May 98

THIS IS SUPPOSED TO BE a retrospective of radical art produced in the last thirty years. The title has something to do with the students revolution back in Paris in May 68. Well the show has received incredibly bad press too often for my liking. This then is an attempt to see what can be salvaged, and how it might be possible to situate the contents and the context of this extravaganza without worrying about the results.

First off it must be acknowledged that it (the show) is very much state of the arts in relation to the participants.

There are one or two dead revolutionaries (perhaps more who cares) somehow out of place, but they go along with the other old fogies who manage to hold their own in a circus pretty much devoid of antagonism. Of course there are always those who are sour that they were not included but that’s anyway irrelevant.

The second point is that one personally knew many participants, and I’m sure this is not so unique a statistic. There you have it, a slice of German / Euro / International art market. We were given a good, no, very good cross section of what is in store for the artist vis-a-vis the market cooperation with the corporate-state. Welcome.

Nothing will change in the next ten years. At least not until the facade of berlin is over-constructed.

Until that bubble bursts and this false economy is exposed the fringe elements will have nothing to do with anyone that might have seen the show. Do they-the fringe-in fact exist? Will the bubble burst? To criticise the show is to wish to be the fringe.

Who ever talks about the idea of not selling out to the art market is in the end a cad! We all do it, and we have to do it as even the mighty highwayman Lacan points out it is „your money or your life“ and of course without one the other is very depraved if not extinct in our gesellschaft.

The curators in my opinion tried to turn this banal state of affairs into something tangibly everyday 1970’s; something that showed us some of the available strategic directions in artistic production.

But who gives a... It is really not their fault. There were many many artists that I had a respect for, some were acceptable and some that one saw through the veneer of posturing. But this is splitting hairs, the modernist surfaces were just not compatible with what the market (we) produce on corporate planes.

Artists or cultural producers are unable to keep up with the gigantic scale of global concerns from hamburgers to hardware. One just looks pathetic amongst the present levels of industrial power to organise everything from the world cup to a revolution.

We can forget meaningful posturing. Art is in this context dead, there is only one solution that is continually return to craft and intensify its possible matter-flow dynamics. Dare I say it boycott all corporate-state collaborations (is that possible?) die young and stay pretty. The other alternative is prance around with a fucking huge waterfall attached to your back and tell the innocent bystander it’s not drinking water. And perhaps you will get another wonderful headache pill commission to extend the documents that pertain to late twentieth century culture. As an adjunct, a rather dull one in this day and age, it might be nice to resurrect a Mayo Thompson quote-something about transformation occurring at the lowest level of understanding...