Texte zur Kunst no. 94: Superflex

Texte zur Kunst no. 94 contains my (slightly belated) review of Superflex's retrospective at Kunsthal Charlottenburg.

Mono

The books to which I recently contributed more or less monographic essays on Hito Steyerl and Paul Chan could hardly be more different. Too Much World, edited by Nick Aikens, is a handy and afforbable pocket  - the format of which is based on the current aspect ratio of  wide-screen television and video. Accompanying Hito's brilliant show at the Van Abbemuseum, this book is probably the best publication on her work to date - though it is unfortunately marred by the kind of copy-editing bloopers that come with a crazy production schedule. I contributed the essay "Postcinematic Essays After the Future."

Hito's book is lean and light, and seems perfectly adapted to today's mobile reader; it is the paper book rebooted for the age of the tablet. Paul Chan's behemoth, the New New Testament, seemingly goes in the other direction. It is one of three (!) books to be published in conjunction with his exhibition at Schaulager in Basel. The New New Testament collects the (almost) complete series of Volumes Paintings, each one accompanied by a short scrambled text. This publication's monumentality should not be seen as merely symptomatic or regressive; rather, it is part of Chan's extended exploration of the contemporary contradictions of the book, of publishing, and of writing. This is the focus of my short essay "Paul Chan's Book Club," which is the condensed version of a longer text that will hopefully see the light of day someday.

In other monographic news, I just wrote an essay for the book on Eran Schaerf's 2012-2013 series of fm-scenario exhibitions, which is to be published later this year by Walther Koenig. (The fm-scenario online platform is here.) It was good to finally write at somewhat greater length (and, hopefully, in greater depth) on Eran's practice, which so far has not received the critical and theoretical attention it deserves.

Furthermore, the essay I wrote some time ago on Louise Lawler's A Movie Will be Shown Without the Picture will also see the light of day later this year, in a publication on this project dedicated to the project produced by If I Can't Dance, I Don't Want to Be Part of the Revolution. There are, of course, other texts in the works, non-monographic in nature, but those I'll let sneak up on you when they're ready.

Project 1975

 

The book Project 1975: The Postcolonial Unconscious in Contemporary Art documents Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam's two-year research and exhibition project, the title of which references the year in which Surinam gained its independence from Holland. The Dutch cultural and intellectual scene has been marked by a curious dearth of critical engagement with the country's colonial past, and colonial unconscious. Project 1975 was an impressive attempt to remedy this at least to some extent, with a number of group shows, lectures, and a series of commissioned essays in the SMBA newsletter. I don't quite understand why some of the latter have not been reprised here, or some of the design decisions, but it is still a worthwhile documentation of Project 1975 - including a series of interviews, an essay on "Mapping Empire" by Ashley Dawson, and my own "Piet Zwart & Zwarte Piet."

The text revolves around two historical cases: Piet Zwart's original photomontage for the cover of Anton de Kom's anticolonial manifesto Wij slaven van Suriname (1934), which ended up not being used, and Petra Bauer and Annette Krauss's recent project about the tenacious phenomenon of Zwarte Piet or Black Pete, which landed the artists and the Van Abbemuseum in hot water for daring to attack "Dutch culture" and "Dutch identity." And yes, being able to use this punning title was pure gravy.

Images: the final cover design of Wij slaven van Suriname (1934) and Links Richten no. 9 (1933).

Come Spring: Paul Chan & Hito Steyerl

On April 11, Paul Chan's exhibition at the Schaulager in Basel will open; the next day sees the opening of Hito Steyerl's show at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven. I wrote texts for publications accompanying both shows. More incisively than most, these two artists engage with the mutations and contradictions of contemporary cultural production and circulation. 

For Hito's show, I wrote a catalogue essay "Postcinematic Essays After the Future," a short version of which has has appeared in the museum's newsletter, Radically Yours. The catalogue is to be published by Sternberg Press. My texts deals with the migration of the essay from text to video to live performance, and with Hito's notion of "circulationism" as the digital sequel to productivism. In addition, I engaged in an e-mail conversation with Hito for Metropolis M that has just been published in the April-May issue under the title "Glitches of an Exhibition." (Although the title is still in English, the actual text was translated English, or from International Disco Latin, into Dutch.)

  

Paul's Schaulager exhibition features Volumes, his installation of 1005 mounted and painted book covers. The show is accompanied by three different publications, published by Paul's Badlands Unlimited. One of these is called the New New Testament - a massive volume collecting all Volumes, with short accompanying texts. I contributed a brief essay on Paul's various book- and font-related works and activities, and with changes in publishing and the status of writing at the far end of the Gutenberg Galaxy. 

Top Image: still from a rough edit of Hito Steyerl's Liquidity Inc. (2014). Bottom image: detail of Volumes (2012) and the New New Testament cover. 

Theory, Culture & Mousse

Two new articles are online (though one is probably behind a paywall), resulting from very different production processes and temporalities. The first, "Liberation Through Laziness," is the result of an invition by Bureau Publik in Denmark to speak on Paul Lafargue's The Right to Be Lazy. As I had a request from Mousse magazine to contribute something I decided to turn my Copenhagen lecture into an article for them. The great advantage of art magazines can be their dedication to the moment, and the possibility for producing texts and constellation of texts that articulate that moment, hopefully in a manner that allows one to think a bit beyond it. I'm quite happy with this essay on those terms, though I hope I can return to it at some future point and develop a few aspects a bit further, and more rigorously.

Far removed from the speed of art magazines is the glacier-like pace of academic journals. In the autumn of 2011, after the Autonomy Conference at the Van Abbemuseum, Nikos Papastergiadis asked me to submit an article on autonomy and Rancière to a special issue of Theory, Culture & Society he was editing. Since I was already working on an essay for the Autonomy issue of Open, and didn't feel up to the task of producing something completely different on the same subject right after finishing the Open text, I felt I either had to bow out or develop my Open essay a bit further. I was asked to do the latter. Of course, this text/these texts were also to become (parts of) one chapter of my book History in Motion, which came out in the fall of 2013. This, it turns out, was actually before the publication of my TCS article, "Autonomy as Aesthetic Practice," which has only now been "prepublished" online, ahead of its publication in print. (I'm not sure if this link will lead you to the full article if you're not affiliated with an institution that has a TCS subscription; probably not.)

Between production cycles that take less than two months and those that take more than two years, it can be rather tricky to develop a pace of work that works for you. Of course, all magazines and journals are likewise caught up in the contradictions of our economy of time, and occupy a niche that works for them. What cannot be valued enough are those working relationships with magazines, reviews or journals whose durations and rhythms can be brought in synch with yours, at least intermittently.

Speaking of the Autonomy Project, that loose collaboration between various art schools, universities and the Van Abbemuseum, which straddles different economies (of time): I am currently editing the Art and Autonomy reader, as head of an editorial team that also comprises Autonomy Project colleagues. The reader is to be published by Afterall, which itself is situated in something of an art world/academia nexus. We're trying something rather different from the standard reader format with this one. As a denizen of Old Europe I don't like to show my excitement too much, but the book is taking shape rather beautifully. The aim is to finalize the edit after the summer and have the thing out before the end of the year. We shall see.

E-Flux Journal: World History and Earth Art

Issue no. 49 of e-flux journal contains my essay "World History and Earth Art." This text takes as its point of departure Jonas Staal's smartphone app  and web site, The Venice Biennale Ideological Guide 2013.  

I use this interactive work as a conceptual tool to reconsider both big and more modest questions involving the state, its tenuous but destructive grasp on history, and its role in the data-mining operation that our information economy has increasingly become. 

In the process, the various other artworks and cultural phenomena that are being discussed also serve to produce a richer reading and more substantial critique of the Guide - as a concrete and specific intervention in the quantitative turn that culture is undergoing.

Sean Snyder: No Apocalypse, Not Now

Currently the Kunstverein in Cologne is showing Sean Snyder's solo No Apocalypse, Not Now (till December 22). The exhibition could be seen as a counterpart of Snyder's 2009 exhibition Index at the ICA. Index was a project for which Snyder intended to digitize and upload all his works, destroying their old media - analog videos, photo contact sheets, and so on. 

At the ICA and ever since, Index has been represented by black-and-white photographs of media in various states of photographic enlargement and abstraction (and in various phases of destruction). The projected uploading operation was never realized, and between 2009 and 2013 Snyder's practice was on hiatus. In the main space of No Apocalypse, Not Now, Snyder is showing some of the Index photos together a selection of videos that have as it were re-emerged from Index. However, they have been transformed in the process: they're all shown on the same old-school monitors, even those that were originally projections. They have been abstracted and flattened out, and made more fully comparable in the process. New and at times genuinely illuminating interactions and interferences emerge between different pieces; this is such a strong reconfiguration that it is effectively a new work, like Duchamp's Boîte-en-valise. 

In separate spaces, two videos are screened that were made around the same time as Index: Exhibition and Afghanistan. They, too, were included in the 2009 Index show at the ICA. Here, they are set apart from the earlier, "indexed" videos as large projections, suggesting that there is life besides and beyond Index. 

For a small catalogue/brochure that visitors can purchase at the Kunstverein for one euro, I have adapted and updated an unpublished article on Snyder from 2009, "Two or Three Things I Think I Know About Sean Snyder." At the time, I regarded the text as an attempt to state some "basic banalities" about an artist whose reception, I felt, was still in its infancy. While things have not really moved forward in the meantime, the show in Cologne might help change his. It certainly convinced me that one of these days I have to write an entirely new text that more fully reflects my current thoughts on Snyder's practice.

This Is Television

Judy Radul's show This Is Television is on view till the 19th of October at the daadgalerie in Berlin. The exhibition encompasses a 16 mm film, video stills and a set-up of monitors and cameras for which I compiled a video programme that contains artistic reflections on the medium as well as direct interventions in broadcast or cable television. The pacing of these videos is used to manipulate a local television feed through the intermediary of two live cameras.

Artists/directors range from Willem de Ridder and Wim T. Schippers to Sean Snyder, from General Idea to Harun Farocki, from Gregg Bordowitz to Alexander Kluge, from Christoph Schlingensief to Eva Meyer & Eran Schaerf.

New Left Review: Performance After Television

Issue no. 80 of New Left Review (March/April 2013) contains my article "Performance Art After Television," which is part of chapter 3 of History in Motion. In general, that book would hardly have come into being without NLR's receptiveness and support, even when faced with half-baked work-in-progress. The "art" bit was added to my original title "Performance After Television" so as to give a slightly clearer sense of the subject; after all, this is not an art journal. The essay shares the pages of this issue with, for instance, contributions on the Arab uprisings and the Nobel Prize for Literature—not to mention the Decline of the West.

The article is online here, but it's behind a paywall.

Image: Eran Schaerf's 2002 installation version of his Listener's Voice Project.

www.newleftreview.org

Lidwien van de Ven

The event that echoes throughout Lidwien van de Ven's new book is the 2002 murder of Pim Fortuyn, the Dutch right-wing populist. As Fortuyn's intellectual heirs, Geert Wilders and Thilo Sarrazin have a spectral presence in this publication, produced by Witte de With (and edited with great acumen and patience by Amira Gad) in the context of a series of artists'  books focussing on the institution's local context.

Under the perhaps deliberately anodyne title Rotterdam: Sensitive Times, the photo sequence that runs through the book combines images of manifestations in the immediate aftermath of Fortuyn's death with numerous other events, across Europe and elsewhere, including a number of extreme-right and Muslim demonstrations. I focus on such manufactured or staged events in my short and condensed text in the book, "Lidwien van de Ven: Photo Opportunities."

http://www.wdw.nl/shop/artist-book-2/rotterdam-sensitive-times/

Contemporary Art: 1989 to the Present

Contemporary Art: 1989 to the Present is a collection of essays edited by Alexander Dumbadze and Suzanne Hudson. Designed as a multifaceted introduction to the field, the book contains contributions by the likes of Ina Blom, Sabeth Buchmann, T.J. Demos, Liam Gillick and Maria Lind, Carrie Lambert-Beatty, Julian Stallabrass and Jan Verwoert. The section titled "The Rise of Fundamentalism" contains my article "Monotheism à la Mode." It recapitulates and develops some strands from Idols of the Market.

While it looks like an excellent job editorially, it must be said that the pricing by Wiley-Blackwell is rather obscene. That's the academic textbook market for you: capitalism at its most Stalinist. 

No Time

 
Starting on September 20, the 21er Haus in Vienna is hosting an exhibition titled Keine Zeit ("no time") in German and Busy in English. Dealing with the exhaustion of the self — stress, depression, burnout — in the age of cognitive and "creative" capitalism, with its ideology of relentless flexibility and its erosion of old dividing lines between work and leisure. 

The exhibition foregrounds art's implication in this regime, and my catalogue essay "Autonomous Symptoms in a Collapsing Economy of Time" focuses on various forms of performance and of dance in today's "temporal economy." Continuing where my previous text "Unknown Knowns" left off, the essay homes in on the performance of symptoms and its potential and pitfalls for collaborative projects. Artists discussed include Yvonne Rainer, Jérôme Bel, Charles Atlas, Dora Garcia and Lars von Trier.

The catalogue of Keine Zeit/Busy also contains contributions by Bettina Steinbrügge/Alain Ehrenberg, Diedrich Diederichsen, Liam Gillick, and Angela Melitopoulos/Maurizio Lazzarato, among others.

Image: Dora Garcia's Real Artists Don't Have Teeth at the 2011 Venice Biennale. 

Daan van Golden

The catalogue Daan van Golden: Apperception is out now - published by Wiels and Roma Publications. 

The adjacent image shows a spread from my essay.






On 27 June there will be a book launch at Wiels, with curator Devrim Bayar and Willem Oorebeek among the participants.

www. wiels.org

A Movie Without the Picture at The Movies

On 12 June, Louise Lawler’s A Movie Will Be Shown Without the Picture was non-screened at The Movies in Amsterdam. In the case of the original 1979 version at the Aero Theater in Santa Monica and in some later iterations of the piece, the movie shown was The Misfits (1961); in 1983 in New York, it was The Hustler (also 1961), preceded by the Chuck Jones cartoon What’s Opera, Doc? In 2012, the film selection has progressed to the late 1970s: as most audience members will have realized instantly upon hearing the first notes of the soundtrack in the darkened theater, this time the film was Saturday Night Fever (1977). 

The piece’s anachronistic update was one subject of the conversation that I moderated afterwards (in the cinema’s café) with Eric de Bruyn and Andrea Fraser—with Louise herself in the position of “fact checker.” Moving from the dying days of Old Hollywood to a rather remarkable hybrid of gritty 1970s urban drama and neo-“cinema of attractions” blockbuster spectacle that is almost contemporaneous with A Movie will be Shown Without the Picture itself, Lawler gave us much food for thought. 

As Andrea rightly stressed, Saturday Night Fever teems with metaphors of psychological and social projection, and it brings a new form of precarious masculine performance into play. Meanwhile, what was noticeable across a range of audience reactions—from audible snoring, relaxed beer-drinking and talking to smartphone use—was the way in which the non-picture foregrounds audience performance. Andrea once remarked that you don’t simply look at a work by Lawler: you are addressed and interpellated by it. A Movie spawns forms of audience performance without making grand claims about activating or emancipating the spectator. 

While the piece can obviously related back to various avant-garde attacks on the cinema and the filmic image, as a performative intervention in the cinematic apparatus it can also function as an anticipatory critique of much later relational and “social” art practice. Hollywood producer Samuel Goldwyn allegedly once bowed out of a project with the malapropism “Include me out!”, and the paradoxical effect of A Movie Will Be Shown Without the Picture is that it does indeed include the spectator out. Or does it exclude her in? If, referencing Louise’s phrase Why Picture’s Now?, we ask “Why A Movie Without the Picture now?”, this gently insidious quality would certainly have to be part of the answer. 

Eric raised the issue of the term picture itself, which is obviously both very specific and heavily connoted in the context of late-1970s art practice. Why the “picture” (as opposed to, say "image") in A Movie Will Be Shown Without the Picture? We did not get around to fully addressing this, and as usual a lot of loose ends remained. I will continue to work on this piece and the aim is to end this “Performance in Residence” project with a small publication. Many thanks to Louise, Andrea, Eric, Frederique Bergholtz, Tanja Baudoin, Ann Goldstein and the Stedelijk staff members and everybody else who made this possible—including the audience members.

Willem de Rooij

Willem de Rooij's permanent installation for Bentheim Castle, Residual, features a transparent display case with one of Ruisdael's paintings of the castle, situated in Germany near the Dutch border. In addition to seeing the painting, both as image and as object, one sees the technical equipment that normally remains hidden. In many ways this work recalls Michael Asher's projects of the 1970s, it does not intervene in a recognized gallery or museum. More than functioning as a rather problematic retro-version of Institutional Critique, the piece announces a potential space for art; the intention is to turn Willem de Rooij's project into the starting point for an artist-in-residence project, with young artists being enabled to produce and exhibit in situ. 

Exhibiting a Ruisdael painting at the site depicted on the painting, and exhibiting the exhibition of this work in a way that foregrounds its status as material artefact in a transparent case full of visible machinery, Residual can be seen to reflect on the relation between physical picture and immaterial image, and between thing and network.  In my essay for the accompanying publication, I move from Barthes to Simmel and from Victor Stoichita to Craig Owens in order to analyse Residual's take on both seventeenth-century and contemporary "visual economies." From the final part of the essay:

'In the pre-industrial seventeenth-century Dutch Republic, painting showcased and 'doubled' the accumulation of wealth derived from Dutch mercantile capitalism. In the post-industrial Netherlands of the early twentieth century, visual production and the 'creative industries' are often presented as a partial replacement of industries that have moved overseas. Instead of manufacturing televisions or producing steel, the Netherlands now exports TV formats and fashion. In 2011 it became apparent that 'difficult' contemporary art is not part of this, as the Dutch government relentlessly cut funding for a number of crucial institutions, including the Rijksakademie, which Jeroen de Rijke and Willem de Rooij attended. New art isn’t as profitable as old art. The Rijksmuseum is hawking its wares even at Schiphol Airport, with the Rijksmuseum Schiphol, where Ruisdael and d’Hondecoeter are regularly featured. 

"Of course Willem de Rooij’s practice is implicated in the current political-economic constellation. How could it be otherwise? De Rooij is a producer of surplus value through 'immaterial labour'; his work is part of the 'culturalized' economy. However, compared with blockbuster shows with readymade themes and famous names, this practice is too inefficient and marginal for the economistic Dutch cultural policy, which uses 'subsidised art' as a populist whipping boy alongside others, creating enemies for its perceived clientele of 'hardworking Dutchmen'. In such a situation, art can only be framed in two ways: either it delivers an unproblematic message of “Dutchness” or it is immediately and spectacularly successful as a cultural commodity. Preferably both. While the Rijksmuseum is hawking its blue-chip Dutch wares in its overdesigned box inserted into the bustling airport, Willem de Rooij’s counter-space at Bentheim castle – on the margins of the old water-merchandise complex, on the long train line that connects Berlin to Amsterdam – foregrounds its own properties and contradictions, and those of the object and the subjects that it contains."

This small essay is part of my "thingness" research project (as are recent texts on design, transparency, and on artists such as Daan van Golden and Stan Douglas). I hope to intensify this strand of research and develop what are so far mere sketches once the History in Motion book (which should see the light of day this fall) is out of the way. 

Residual will be inaugurated on May 4 as part of the raumsichten exhibition project. The book is published by Walther König and can be ordered at amazon.de.

Coming Soon

On the 12th of June, a new version of Louise Lawler's 1979 work A Movie Will Be Shown Without the Picture will be presented in Amsterdam, as part of a "Performance in Residence" project I'm doing with the curatorial platform If I Can't Dance, I Don't Want to Be Part of Your Revolution. The Stedelijk Museum is also a partner in organizing the Amsterdam version of A Movie.

From the If I Can't Dance site: "Performance in Residence ‘hosts’ a performance-related (body of) work for a substantial period of time, allowing a researcher to engage in an in-depth inquiry. A public presentation marks the start of the research, and the conclusions are presented at the end of the period in the form of an essay, exhibition, performance or other. With this programme, If I Can’t Dance aims to research performances as case studies and proposes to connect archival research to practice."

A small initiative such as If I Cant Dance's "Performance in Residence" research initiative is much appreciated at a moment when Dutch universities are actively demolishing pockets of research and reflection that had not yet been brought into line with the prevailing ideological-economical imperatives; it doesn't matter what you do and if it makes any sense at all, as long as it somehow pretends to stimulate "the creative industries."

A Movie Will Be Shown Without the Picture at The Movies, Haarlemmerdijk 161-163, 12 June, 7 PM. There will be a discussion following the piece, with contributions by Andrea Fraser and myself, among others.

Image: Poster for the 1983 version of A Movie.

Gert Jan Kocken

The Office in Berlin has a series called The World According to, and The World According to Gert Jan Kocken is out now. It takes the form of a Bilderatlas compiling and arranging aniconic and iconic images of God—including of course His Incarnation. 

Since I had a tiny advisory role, I guess I can plug the project here without turning this into an actual blog.

The publication can be ordered here.




Image: studio wall, February 2012. 

Texte zur Kunst no. 85: Agency

Texte zur Kunst no. 85 (March 2012) contains a thematic section called "Art History Revisited" as well as a number of Mike Kelley obituaries, and of course the review section. I contributed a short review of Agency's exhibition at Objectif in Antwerp. From the review:

"As Agency is an agency with a generic name, so its exhibitions have a generic form: cheap foldable tables with one numbered 'thing' per table, represented by an object or image (labeled 'specimen'), lit by a single lamp hanging directly above the table, with a clipboard holding some sheets with information on the property lawsuit connected to the object in question. This generic format does in fact allow for a great variety, and when the number of tables is sizable, as it is here, the effect borders on the bewildering. Speculation on the protection of ideas leads Matthys to investigate both a robotic teddy bear and one minute of silence on a CD, both a logo for Olympic TV coverage and an abstract mural (which is, naturally, presented on the wall rather than on one of the tables). To one side, there is a wall of shelving with boxes containing additional things, which may be consulted by visitors.

"The visual appearance of Agency’s installations recalls the commodity art of the late 1980s, Haim Steinbach’s shelving in particular – with a hint of Mark Dion’s taxonomic displays. In fact, one of the boxes in the stacks contains thing 001574, a bookend based on Koons’ Balloon Dog sculptures. The producer was sued by Koons for copyright infringement—a remarkable turn of events, given that Koons was often on the receiving end of lawsuits. More recently, it was Richard Prince who was adjudged to have broken the law with his use of images from a book on Rastafarians. In general, Appropriation and Commodity art have increasingly been at odds with intellectual property law (copyright, trademarks, patents), which has taken on an ever greater importance in post-Fordist 'semiotic' capitalism. Contemporary art is of course an integral part of this regime, as reflected by the legalistic turn inaugurated by Conceptual art, when what was sold was no longer an object but a certificate, a protocol. This development is in fact at the roots of Agency’s interest in the contested nature of commodities."   

www.textezurkunst.de

Afterall: Wendelien van Oldenborgh

The Spring 2012 edition of Afterall (no. 29) contains articles on Wendelien van Oldenborgh by Emily Pethick and by me. My essay focuses on her three slide pieces Après la reprise, la prise (2009), Pertinho de Alphaville (2010) and Supposing I love you. And you also love me (2011).

The text is online in its entirety here.

Daan van Golden

A master in the art of the delay, Daan van Golden achieved a certain level of success in the Pop decade of the 1960s only to retreat from public activities following the 1968 documenta, using the Dutch subsidy system to make a living rather than a career. Having recommenced exhibiting his art around 1980, Van Golden's renown remained largely confined to the Netherlands until recently, with exhibitions at the Camden Arts Center, Greene Naftali, and now a carefully curated retrospective at Wiels in Brussels. Van Golden's work thus seems poised to arrive in the present, in the present-day culture industry. I was invited to contribute an essay to the catalogue of the Wiels exhibition, and I decided to use this opportunity reflect on the complex role of Van Golden's practice in (and often against) developments in the cultural economy since the 1960s.

From the introduction: "Daan van Golden’s works are marked by precise attention to the properties of the mediums employed by the artist. This would seem to invite a formalist analysis, or rather a structuralist one—for van Golden’s early Pop abstractions, the “handkerchief” and “wrapping paper” paintings, already mock the limitations of formalism, playing off form-as-form against form as a codified, signifying structure. While such works thus make it abundantly clear that they should not be regarded as self-sufficient forms, I want to argue that, since the 1970s in particular, van Golden’s work also frustrates structuralist readings that disparage the social context as extraneous to the production of meaning. What I propose to do here is analyse van Golden’s practice in the context of changing economical and social conditions—globally, but also, and specifically, in the Netherlands. Of course, the aim is not to read art as a mere superstructural or ideological reflection of an economic and social base. If anything, the point should be that the economy’s increasing dependence on intellectual and cultural labour makes the problematic—or dialectic—relation between these two more complicated than ever. Van Golden’s works can be seen as constituting a series of interventions in the changing conditions of cultural production."

The retrospective at Wiels is on view until 29 April; the catalogue will be ready towards the end of the show's run. The image shows an installation view with a dialogue between two exercises in framing and ornithology: an untitled 1965 collage in the foreground and Birds (1986) in the background.

[A note on the name: In Dutch the full name is "Daan van Golden" with a lower-case v, but when only the the last name is used it is "Van Golden" with a capital V. Since this is rather confusing to the majority of the world's population, Wiels consistently uses "van Golden."]

www.wiels.org