»Living with Pop: A Reproduction of Capitalist Realism«
Kunsthalle Düsseldorf 21.7.–29.9.2013

I am a photograph

Commodities tend to resist those forms of memory that they themselves do not generate. The current quasi-trend to restage or reassemble historical exhibitions – the frame-by-frame replay of When Attitudes Become Form this summer at the Fondazione Prada in Venice, for example – might be described as an advanced symptom of the commodification of art historical memory. Apparently, it is no longer the single work of art that doubles as a commodity: the exhibition format itself has entered an age of mechanical reproducibility.

This exhibition at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf is a self-described reproduction of Manfred Kuttner, Konrad Lueg, Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter’s Leben mit Pop: A Demonstration for Capitalist Realism (1963), first instantiated as an action at the Berges Möbelhaus in Düsseldorf. On view is a documentary, archival spin-off of exhibitions and actions produced by those four from 1963 through 1966 centering on a common theme: the invented term Capitalist Realism. Starting with the four artist’s showing of canvases in an empty shop, the exhibition then traces Lueg and Richter’s infamous, stationary »action« at the Berges Möbelhaus – where they sat around on furniture placed on plinths, while the news, and a documentary on Adenauer, played on a background television – the result here is not so much a »readymade« or replica exhibition, but an archival display. This display, in which the original works are only shown as reproductions, functions as documentary (displaying related ephemera, posters, letters and notebooks), commentary (showing news documents, for example, relating to the exhibitions’ reception) and even as a generative platform: curators Elodie Evers, Magdalena Holzhey and Gregor Jansen collaborated with artist Christopher Williams, who assembled a series of historical and contemporary video works, presented throughout the exhibition, that offer a contrapuntal commentary on Capitalist Realism (an idea and phrase that appears in Williams’ own work). 

The exhibition architecture itself co-opts the methods of its own subject matter, proceeding in unit-like displays reminiscent of trade fairs or product displays. Indeed, there is a direct link between the formats of commodity display – drivers of capitalist desire – and the original impulse behind the original Leben mit Pop, and its affiliated actions, responding as it did to forms of bourgeois life, the West German Wirtschaftswunder, American Pop, and the emergent conspicuous consumption of the post-war era. Most significantly, the works by Richter, Polke and Lueg – Polke’s Socks (1963), Richter’s Neuschwanstein Castle (1963), for example – were presented only as full-scale, photographic reproductions, mounted unassumingly on corrugated cardboard. This decision to include only reproduced works (excepting the real letters and photographs that were presented in the archival vitrines) somewhat collapsed the formal divisions between work and reception, and more significantly, demonstrated an attempt to strip these canonical paintings of aura. This choice allowed the viewer to see such paintings not with any de-aurified freshness, but rather with the studied coolness of art historical slides.

Viewing such works today, one sees a direct line – in attitude as well as form – linking the 1963 exhibition, through artists like Richard Prince, and later, the détourned actions of collectives like the Bernadette Corporation and Colin de Land’s Art Club 2000, members of which iconically photographed themselves sitting around the white couches of a Gap store in Manhattan. The video series that Christopher Williams curated included a silent, black-and-white HD film titled The Disinfectant Sun (2013) by young Düsseldorf artists Philipp Rühr and Henning Fehr: the camera moves past storefronts on the bourgeois shopping street Nordstraße in Düsseldorf, trash, objects and people fluttering about, shopping as consumers par excellence. As a response to emergent forms of Pop as well as to the mass-mediation of the public sphere, the original exhibition presented alongside such newer works, make clear that the conditions that prompted that original exhibition have only further rooted themselves today. Pop is everywhere, and we go on living with it. 

PABLO LARIOS