Dank Lloyd Wright: Gag Economy

Over the duration of six weeks, MAGAZIN in Vienna is transformed into a concept “dollar” store of random merchandise that is as disposable as flashing memes on a screen. Gag Economy recognizes the struggles of the euro in daunting times, as superfluous items engage with forms of deep Kulturkritik.

The exhibition is a pendulum that swings between humorous memes and political propaganda, creating a space for both laughter as a form of criticism and consumption (of images, products, and content) as a reflection of our relationship to social media in a short-attention economy.

Gag Economy is a play on the term “gig economy,” which describes a form of precarious labor that exempts the employer from providing workers with basic rights like access to healthcare, holidays, or even the tools and infrastructures to perform a task or provide a service. In this change of labor relations, the security of a regular salary is replaced with the continuous demand of risk and labor from the worker. Manifested in how multinational, tax-avoiding corporations like Uber and Doordash operate, this practice of capitalist extraction has been appropriated by architects to describe in deceivingly fashionable ways exploitative and cruel forms of labor. Firm owners, already pushing architectural workers to work unpaid overtime, now force this precarity to gain more capital from workers and further widen the income gap.

By leaving the digital temporality of the phone screen and summoning the wastefulness and speed of fast-fashion, Gag Economy transforms MAGAZIN and later on Belvedere 21 into a display of wearable memes, slogans, and manifestos that can be worn to become a walking joke and a piece of interactive, human-scale anti-imperialist propaganda.

Dank Lloyd Wright is an activist collective, cum joke faction, center for ants, frog week enthusiast group, and book club operated anonymously from a half basement somewhere in Vienna. Current interests include getting shadow-banned on instagram, rejected by LOG, blocked by ivy league schools and members of capitalist roundtables. Anyone that follows DLW is DLW. You are DLW, we are all DLW, (unless you are a slumlord, union buster, or on the “shitty men in architecture” list).

MAGAZIN is an exhibition space for contemporary architecture in Vienna run by Jerome Becker and Matthias Moroder. MAGAZIN presents the work of local and international architects in solo exhibitions that are especially conceived for the spaces in the Rembrandtstrasse location—framed by corresponding lectures, panel discussions and publications.