ART CLUB2000: Selected Works 1992–1999

“Art Club2000, an artists’ collective active during the 1990s, was made up of eight enterprising art school undergraduates: Craig Wadlin, Soibian Spring, Sarah Rossiter, Will Rollins, Shannon Pultz, Daniel McDonald, Gillian Haratani and Patterson Beckwith, who made art and produced exhibitions—two activities they understood as having separate implications. When the group began they were studying at the Cooper Union—a tuition-free institution in New York’s East Village—with teachers such as Hans Haacke and Mark Dion, meaning that although the members were exposed to the extreme capitalism of the city, they were also allowed enough distance to appreciate its effects. Art Club2000, with its precocity, became a unique clash of commodity fetishism and institutional critique.”
—Jackie McAllister (in Afterall 22, 2009)

ART CLUB2000: Selected Works 1992–1999 is the first comprehensive presentation of the fabled New York collective ART CLUB2000 (or AC2K), founded in 1992. Developed by Artists Space in New York and exhibited there last autumn, the exhibition unites AC2K’s entire production and conception of art for the first time in Europe. Although few people viewed them at the time, their exhibitions are considered legendary and influential. AC2K pursued an art that always remained fluid, political and activist yet funny, sincere, outrageous and caustic.

Between 1992 and 1999, in just over ten exhibitions, AC2K developed an oeuvre that is not made up of a collection of individual artworks. Rather, it consists of exhibitions, a medium used by AC2K to address, criticize and parody social changes, urban development and their own complicated attitude to life and the art world. The result was a portrait of a time of upheaval and of a gentrifying (art) environment.  

AC2K traced developments in which they themselves were entangled—and which remain core issues for artists and people today. Their exhibitions spoke of searching for artistic identity, questioning authorship, of alternatives in criticism and the complacency of their own generation. They addressed peer and milieu pressure, self-exploitative self-marketing, the cult of youth and youth culture and the pleasure of (increasingly difficult) subversion. Through their exhibitions, they traced the portrait of gentrification, not only of New York, but of our time and of our lives. 

The exhibition at Kunsthalle Zürich was developed by Artists Space, New York City, and was curated in close collaboration with AC2K.