The Art World
Feinkost, Berlin, Germany
SOSka Group, Barter (2007), video-still
In a small gallery on the outskirts of Mitte, an exhibition of a few well-chosen artifacts maps the existence and behaviour of that transnational (and transactional) population: ‘The Art World’. The exhibition begins with three abstract works on paper by Charles Gute, enlarged Microsoft Word documents titled Revisions and Queries (2005); that is, evidence of this world begins with the visible hand of the editor operating on the now-invisivble conversations that once took place between Hans Ulrich Obrist and Dara Birnbaum, Dan Graham, and Maurizio Cattelan. An elevated view of people standing around in Bruce Nauman’s Square Depression (1977/2007) makes up the face of Matthieu Laurette’s Frieze vs Artforum (2007): two stacks of magazines vying for attention in the corner. Placed side by side, and decked out in their (matching) September best, here are two contestants in a ‘who’s taller?’ competition.
The absurdly long list in Ben Gavin’s Courtesy of… (2006) makes light of a nightmarish hypothetical situation, naming dozens of museums and blue-chip galleries. Elsewhere, Rainer Ganahl faces defeat against the Alighiero Boetti archive authorities, who have proclaimed Ganahl’s Boetti weavings fakes (despite being signed and dated by the artist). SOSka Group’s video, Barter (2007), puts the question of that unfathomable beast ‘value’ into the hands of farmers who have willingly traded two dozen eggs for a faked Cindy Sherman clown portrait. A vintage ad taken from Flash Art in 1972 seems too surreal to be real: ‘Today everyone talks in dollars and I cost only a $1000,’ reads the text – next to a portrait of the magazine’s founder Giancarlo Politi.
The leitmotif of the sundry artifacts acquired from that phantom sphere under investigation here would is a wicked sense of humour. Indeed, the gallery’s name ‘Feinkost’ (‘deli’) is no invention of the owner but a suitably punning found work – ‘fine cost.’ Recently opened, the gallery is owned by a former editor of Flash Art and former gallery assistant at Gagosian in New York: Aaron Moulton is an insider, small fry with big ideas now hedging his bets at survival as a gallerist. Across the street is a billboard advertisement for an electricity concern reading ‘Unterbieter’ (Underbidder), a sign bearing the portent of a parallel existence. Overall, the invisible hand writ large in the art auctions here was just too other- (if not art-) worldly.
April Lamm
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