The last few years have witnessed art spaces and clubs reaching out to each other, each seeking the others’ prestige, credibility and audience. It seems as if clubs as cultural spaces were able respond better to the current discourse in and around art than white cubes. In their very struggle for survival, art spaces are the spitting image of capitalist conformity. The white cube is capable of digesting even the most fierce critique, by separating it in time and space. In small portions it is made indigestible to the observer without poisoning the productive, working brain. It is sane. It allows for sober consideration, reflection. It allows the observer to remain in their position as body-less bystander, possibly a freecam. Like when you’ve been shot dead in Counter Strike and are waiting for a new game to start.
The club is its antithesis. Visitors may experience loss of their ego, but never their body. It denies its inhabitants space for observant reflection. The mere presence of the physical body makes it participant.
Possibly, this insistence on the body is what makes the club so appealing to the art world. Clubs are struggling to survive in coexistence with their neighborhoods. The interests of the working bourgeois in recreating their workforce is valued above a crowd spending their vital energies without feeding them back into the labor market. They are site to (chemically induced) psychosis, the broken body (mind) neither willing nor apt for wage labor. The ill are the strongest form of resistance. This observation coincides with the notion that the end of the world seems more likely than the end of neoliberalism. Rave hedonism read as auto aggression, really is aggression against the internalized disciplinary.
Project Credits:
- PsyCHO TRance // K-Hole is part of a research and production program held by Hangar in collaboration with the NewArtFoundation and the Beep Electronic Art Collection. Special acknowledgments to: Fabolous St. Pauli, Hamburg. Xīnchējiān 新车间, Shanghai
Biography:
Kenneth Dow (DE) works as an artist, curator and playwright based between Hamburg and Shanghai. He studied fine arts with Rainer Ganahl and Paul Devautour in Stuttgart, Milan and Shanghai. His work was shown internationally in several institutional group shows and theater festivals.
