[Nettime-bold] via Geert Lovink

["carey young" <carey_young@hotmail.com>]

Hi,

Geert recommended I send this info to you / the list

Carey

-------

The Communications Department



14 July - 12 August

Anthony Wilkinson Gallery
242 Cambridge Heath Road, Bethnal Green, London E2 9DA
tel +44 20 89802662 / fax +44 20 8701286531 / 
info@anthonywilkinsongallery.com


Matthew Arnatt			Art Club 2000
Bernadette Corporation		Stanley Donwood & Tchock
Liam Gillick			Richard Hawkins
Imprint 93			Gareth Jones
Jeff Koons			Mark Lombardi
the Medea group			Martha Rosler
®™ark				Alex Veness
Carey Young

	                                                              curated by 
Alex Farquharson



“At one time artists had only to whisper into the ear of the King or Pope to 
have political effect. Now they must whisper into the ears of millions of 
people”.
										Jeff Koons


The Communications Department presents a range of ways artists respond to 
the omnipresence / omnipotence of corporate images.

The word ‘Lifestyle’ evokes branded lives, as if marketers have succeeded 
where avant-garde artists, who sought a fusion of art and life, failed. Like 
art, brands now communicate through every available media onto every 
available surface - the conventional billboard or magazine ad is to modern 
marketing techniques what painting or sculpture is to contemporary art. At 
the same time, like much ambitious art of the last century, the big brands 
have moved in on all aspects of our public and private lives and values, be 
it education, government, spirituality, welfare, health, the arts, public 
space, the environment, identity, subculture, political resistance. The  
most successful have acquired the aura of universal abstract truths: Coke, 
we know, is ‘the real thing’, and Diesel’s ‘for successful living’ (Liam 
Gillick attempts to paint true Coke brown in his neo-Platonic wallpainting 
“Inside now, we walked into a room with Coca-Cola walls”).

What is left for the artist to do, and what space is there left to occupy? 
Are corporations the master communicators today, in the way that artists 
were when they were in the service of monarchs and the church? Is it 
possible to act outside brand influences, or can their messages and systems 
be re-appropriated and détourned? Are artists able to clear the 
smokescreens? Where do art, advertising and activism begin and end, and what 
are their ‘relational aesthetics’?

Some artists in the Communications Department appear seduced by the 
brilliance and sophistication of the most innovative brands, leaving viewers 
to decide for themselves  whether their appropriations and alliances are a 
form of political critique, or deconstruction of what are conventionally 
regarded as the differences between art and advertising. In the trajectory 
running from Jeff Koons to Art Club 2000 to Bernadette Corporation and Carey 
Young, the distinctions between the conceptual practices of artists and 
those of corporate image-makers seem entirely eroded, suggesting that the 
notion of the avant-garde is now coporately owned. The Communications 
Department features Koons’s late 80s Art Magazines Ads, AC2K’s mid 90s 
fashion shoots (Gap  etc), and Bernadette’s on-going fashion magazine ‘Made 
in the USA’.

Young creates a new work for the show - a 'visioning workshop' held between 
a leading business strategist and the gallery directorship, with the aim of 
imagining new market possibilities for the gallery by questioning existing 
assumptions about art and the artist. The work, which will be for sale 
during the show, will exist in the gallery as the videoed documentation and 
detritus of the meeting.

®™ark are a legally constituted corporation acting as an umbrella company on 
the Internet for anti-corporate activists, matching ‘culture jamming’ 
proposals with funders and implementors. Stanley Donwood and Tchock have 
turned EMI’s exhaustive marketing report on the success or otherwise of 
their promotional artwork for Radiohead into embossed gallery wallpaper. 
Martha Rosler’s film ‘Chile on the road to NAFTA’ adopts the aesthetics of 
the road movie to ask what is free about international free trade alliances. 
Alex Veness* shows paintings commissioned from  commercial artists working 
in Export Processing Zones in China of photographs of workers performing 
menial tasks on the yachts and estates of the super affluent in Antigua.

The Medea group plot the covert web of corporate and political  alliances 
determining the flow of global capital (and, in addition, the art world’s 
own networks), on promotional display panels. Imprint 93’s ready-made, an 
extraordinary VIP list for ‘Die Young Stay Pretty’ at the ICA, is a sign of 
how the corporate ethos is beginning to be applied to the marketing of art 
in public venues - gone are the days of press officers; the phenomenon of 
Communications Departments in galleries and museums implies that art itself 
doesn’t communicate, or that institutions would rather it didn’t.

The ubiquity and persuasiveness of brands, and the question of what space is 
left for the artist, are perhaps most concisely considered by two of the 
least socio-political works in the Department: Richard Hawkins’s collage of 
Marky Mark at pelvic level wearing Calvin Kleins surrounded by a 19th 
century print of a romantic seascape; and a small floor sculpture consisting 
of the white underwear elastics of every one of Gareth Jones’s Calvin 
Kleins. These physically modest works suggest new formal / private / 
symbolic identities for this powerful brand that weren’t in the advertiser’s 
script.


Carey Young’s work is supported by Xerox, East England Arts and Year of the 
Artist

*late addition - name not on card


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