ROUNDTRIPPING
Selections from the Marieluise Hessel Collection
and CCS Bard Special Collections
CURATED BY KATHLEEN DITZIG AND ROBIN LYNCH
29 April 2015 - 30 April 2015
On Sweat, Paper, and Porcelain
CURATED BY KATHLEEN DITZIG
29 March 2015 - 3 May 2015
Incorporate Me
CURATED BY ROBIN LYNCH
29 March 2015 - 3 May 2015
Roundtripping: Selections from the
“Roundtripping” is a financial strategy in which capital goes from a central source to a foreign jurisdiction and then returns to the originating country. The strategy is used to distort statistics on foreign direct investment by generating overly optimistic assessments of an economy’s vitality. The items selected in Roundtripping have all undertaken similar complete circuits, but in the art world. The ‘original’ work - for example, a lecture by Liam Gillick, or a performance by Ulay and Marina Abramović - is in each case transformed by the process of travel, effectively aping the global influence of the work. Roundtripping presents works that crystallise the process of generating cultural capital through travel.
Defined by movement, relocation, and concealment, the offshore is an articulated pattern in contemporary economic, social, and political life that influences art circulation and value.
On Sweat, Paper and Porcelain
With work by Heman Chong, Ho Rui An, The Propeller Group and Superflex,
Andrew Norman Wilson and Akhil C, and Yee I-Lann
Installation view from On Sweat, Paper, and Porcelain, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, March 29 - May 3, 2015. Master’s thesis exhibition curated by Kathleen Ditzig. Photo: Chris Kendall 2015.
On Sweat, Paper, and Porcelain examines the material vehicles of international circulation. Shaped by the material intransigence of global infrastructure, the objects presented in the exhibition are at once artworks and artifacts of the international.
Constituted through their distribution and production, these examples of the offshore, precipitate and represent the shifting networks and socio-spatial relations between the artist, artwork, and its audience. These relations are, today, products of the offshore: an internationalized system of production and commodity consumption brought on by developments in transport and communications that have allowed itinerant individuals to scour the globe for resources and new markets, opening the world through displacing labor and circulating capital.
Global art as it is presented here is the palpable sedimentation of international exchange relations that span the globe. Such art fundamentally incorporate aspects of people, things, and processes as they travel and are perceived from a distance. From negotiations with a bureaucratic Fed-ex employee, standardized name cards that mediate face to face encounters in international markets, the sweaty back of anthropologist Charles le Roux, to blue and white ceramic plates that depict an outsourced labor force, these artworks measure the densities and histories of the global in the span of a card, the lengths of internet orders, and the intimate space between you and me.
Incorporate Me
With work by Heman Chong, Ho Rui An, The Propeller Group and Superflex,
Andrew Norman Wilson and Akhil C, and Yee I-Lann
With work by The Bernadette Corporation, Maja Cule, Auto Italia (Kate Cooper, Marianne Forrest,
Marleen Boschen, Andrew Kerton and Jess Wiesner), Mika Tajima, New Humans, and Artie Vierkant. Curated by Robin Lynch.
Digital environments produce highly personalized and familiar experiences, conditioned by individual interests and connections, but also by the platform’s interests that seek to maintain attention. All aspects of the self are exposed for incorporation into the private entities that maintain the infrastructure of technological devices, driven by the users themselves, as they navigate this network. In this way a data portrait portrays not only the individual, but also a conglomeration of other voices, relationships, people, and entities. This tension between hyper-individualism and continuous contact propels a necessity to self-examine, self-represent, self-market, and self-preserve, bringing about paranoid impulses to maximize yourself, and be the best possible you.
Analyzed through the lens of its corporate interests, Web 2.0 becomes a medium for the further collapse of time between work and life, and the incorporation of individual subjecthood for the sake of market productivity. The increasing need for self-representation of one’s own livelihood, coupled with the rise of “prosumers” and do-it-yourself initiatives, points to the internalization of a corporate mentality in everyday users seeking ways to be included. Together the private and individual needs feed off of one another, co-opting bits of each other’s strategies, networks, and resources in order to bolster their own experience, capital, reach, and representation.
The tumultuous and rapid exchange of information, data, messages, tabs, ads, websites, links, likes, and new applications obscures and confuses the numbers of entities involved, who is co-opting whom, and the inherent biases and interests which condition these movements. Here, ownership becomes an ambiguous and slippery term, as a constant struggle of co-optation, incorporation, autonomy, and contractual clauses compete and confound one another. The increasingly large number of entities involved in this interaction vying to carve out their own space and representation contribute to the creation of an invasive attention economy. Incorporate Me brings together works that investigate the tensions, complex hierarchies, and strategies involved in these networked economies, bringing to light both the benefits and constrictions of operating in a continuously connected environment.