Opens, Saturday 5 July, 5 p.m.
Rainer Ganahl (1961) has been fascinated by Marx for nearly two decades. This culminates in this show which he entitles Manhattan Marxism. In De Vleeshal he will show video’s, Jewelry, paintings, installations, fashion and much more. On his website manhattanmarxism.com Ganahl writes about the exhibition.
The title for Manhattan Marxism was the result of a work KARL MARX VISITS DAVID ZWIRNER ON WEST 20TH STREET, BLINKY PALERMO, LATE WORKS, MANHATTAN MARXISM, 1976/2013 inspired by a painting of Palermo (German painter, 1943-1977) he simply called MANHATTAN.
Needless to say there is a contradiction at hand since Manhattan is
place of Wall street, the biggest machine of Capitalism throughout the
20th century and still one of the biggest and the most important one in
the world. But this little Iceland is not only home to many high wealth
individuals including some of the richest people in the world but also
to many poor people and a neighbourhood still belonging statistically to
the most underprivileged areas in the United States.
Hence, Manhattan in conjunction with Marxism could easily be
understood as radical chic, some kind of provocation if not outright
cynicism, but I do not intend it as such. Not only do I myself live in
Manhattan – in the barrio of Spanish Harlem – but also do many
theoreticians who read and study Marx’s texts which is still taught at
Manhattan universities.
I am interested in Karl Marx as a theoretician and a metaphor for
his theoretical analysis about how people interact materially and
socially thus creating an economic systems that gives us work, value,
profits, losses, crisis, debts and differences. He says work as a the
major force for people to deal with the world, to satisfy their needs
and to create and shape their mostly instrumental thinking. Work for
Marx is a basic category that takes on new shapes in whatever
developmental phase the individual or society finds itself. It is
crucial to sustain life and create our understanding of the world and
each other. I would go as far as to say that in a society where basic
needs like food, clothing, health and security are nearly all
guaranteed by the state without much effort, even consumption,
distraction, shopping and wasting is some kind of lying just idle is
work creating an overall productive effect.
Marx was also an amazing analyst of the products human and machine
work produces. Already in the first part of the 19th century he speaks
about the fetish character of products and good something that is the
dominating and driving force of shopping and accumulating stuff and
services today. His materialism explains the world from the bottom up
and unlike idealists who start with big master gods, big terms and
concepts and put the idea of something ahead of that something, for Marx
survival comes first which then makes humans make things to become who
they are and what they are.
Marx stands in large part of the left leaning population – to which I
count myself – for social justice and hope. On the right leaning
spectrum, he is blamed for the disasters and brutal repressions 20th
century forms of communism produced with all its terror and inefficient
economical systems. Even if I am fascinated by Marx’s materialist
philosophy and his very influential understanding of economical and
social processes of his time including his fight against idealism and
any kind of god-business, I am not a Marxist the way it was understood
in the 20th century where such a sentence and declaration could cost or
save you your head literally or metaphorically you job and material if
not also social well being depending on the time, place and people you
found yourself in. Saying all this, I have to point out to all the
misery, wars and murders that was committed partially under his banner,
his ideology, his name – no matter how innocent the mostly London based
writer was or wasn’t.
Rainer Ganahl
Read more:
http://ganahl.info/
Nessun commento:
Posta un commento