UNITASKING (TENTATIVELY)
Eva Barto, Mattia Denisse, Helene Hellmich, Thomas Teurlai, Pauline Toyer, Ana Vaz, Veronica Wüst
8 March – 11 May 2014
Distribution used to be the keyword in the mass media value system. The blockbuster economy used to rely on distribution to focus all attentions on a single product. Now, in the age of the attention economy, our individual focused attention is the scarcest resource and ultimately the commodity sold to the service industry. Multitasking and its consecutive attention deficit disorders have become the new doom of this era, and any pledge to focus and turn off distracting social networks providers is its injunction. The unitasker is the hero of that day. Doing one thing at a time. Then, is the artist of the late 20th century–hyperactive, self-manager, self-promoter, ubiquitous, biennalist–an outdated role model? There is more than one to think that the modern artist has pioneered these "economics of attention“. Duchamp’s ready-mades, Avant-garde manifestos, Andy Warhol’s lifestyle or conceptualists’ trading of immaterial goods, have deflated the interest in the actual artwork in order to shed light on the social relationship established between the artist and the viewer. Now, in the well-oiled machine of Google AdSense and Mediabot, the engine that reads and analyses every user’s click on a computer in order to suggest contextual advertisements in real time, half the work of the creative act is definitely performed, not by the viewer as Marcel Duchamp used to think, but by software. In these great times should we still refer to art as a part of the creative field, or should we rather ban the term of creativity from the art’s vocabulary?
Guest curator and collaboration: François Piron, ENSBA École Nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Lyon
PROGRAMME
12 April 2014
Helene Hellmich and Veronica Wüst: Paraperformance 2
PRESS MATERIAL
Funding and Support
Kunststiftung NRW
Institut français, Berlin
Kulturamt der Stadt Köln
RheinEnergie Stiftung Kultur
Deltax Wirtschafts- und Steuerberatungsgesellschaft mbH
Hotel Chelsea
Images
1 — exhibition view
2-3 — Pauline Toyer: Condition, 2014
4 — Mattia Denisse: Elementary principles of tropical geometry 3: hyper-banana, 2014, Elementary principles of tropical geometry 2: the paraphrases of the moon, 2014, Waiting for the Urubu's daughter, 2014
5 — exhibition view
6 — Helene Hellmich: 61 m Metall und 5 Behälter, 2014
Photo: Simon Vogel
