CORPORATE CULTURESart in the age of post-industrial capitalism

Advertising Agency: Scholz & Friends, Hamburg, GermanyCreative Directors: Matthias Schmidt, Gunnar Loeser, Heiko SchmidtArt Director: Stefan SchabenbergerReleased: December 2006

• The simplest definition would be the that it is a system which strives for large-scale realization – of PROFIT by acquisition or manufacturing of goods that are acquired or made for lower prices and sold for much more.

A mid-19th-century shopping mall: The Passage in St Petersburg.

• Accumulation of • Wage • Rational calculation• Capitalism is

INDIVIDUALISTIC • It is based on the idea

of PROGRESS• The fundamental unit

of MEANING in the capitalist thought is the OBJECT

RELATIONSHIPS FORMED ARE WITH THE OBJECT ITSELF

• THERAPEUTIC discourse

• Consumption is always and everywhere a cultural process

• ‘consumer culture’ is unique and specific.

• It is the dominant mode of cultural reproduction developed in the advanced industrial societies

Consumer Culture

Consumer Culture is:

• bound up with central values, practices and institutions that define Western modernity such as – choice – individualism – and market relations.

Late or Post Industrial Capitalism

Corporate capitalism‘organization man’Corporate bureaucraciesMultinational corporationsGlobalization- ‘Global Economy’

So -called Society of the Spectacle

“People are going about their daily lives, working and shopping and playing, worshipping at churches and synagogues and mosques, going to movies and to baseball games.

Life in America is going forward, and as the fourth grader who wrote me knew, that is the ultimate repudiation of terrorism” (George Bush address to firemen, police, and postal workers at the World CongressCenter in Atlanta, Georgia, on November 8, 2001.)

Art and Immaterial LabourMladen Stilinovic, Artist at work

Mladen Stilinovic

Mierle Laderman Ukeles

Santiago Sierra. “Labourers who cannot be paid, remunerated to remain in the interior of carton boxes,” 2000Eight people paid to remain inside cardboard boxes, 1999 

Santiago Sierra. 12 Workers paid to remain in cardboard boxes, various spaces.

http://www.multiplicity.it/index2.htm

Wang Jin. 100% 1999

Wang Jin. Chinese Dream, 2006PVC and fishing line, 175 x 200 x 35 cm.

Robe, 2005, PVC and fishing line China Dreams - Wangfujing, 2004Photograph, 136 x 139 cm

Censor America, 2004Qing dynasty paving stone from Yuanmingyuan,

Ai Weiwei. The Coca-Cola Vase, 2010, Han Dynasty Vase and Industrial Paint

Coca Cola Vase (1997).  Vase from Neolithic Age (5000 – 3000 BCE) and paint, 11 7/8″ x diameter 13″. Courtesy Tsai Collection, New York.

http://lamblegs.wordpress.com/tag/the-unilever-series-ai-weiwei-sunflower-seeds/

"World Map" 2006, cotton and wooden base100 x 800 x 600 cm

Installation at 15th Biennale of Sydney, Sydney, Australia, 2006

Mark Lombardi, World Finance Corporation and Associates, ca. 1970-84: Miami, Ajman, and Bogota-Caracas (Brigada 2506: Cuban Anti-Castro Bay of Pigs Veteran) (7th Version), 1999. Colored pencil and graphite on paper, 69-1/8 x 84 inches

Mark Lombardi, Charles Keating, ACC, and Lincoln Savings, ca. 1978-90 (5th Version), 1995. Colored pencil and graphite on paper, 31-3/4 x 46-1/4 inches

Michael Maranda. ARTFORUMx, 2010.

ARTFORUMx delineates the history of Artforum magazine in visual form, revealing the number and size of advertisements that have appeared within its pages from June 1962 to the Summer 2010 edition. Each issue has been catalogued and reproduced in a uniquely distilled form. Red rectangles represent magazine content and black areas stand in for advertisements. The books in this expansive set display visual echos of constructivist graphic experiments and minimalist visual art, while diagramming the base level of the economics of publishing, the ebb and flow of the market—art or otherwise—over the last 48 years.

The first part of the project consists of reprints of each issue of Artforum, scaled to 8.25 inch square (the original trim is 10.25). The cover identifies which issue is being reproduced, while the cover graphic illustrates the ratio of content to advertising found in each issue. Placed on a single-level bookshelf, these 483 issues measure approximately 22 feet (6.7 meters) long. As each spine incorporates the cover graph, a view of the front of the shelf provides a quick snapshot of the growth not only of the size of the magazine but the relative advertisement to content ratio as well. The volumes are intended to be read by viewers, and thus are accessible to hand, not presented behind glass.

The second part of the project consists of six hardcover summary volumes, each 7 inch square and ~100 pages long. The first five volumes present reductions of each issue to a grid of red and black squares on a single page, essentially a page plan of that issue. The sixth volume is an extended bar-chart of the contents of the magazines along with a representation of the contemporaneous rise and fall of the Dow Jones Composite Index.

The third part of the project is a foil of sorts, allowing for the introduction of the first two parts into an exhibition context. Here, 177 spreads of the March 2007 issue are rendered, perversely, in watercolour with the already introduced schema of red and black squares.

Allan SekulaPanorama. Mid-Atlantic, November 1993, from Fish Story 1989–95

Allan SekulaDoomed Fishing Village of Ilsan, September 1993, from Fish Story 1989–95

Allan SekulaRemnants of a Movie Set. Abandoned Shipyard. Los Angeles Harbor. Terminal Island, California. January 1993, from Fish Story 1989–95