What Can Artists Do Now?
The curatorial collective Artist Project Group interrogates phenomena of capitalism through curatorial and artistic methods, in an attempt to build platforms for resilient aesthetic and artistic practices. In our project for curated_by with Galerie Elisabeth & Klaus Thoman and within the framing of Kelet, we continue to investigate the capitalist overproduction of meaning, including the recuperation of crisis phenomena into the market, and ask “What Can Artists Do Now?”
Following the workshop „Artists Have The Answers?“ and the online festival „What Would Artists Do?“, the exhibition integrates recently developed works – developed from the vantage point of the Artist-as-Consultant and/or offered as services – into the context of a fine-art gallery. The exhibition troubles notions of audience, participant, material, and impact. In presenting what these artists are doing now, the works connect to a multitude of current crises – both acute and wide-ranging – that are inherent in capitalism and continuously producing its resultant conditions and intensifications. The works hook together and present an overall landscape of the present phenomenon and epiphenomenon of capitalism.
The Cybernetics-based model of business consultancy services is one of the most pervasive yet invisible global exports from the incipient Western Cold War information industry. Today, consultative industry continues its expansion into increasingly differentiated services, with its methods and services pervasively influencing decision making processes that govern public life.
In the 90s, artists started to critically affirm their transforming role as service providers to institutions, yet their collective movement towards self-regulating their practice was often sidelined by discourses of critique and politics, putting an end to emancipatory initiatives to improve working conditions of artists. Artist Project Group is interested in replacing the concept of innovation with practices of maintenance, that is, maintaining practices through crisis by developing projects in which artists extend their performative knowledge practices as services to institutions, organizations and businesses.
Artist Project Group (Bernhard Garnicnig, Lukas Heistinger, Andrea Steves)
ARTISTS:
JOHN M ARMLEDER, ARTIST PROJECT GROUP (BERNHARD GARNICNIG, LUKAS HEISTINGER, ANDREA STEVES), EGLĖ BUDVYTYTĖ, BUREAU OF ANALOGIES (JENS VAN LATHEM, SCOTT WILLIAM RABY, TOBIAS VAN ROYEN), THOMAS FEUERSTEIN, JULIA HAUGENEDER, LUCIE KOLB, MARY MAGGIC, MEMECLASSWORLDWIDE (JUAN BLANCO, MATEUSZ DWORCZYK, RAMONA KORTYKA, JENNIFER MERLYN SCHERLER), WALTER PICHLER, PARSA SANJANA SAJID, PETER SANDBICHLER, MIRIAM SIMUN, PAUL SPENDIER, LOIS WEINBERGER, SETH WEINER, FRANZ WEST
