As the clash between dairy and non-dairy camps rages on, both sides can recognize the upper lips featured in MilkPEP’s iconic got milk? campaign. Through the 90s and 00s, photos of celebrities sporting thin, white mustaches dominated our cultural consciousness, but even though the campaign successfully took over commercials and cafeterias across the country, consumers are becoming increasingly reluctant toward milk’s once-promising health benefits.
The campaign’s two-word question plays a significant role in Jens Settergren’s sensorial installation at Viborg Kunsthal. Through a suite of sleek LED simulations, Milk Plus follows the aesthetic journey of dairy marketing and its contributions to a tech-mediated body. Here, the Danish artist constructs a sci-fi world of his own. In a storm of blood cells, synthetic babies and Doppler-like heartbeats, he questions the nature of consumption itself: when do we feed and when are we fed on?
The exhibition explores the enduring significance of milk as a symbol of vitality, purity and health. While connotations of “mother’s milk” evoke ideas of care and protection, a critical examination of Big Milk and its deprivation-style marketing tactics reveals a more nefarious side. Pinning these associations alongside one another, Settergren highlights the moment when “the advertising-like velvety soft and chalk-white milk flows in slow-motion before our gaze, animated in a creation-mythological manner to possess its own agency,” the gallery writes in a release.
Milk Plus is now on view in Denmark through January 12, 2025.
Viborg Kunsthal
Riddergade 8,
8800 Viborg, Denmark
