Counter-Production

Counter-Production

Generali Foundation

Counter-Production, 2012. Exhibition view. © Generali Foundation, 2012. Photo: Wolfgang Thaler.

October 22, 2012

Counter-Production
Through December 16, 2012

Generali Foundation
Wiedner Hauptstrasse 15
1040 Vienna, Austria
Hours: Tuesday–Sunday, public holidays 11–6pm,
Thursday 11–8pm

T+43 1 504 98 80
foundation [​at​] generali.at

foundation.generali.at

Ricardo Basbaum, Mary Ellen Carroll, Dexter Sinister, Goldin+Senneby, Marine Hugonnier, Henrik Olesen, Marion von Osten, Johannes Porsch, Seth Price, Josephine Pryde, Lili Reynaud-Dewar, Josef Strau

In the wake of technological and economic transformation during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the image of artistic production has undergone major changes. In view of the inner constraints of a reality framed according to post-Fordism with its insistence on efficiency, flexibility, and intelligent self-management, to what extent and in what ways do artists participate in and confront contemporary conditions of global production and capital? Some artists have responded to the changed conditions of production indirectly by pointing out their intrinsic contradictions with the use of definitions such as “productive non-production” or “non-productive production,” “counter-productive work,” or the body as site of reproduction and self-production.

The exhibition Counter-Production examines the gesture or method of counter-production so as to grasp and address questions relating to the ways in which contemporary artistic production functions. At the same time, this attempt forms the basis of a redefinition of the term “counter-production,” which, like the politico-economic, technological and socio-cultural fields in which it originally made its appearance, is subject to historical transformation and, as such, is to be redefined.

Emerging from historical cinema and philosophy as influenced by the post-1968 counter-cultural movements, this concept has since continued to circulate, thus directly or incidentally subject to inquiry and inspiration in the works of contemporary artists. This may be observed in the case of Marine Hugonnier’s unfinished, and partly concealed, manuscript Travail Contre Productif (1996–on going). With “gestures of restraint,” the latter work seeks to produce something which is not productive. 

Thirty-five years earlier, filmmaker and writer Alexander Kluge described counter-production as an aesthetic strategy designed to articulate a mode of “counter-control” built with the organization of individual experiences for infiltrating hegemonic structures. Kluge’s counter-productive practices, which took clear shape in his films, books, and unusual television formats, provided some of the material for Seth Price’s essay “Dispersion” (2003) that was to later resurface as a series of screenprints titled Essay with Knots (2008) and the video Redistribution (2007). Price’s triad highlights the way in which art in the era of digital media circulates in the same way as any other information on the Internet: uncontrollable, vulnerable to manipulation, repackaged in many contexts without being regulated.

Unlike the early 1990s, a time in which counter-production and the notion of “counter-public” were discussed in conjunction with political and artistic forms of activist, participatory or service-oriented art, through its polyvalent artistic approaches this exhibition indicates how, today, this concept may be reinvoked as a possibility for bringing into focus the artwork itself together with its processes of production. Opening up three zones of interrelation, the exhibition seeks to offer different examples of where and how the concept of “counter-production” may provide artists with the possibility of generating a critical distance.

Productive Displacement (Marine Hugonnier and Seth Price, Ricardo Basbaum and Dexter Sinister) brings together works of art that deviate from conventional notions of artistic production, presentation and communication so as to critically examine the very principles of this conformity; Creative Speculations: Hierarchies and Structural Movement (Mary Ellen Carroll, Goldin+Senneby, Marion von Osten, and Lili Reynaud-Dewar) suggests how the frequently concealed normative order originating in recognized structures changes into the opposite of its initial purpose, and Modeling the Self (Henrik Olesen, Johannes Porsch, Josephine Pryde and Josef Strau) considers the property relations of the body as the site of sexual and identity-related processes of negotiation. 

In a text published in the exhibition catalogue Make Your Own Life: Artists In & Out of Cologne (2006), Strau coined the expression “non-productive attitude” that he today understands as a posture of productive withdrawal in which life, work, and economy are affectively combined. He thus articulates an approach of critical distance which, with the deployment of “non-production production,” gets precisely to the heart of that ambivalence and contradictoriness in artistic production that comprises the exploratory thematic intention of the present exhibition. Hence, Counter-Production seeks to disclose the extent to which such an approach is capable of opening up potential perspectives for art.

Curators: Diana Baldon and Ilse Lafer with the involvement of Luke Skrebowski

Exhibition Publication 
Counter-Production
Online publication (English)
Design: Dexter Sinister
Concept: Luke Skrebowski with Diana Baldon and Ilse Lafer
Edited by Diana Baldon and Ilse Lafer for Generali Foundation
Published by Sabine Folie
Download: foundation.generali.at

Accompanying program
Thursday, October 24, 7pm 
Open Call (German/English)
A rolling program of fifteen-minute presentations where the public is invited to run the event and respond to the term “counter-production” within and beyond its articulation in this exhibition. The talk will be chaired by Andreas Spiegl (lecturer at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna).

Tuesday November 20 to Thursday, November 22, 4 to 7pm
“Me–You: Choreographies, Games, and Exercises”
“Collective-conversation” with Ricardo Basbaum
“In the frame of the exhibition Counter-Production, I propose to organize a new action as part of my series ‘collective-conversation’ with a group of participants who are willing to share some collaborative moments.” (Ricardo Basbaum)

 

 


Counter-Production at Generali Foundation Vienna
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