THE LAST SHOW
Six D.O.G.S, 15-22.02.2013, Athens
“Last Show” is an exhibition borrowing its title from the publication “Hope and Violence in the Last Spectacle” by G. Agamben, in which he discusses the contemporaneity of the “Society of the Spectacle” by G. Debord. It is composed by works in various media such as painting, sculpture, video, and prints – placed around the traces of a central performance taking place at the opening night.
Alexander Rodchenko’s 1913 “End of Painting” - three monochromes painted in the three primary colors – is recreated and painted over in chroma-key green, turning the century-old radical argument for painting’s autonomy against bourgeois illusion and narrative, into a projection-ready screen for CGI effects. Johannes Itten’s Bauhaus color wheel, a pedagogical diagram displaying color harmonics is flattened into a plywood cutout and neutralized in a uniform Photoshop background grey, stripped of its utopian ideals of universal order and leaning against the wall like a discarded construction material. In reverse, Photoshop’s digital artifacts materialize as a transparency grid painting and a plywood explosion : The transparency grid turns into a physical canvas, turning the Modernist ideal of the grid as stand-in for universal order and balance into a technical interface awaiting data. The explosion, a starburst out of the software’s archive of vector ready-mades and a signifier of maximum kinetic energy turns into another plywood cutout leaning against the wall, infinitely immobilized. In these works, the digital infiltrates the analog, cutting through the avant garde’s radicality and utopian aspirations and turning them into empty screens, hollowed-out placeholders where data – and the spectacle - can now take over, stripped of any liveliness and meaning.
Photos from the “Scene & Heard” column of Artforum Magazine, a foundational publication for art criticism in the 1960s and 1970s, picturing gatekeepers photographed in artworld openings and events, are printed here on blotting paper through diverted at-home printing techniques, with the machine taking over authorship. The artworld becomes the artwork, in a closed feedback loop where social capital and networking become substitutes for cultural production. On the opening evening, the performance consists of a party clown entertaining the audience for an hour, offered for free with any order over 20 pizzas. The event – somewhere between a birthday party and a corporate mixer - is recorded by a GoPro camera surveilling the space, and then played over in a loop for the duration of the exhibition. The remains – pizza boxes, wine bottles, balloons – stay present on the central table in the middle of space.
By using a logic of appropriation, the works discuss the relationship of art to entertainment, spectacle and consumption and the subsumption of art history and the avant-garde radicalisms by the new visual regimes of the virtual. The “spectacular vacancy” mentioned by Agamben in his work is reflected, therefore, through the set-up of the landscape of an absence.
THE LAST SHOW
Six D.O.G.S, 15-22.02.2013, Athens
“Last Show” is an exhibition borrowing its title from the publication “Hope and Violence in the Last Spectacle” by G. Agamben, in which he discusses the contemporaneity of the “Society of the Spectacle” by G. Debord. It is composed by works in various media such as painting, sculpture, video, and prints – placed around the traces of a central performance taking place at the opening night.
Alexander Rodchenko’s 1913 “End of Painting” - three monochromes painted in the three primary colors – is recreated and painted over in chroma-key green, turning the century-old radical argument for painting’s autonomy against bourgeois illusion and narrative, into a projection-ready screen for CGI effects. Johannes Itten’s Bauhaus color wheel, a pedagogical diagram displaying color harmonics is flattened into a plywood cutout and neutralized in a uniform Photoshop background grey, stripped of its utopian ideals of universal order and leaning against the wall like a discarded construction material. In reverse, Photoshop’s digital artifacts materialize as a transparency grid painting and a plywood explosion : The transparency grid turns into a physical canvas, turning the Modernist ideal of the grid as stand-in for universal order and balance into a technical interface awaiting data. The explosion, a starburst out of the software’s archive of vector ready-mades and a signifier of maximum kinetic energy turns into another plywood cutout leaning against the wall, infinitely immobilized. In these works, the digital infiltrates the analog, cutting through the avant garde’s radicality and utopian aspirations and turning them into empty screens, hollowed-out placeholders where data – and the spectacle - can now take over, stripped of any liveliness and meaning.
Photos from the “Scene & Heard” column of Artforum Magazine, a foundational publication for art criticism in the 1960s and 1970s, picturing gatekeepers photographed in artworld openings and events, are printed here on blotting paper through diverted at-home printing techniques, with the machine taking over authorship. The artworld becomes the artwork, in a closed feedback loop where social capital and networking become substitutes for cultural production. On the opening evening, the performance consists of a party clown entertaining the audience for an hour, offered for free with any order over 20 pizzas. The event – somewhere between a birthday party and a corporate mixer - is recorded by a GoPro camera surveilling the space, and then played over in a loop for the duration of the exhibition. The remains – pizza boxes, wine bottles, balloons – stay present on the central table in the middle of space.
By using a logic of appropriation, the works discuss the relationship of art to entertainment, spectacle and consumption and the subsumption of art history and the avant-garde radicalisms by the new visual regimes of the virtual. The “spectacular vacancy” mentioned by Agamben in his work is reflected, therefore, through the set-up of the landscape of an absence.