[spectre] Exhibition announcement: It's the Political Economy, Stupid

[Open Space]

° *It's the Political Economy, Stupid* | 16 March - 25 April 2011

Opening: 15 March, 19.00 pm

*Project curators*: Oliver Ressler & Gregory Sholette

*Participating artists*:

Zanny Begg
Libia Castro & Ólafur Ólafsson
Damon Rich
Superflex


Globalization, privatization, flexible work schedules, deregulated markets;
30 years of neoliberal capitalism has driven most of the world’s governments
to partly or wholly abandon their previous role as arbitrators between the
security of the majority and the profiteering of the corporate sector. It
comes as no surprise therefore that when problems in the US real estate and
financial sectors resulted in a global financial crisis starting in 2008,
governments all over the world pumped trillions of dollars into banks and
insurance companies, essentially creating the largest transfer ever of
capital into the private sector. One argument often cited for this
unprecedented action was that many of these transnational corporations were
“too big to fail.” Still, despite these enormous expenditures millions of
people soon lost their homes and livelihood, and the economic and social
damage has not yet ended. The cost of these bailouts is staggering. States
borrowed capital to rescue financial institutions resulting in growing
national debt and virtual insolvency for some countries. Managing these
budget deficits might have been possible if wealthy transnational
corporations were forced to assist the economy, but neoliberal governments
instead chose to introduce belt-tightening programs that radically reduce
public services and social welfare. Needless to say, these austerity
measures do not necessarily reflect the will of the majority, and increasing
voter apathy is one serious side effect of such top-down decision-making.

Today, we are facing a catastrophe of capitalism that has also become a
major crisis for representative democracy. The very idea of the modern
nation state is in jeopardy as the deterritorialized flow of finance capital
melts down all that was solid into raw material for market speculation and
bio-political asset mining. It is the social order itself, and the very
notion of governance with its archaic promise of security and happiness that
has become another kind of modern ruin. Theorist Slavoj Žižek puts it this
way, “the central task of the ruling ideology in the present crises is to
impose a narrative which will place the blame for the meltdown not on the
global capitalist system as such, but on secondary and contingent deviations
(overly lax legal regulations, the corruption of big financial institutions,
and so on).” [1]
*
It’s the Political Economy, Stupid* [2] brings together a group of
superlative artists who focus on the current crisis in a sustained and
critical manner. Rather than acquiesce to our current calamity this
exhibition asks if it is not time to push back against the disciplinary
dictates of the capitalist logic and, as if by some artistic sorcery, launch
a rescue of the very notion of the social itself.

The exhibition *It’s the Political Economy, Stupid* will be continued with
different works in an upcoming show at the Austrian Cultural Forum New York,
from January till April 2012 (http://www.acfny.org).

----------------------------------------------------------
[1] Slavoj Žižek, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce. Verso Books, London/New
York 2009, p. 19
[2] The title It’s the Political Economy, Stupid is a re-phrasing by Slavoj
Žižek of the phrase “It’s the economy, stupid”, a widely circulated phrase
used during Bill Clinton’s successful 1992 presidential campaign against
incumbent President George Bush Senior.


*Artist info:

Zanny Begg *
Treat (or trick), video installation, 7 min., 2009

Treat (or trick) is a video installation in three parts exploring the tricks
of the financial trade; part 1 stars the notorious magician of the free
market, Mr. Invisible Hands; part 2 explores the secret life of rabbits (and
other small commodities); and part 3 looks at the bottomless pit of our
desires. Canned laughter, boos, gasps and cheers evoke an absent audience
who jolly along the solitary viewer in accepting some of the oldest myths of
the free market. But as the film points out Mr. Invisible Hand’s best trick
is not pulling a rabbit from a hat or acts of escapology and transposition
but changing the relationship between audience and performer – no one really
believes in the magic, but we still come along to see the “allure of the
trick”.

*Libia Castro & Ólafur Ólafsson*
Lobbyists, video, 16 min., 2009

With this video work we wanted to continue portraying labour today and a
possible example of immaterial labour, as well as portraying an activity
that would represent latest developments in Europe on certain policies. We
registered lobbyists and activists performing under working conditions,
exploring the maelstrom surrounding their activity in Brussels and
Strasbourg. In preparation for the work we studied historical and
contemporary sources constructing the figure of the lobbyist, interviewed
and filmed a variety of people associated with lobbyist associations, NGOs
and civilian ‘watchdog’ groups, and dug into different modes of
registration, news and music videos. We commissioned British reporter and
activist Tamasin Cave to write an article about the current situation, which
we were witnessing. In the following we worked with British actress Caroline
Dalton and the Icelandic reggae group Hjálmar to perform the article, in an
intertwining manner of spoken narration, singing and chanting, to a
dub-score from Hjálmar, as soundtrack to the video.

*Damon Rich*
Mortgage Stakeholders, 2-channel video, 47 min., 2008

Mortgage Stakeholders stages a conversation between bankers, regulators,
architects, investors, financial justice advocates and others about the
United States system for financing private housing. This video was
originally produced as part of Red Lines Housing Crisis Learning Center, a
mobile exhibition kit of models, photographs, videos, and drawings designed
to immerse visitors in the financial landscape of architecture.

The American preference for traditional residential design masks a
frightening reality: across the globe, individual buildings have been
retrofitted to serve as interchangeable nodes in a vast abstract structure,
held loosely together by legal and political restraints, made to allow the
furious circulation of finance capital.

Who supplies the money to construct and buy buildings? What are the
historical relationships between lenders and borrowers? How are ownership
claims produced and circulated? As what has become known as the Subprime
Meltdown continues to spread, pushing people out of homes, wasting
neighborhoods, bankrupting institutions, and threatening global economic
crisis, Red Lines aims to broaden and enrich the urgent conversation about
how our society finances its living environments.

*Superflex*
The Financial Crisis, video installation, 2009

The Financial Crisis (Session I-V) is a new film work, in which Superflex
address the financial crisis and meltdown from a therapeutic perspective. A
hypnotist guides us through our worst nightmares to reveal the crisis
without as the psychosis within. During 4 sessions you will experience the
fascination of speculation and power, fear, anxiety and frustration of
loosing control, economic loss and personal disaster.

Session 1 - The Invisible Hand
Session 2 - George Soros
Session 3 - You
Session 4 - Old Friends

A middle-aged man in wire-rimmed glasses coolly asks us to imagine various
scenarios relating to personal ruin: losing your house, losing your job. He
asks us to picture what it must be like to be billionaire financier George
Soros as he’s guided in his various investment machinations by the invisible
hand of the market. It all sounds vaguely unreal and nightmarish, and sure
enough, at the end of each “session”, the man snaps his fingers and says,
“When you wake up, you will feel happy and refreshed”. It turns out he’s a
hypnotist, and we are being put under to cure our addiction to capitalism –
which, unlike smoking, is one habit that seems impossible to break. (Time
Out New York, Feb. 2010)


*supported by*:

BM:UKK
Stadt Wien - Kulturabteilung MA 7
ERSTE Foundation

About us:
Open Friday, Saturday 13.00 - 18.30 and open for the rest of the week days
by appointment only.
Admission free
*
Open Space, Open Systems *
Zentrum für Kunstprojekte
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Austria

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*Open Space, Open Systems* - Zentrum für Kunstprojekte aims to create the
most vital facilities for art concerned with contributing a model strategy
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