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Phase 3: Besides Reproduction
Daniel Buren, Diego Castro, Maria Eichhorn, Katja Staats
Stephan Dillemuth, Loretta Fahrenholz, Phillip Zach
nOffice
05 November – 22 December 2011
Opening: Friday, 04 November 2011, 7 pm
Kunstraum of Leuphana University of Lüneburg, Campus Hall 25
Opening hours: Tues-Thurs, Sat, 2 – 6 pm
Curators involved in the exhibition series »Demanding Supplies« are Julia Moritz, Valérie Knoll, Hannes Loichinger,
Magnus Schäfer, and Cornelia Kastelan
Following a long critical tradition, the art market has been understood as art’s contaminating »other«.
More recently, there have been increasing attempts to subject the dichotomy between art and economy to a more
differentiated analysis: the art market appears as a highly ritualized, segmented system marked by complex social
processes. Whereas it resembles other markets in some respects, its unique characteristics include intransparency,
as well as distinctive value regimes and hidden symbolic commodification processes in the interplay of a variety of
actants. There is a widespread awareness of these conditions in the artistic field, and many artists are still
critically investigating the intricacies of that very market – without falling into euphoria or phobia. In the
thicket of an accelerated art market that is perceived as diffuse, explicit positioning seems decisive for reflecting
on one’s own involvement.
In 2011, the Kunstraum of Leuphana University of Lüneburg, Germany, has devoted three exhibition projects entitled
»Demanding Supplies – Nachfragende Angebote« to this exploration of art and its markets. In the first phase,
»Enabling Space,« nOffice (Markus Miessen, Ralf Pflugfelder, Magnus Nilsson) developed a new spatial structure
and thereby questioned how the conditions of art’s presentation predetermine its ambivalent relationship to its markets.
The second phase, »Trans-Actions,« developed in collaboration with Halle für Kunst Lüneburg and Magnus Schäfer,
was a double exhibition focusing on a phenomenon of the most recent history of art. Taking the example of the New
York gallery American Fine Arts, Co. – founded by Colin de Land (1955-2003) –, the exhibition looked at the
merging of commercial and artistic practices generally considered at odds with each other. Exhibition participants
included Art Club 2000, Patterson Beckwith, J. St. Bernard, Stephan Dillemuth, John Dogg, Loretta Fahrenholz, Karl
Holmqvist, Jackie McAllister, James Meyer, and Phillip Zach. Besides these reflexions on the mechanisms of art markets,
artist Carissa Rodriguez highlighted the problem of professional positioning in the art world in her installation
»Secrétaires«. The works of three artists out of this group are kept for the current exhibition.
The third phase, »Besides Reproduction,« will now add four artistic positions that shift attention to the art
market under varying premises: Maria Eichhorn and Daniel Buren are joined by Diego Castro and Katja Staats, the two
2011 winners of the Daniel Frese Prize for Contemporary Art, which was awarded for the first time this year.
Maria Eichhorn has been examining the artistic field since the 1990s. A famous example of her work is »Maria
Eichhorn Aktiengesellschaft« (Public Limited Company) (2002) for documenta 11. Consisting of a stock company
using its allotted production funds, the work leads its system ad absurdum by freezing its own assets. For the
show at the Kunstraum of Leuphana University of Lüneburg, the artist revisits an exhibition series she presented
four times at her gallery Barbara Weiss, Berlin, between 1995 and 2001. The exhibitions staged a kind of »remnant
sale« that operated according to the principle of successive reduction. Every object sold was missing from the
inventory of the following exhibition. For each of the exhibitions, an updated invitation card listing all of the
works in alphabetical order gives insight into the dynamics of supply and demand. Ten years after, Eichhorn updates
this invitation card once again. It is presented next to the four previous cards in a new display conceived by the
artist. In this way, Eichhorn develops a partial continuation – a simultaneous reproduction and retrospection.
With his 2005 work »Immaterialistische Internationale« (Immaterialist International), Diego Castro has created a
progressively expanding movement of performances, videos, installations, pamphlets and hundreds of drawings, all
of which have come to form a complex of works that critically targets the standard forms of distribution and
representation systems in art. Castro’s design, which emerged from this body of work, was awarded the 2011 Daniel
Frese Prize for Contemporary Art by a jury chaired by Beatrice von Bismarck and acknowledged by laudator Robert Fleck.
»Immaterialist International« discusses the ritualistic value of art and advocates ways of bypassing the various filters
of the field. Castro employs the means of reproduction by updating them while holding back the original as discussed
by Walter Benjamin. For the exhibition, Castro develops an overview of his project which opens up references to the
»Situationist International,« its impulses critical of capitalism, and its political demands in the 1960s. A copy
machine allows the viewers to access posters, audio recordings and drawings on subjects such as »art and art trade«
or »working conditions for cultural workers«.
The intransparency of the art market and the social mechanisms of the art world are also a central field of interest
for artist Katja Staats, winner of the 2011 Daniel Frese Prize for Contemporary Art in the young emerging artist
category. For the exhibition, she visited artists in her geographical context to represent several of their works
in different sites. Each of the black-and-white images depicts Katja Staats as a rear figure, gazing at the artwork
seen in the photograph. Further allusions in this composition include the »picture in the picture« as well as the
artist’s self-depiction. The reproduction of persons in the picture allows to incorporate the players of the art
market network. What is multiplied are the perspectives of a system whose protagonists are following specific
conventions and pursuing interests often veiled. In this way, Staats questions not only her own position; by
recontextualizing those artworks, she forces a shift in the attention economy through a symbolic inversion of
center and periphery.
Daniel Buren looks at the partial homology of artworks and other passion objects. In 2008, the first-generation
Conceptual artist and early proponent of institutional critique triggered a daring liaison between the art and
fashion markets. Buren designed 365 silk scarves for the luxury brand »Hermès,« the same kind that serves as the
company’s hallmark. The motifs Buren employs are drawn from a selection from his bundle of thousands of
»photo-souvenirs«. Buren has been taking these photographs of his own ephemeral and site-specific art projects
since the 1950s, though until that point they had only been seen in books. Besides the »photo-souvenirs,« the
scarves were also printed with another »brand« by Buren himself: the always 8.7 cm-wide stripes that he had
originally taken from a customary awning fabric and has been using ever since. As part of the »photo-souvenirs«
on the silks, the stripe pattern now occupies a new territory in the inherent logic of the work. As surfaces of
various spatial and social situations, Buren generates his critical intersections of art, design, craft, and
fashion. In an arrangement developed for the Kunstraum, the artist seizes on this threefold reproduction: the
ephemeral art project through the »photo-souvenir,« the »photo-souvenir« in the silk cloth and the awning fabric
pattern as well as the artistic identification symbols as a framework for both that is nonetheless set to work –
questioning the margin between artwork and luxury good. This also leaves room for Buren’s own inquiry into the
sphere of the logic of distinction and the constantly re-evaluated edge of criticism – that, however, continually
defines the difference between works of art and luxury objects.
Keeping elements from the second exhibition project »Trans-Actions,« the presented works merge into the final phase
of the series »Demanding Supplies – Nachfragende Angebote.« The integrated text installation by Phillip Zach quotes
fragments of the discursive bequest of the New York gallery American Fine Arts, Co. Stephan Dillemuth’s video, showing
a talk of the artist with its protagonist Colin de Land and artist Joseph Strau, moves into the backstage opened for
visitors, the office of the Kunstraum. Loretta Fahrenholz is represented by a poster of her film »HAUST« which she had
shown parallel to an insight into Colin de Land’s video and super-8 films and which negotiates challenges during phases
of passage in artistic trajectories.
Upcoming Dates:
Workshop with Maria Eichhorn (Berlin)
Sat 5/11/2011, 11 am – 2 pm
Kunstraum of Leuphana University of Lüneburg, Campus Building 5, Room 326
Workshop »Passion Investments in Art Markets«
Fri 25/11/2011, 2 – 7 pm
Lectures by
Olav Velthuis (University of Amsterdam):
»A Market in Stasis. Why Contemporary Art is Always Sold in the Same Way«
Larissa Buchholz (Columbia University New York): »The Relationship of Symbolic and Economic Value in the
Global Art Field. Challenging the Convergence Thesis«
Massimiliano Nuccio (Leuphana University of Lüneburg, Bocconi University Milan):
»The Art Market between (Creative) Economy and Economics«
Christoph Behnke, Steffen Rudolph, Ulf Wuggenig (Leuphana University of Lüneburg): »Art Market Research –
Some Non-Obvious Results«
Kunstraum of Leuphana University of Lüneburg, Campus Building 5, Room 326
»New Patrons in Hamburg« with Harun Farocki, Nina Möntmann, Vera Tollmann
Fri 16/12/2011, 6 pm
Kunstraum of Leuphana University of Lüneburg, Campus Building 5, Room 326
The exhibition is based on a cooperation between Kunstraum of Leuphana University of Lüneburg and the project KIM
(Innovation Incubator at the Leuphana University of Lüneburg), which is supported by the ERDF programme of the
European Union and the federal state of Lower Saxony.
www.kim-art.net
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