. These things are really strange, you know, that you make an unhealthy drink and waste good stuff.”
The Real Thing is not a symbolic use of language. Consisting of a basic boiler plate upon which a beaker filled with water contains the nominal bottle of Coca-Cola, The Real Thing is a functional, minimalist work. It boils the synthetic beverage and collects the evaporated liquid, funneling it back into another glass beside the beaker. Minerals are then added to the evaporated liquid to make the water potable.
Initially produced in 2006 without actually functioning, the distillation machine was developed in collaboration with a chemist from the University of Amsterdam. It first exhibited at the Van Abbe Museum in Amsterdam in 2014, and gained widespread buzz from magazines like WIRED and Dezeen. A newer version is currently being exhibited in Doha, Qatar.
Smits’ desire is not to save the world by turning the most popular soda across cultures into water. He’s here to point the finger, to make us ponder the absurdity of guaranteed access to synthetic sugar-water as opposed to the impossibility of drinkable water in many areas of the world. An injustice that is a result of big business trumping profit over clean water as a human right.
