Absolution — W. T. Falscher Puts Forgiveness on the Shelf

There is a new work by W. T. Falscher, and like the best of his art, it arrives disguised as something else. It looks like an online shop. It is not. It is called Absolution, it lives at absolution.wtf, and the address itself is the first line of the joke — a domain ending that doubles as the artist's initials and as the sound a person makes when they look at the state of the world.

Three products, one promise

The work presents three products for sale. A block of butter. A soft drink. A pack of suppositories. Each is branded, photographed and described in the flawless language of consumer advertising. And each promises the same impossible thing: absolution. Forgiveness, on demand.

Spread the butter on your morning toast, and your sins are gone before the coffee is poured. Crack open the drink, and wash them down whenever the guilt creeps back. And once a week, the suppository — the deep reset the other two cannot reach, forgiveness administered in the least dignified place a person could put it. The escalation is deliberate, from the breakfast table to the body's lowest door, and it is the point.

The art is the wanting

Nothing on the site is for sale. There is no checkout, no cart, no transaction. The art is not the products — the art is the website, and the longing it exposes. Falscher has taken the oldest human weakness and given it a storefront: the wish to feel clean without becoming clean, to do the damage and keep the conscience spotless, to buy our way back to zero and carry on exactly as before.

And then comes the detail that turns satire into indictment. Every product is sold out. Not out of stock by accident — sold out by design, because the one commodity humanity will always queue for is permission to stay the same. Demand, the work tells us, has never been higher.

A mirror, as always

This is familiar ground for Falscher, and it is of a piece with everything he makes. He does not invent the absurdity. He packages it, puts it under bright light, and hands it back to us with a price tag we recognise. Where his net art has held up the political present and his movement Trumpicism the lie dressed as truth, Absolution holds up the quiet transaction we all make with our own conscience. It is funny, until it isn't. Which is precisely how long the joke is meant to last.

Art reflects reality. See the work at absolution.wtf.

A work by W. T. Falscher, represented by The Ministry of Good Taste.