You Probably Have Everything You Need to Browse This Site

FLAME, Lenard Giller, Louise Lawler, Max Schaffer

You Probably Have Everything You Need to Browse This Site unites the works of artists reflecting on the spatial and economic conditions of producing, presenting and ultimately being art. Unfolding in the works on view is a longing for zealous production, for laying bare the structures that facilitate art and for incisively commenting on the escalated market conditions of our time.

A collaborative practice between Taslima Ahmed and Manuel Gnam, FLAME consumes information and filters, rates, rearranges and reproduces the contents in order to feed them into the gallery circuit. FLAME acts in lieu of a variety of cultural forces such as the invisible hand of the art market, the collective voice of the internet or a data-based will of the people. Titled Germans, This Is God Speaking, their latest work carries references to market dynamics that ultimately also underlie the art business, all embedded in an ad-like aesthetic triggering human desires. 

Louise Lawler is a key figure of the Pictures Generation of appropriation art. Most of her photographic work depicts artworks of other artists, photographed at the sites that constitute the art field: museums, galleries, auction houses, storages or collector’s homes. On view at the gallery are two editions of the same work titled Vienna (either gray, mustard, sage or lavender). Depicting a painting by American artist R.H. Quaytman hung above a marble table at a private house in Vienna, Lawler’s photograph transforms some of the painting’s aura through depicting its embedding in a domestic setting. 

Based on materials mined from a particularly narrow context, Lenard Giller’s Productions is a 81-minute long, 16mm color film deploying the timeframe of Disney’s Cinderella movie from 1950. By taking 360 images from the corresponding Panini sticker album whose content was wholly based on stills from the movie and re-inserting them into the timeframe at the very places where they belong, Giller explores the tensions between production efforts, mass media, memory, empty frames and fulfilling time. A series of facsimiles of the sticker album, some of which carry original stickers from 1980, add to the artist’s attempt of meticulously investigating the means of its production.  

Max Schaffer’s Untitled (Blip) is a Jahresgabe for the GAK Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst in Bremen, tied to a legal agreement obliging the temporary owners of each edition to relay the work after the course of one year. The agreement also stipulates that no owner should gain monetary profits from passing on the work. Being found impressions on silk paper of certificates for a Jahresgabe by Richard Artschwager he produced for the Hamburger Kunstverein in 1978, the work itself is a testament to the rise of the valorisation of art objects through legal frameworks since the 1960s. Shown at the gallery is the artist’s proof of the edition which evades itself from the constant circulation of the others. Usually being hung at the artist’s studio, the work will be returned to the artist after the termination of the exhibition. 

Exhibition Text

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