Scott King
dal 21/2/2008 al 12/4/2008
Segnalato da
21/2/2008
Scott King
Kunstverein Munchen, Munich
Marxist Disco (cancelled). Following the tradition of situationist politics of the image and the graphical punk heritage, he amalgamates publicly circulating signs of our consumerist culture in bastardized icons, celebrating the disease of their own origin. His work is caracherised by the idea of a viral aesthetic of the parasitic, which makes use of the organs of its host in order to bring it down through their own means.
Scott King proverbially bites the hand that feeds him. He started his professional career as a highly acclaimed graphic designer and worked as an art and creative director for style magazines like ID and Sleazenation in the 1990s. He designed the election campaign of the punk-impresario Malcom McLaren, who ran for mayor in London, a well as numerous LP covers for pop-icons like the Pet Shop Boys, Suicide and Morrissey.
Beside his commercial activities Scott King repeatedly initiated independent projects that undermined mass communication on a substantive level by using its formats, types of media and aesthetic vocabulary. King’s cooperation with the English historian Matt Worley on the project called “CRASH!” since 1997 might be the single most legendary one of them. With the edition of the magazine „Prada Meinhof“ in the late 1990s “CRASH!” encapsulated – again appropriately presented for a mass media context - the upcoming chic of fashionably empty revolutionary gestures of former leftist politics. When politics turns into a pose, then the pose becomes political.
The idea of a viral aesthetic of the parasitic, which makes use of the organs of its host in order to bring it down through their own means, also characterizes King’s artistic work. Following the tradition of situationist politics of the image and the graphical punk heritage, he amalgamates publicly circulating signs of our consumerist culture in bastardized icons, celebrating the disease of their own origin. Just like the godfather of the political left once noticed that with the rise of capitalist modernity everything solid melts into thin air, it only gets a few degrees hotter with Scott King’s “Marxist Disco (cancelled)“.
With “Marxist Disco (cancelled)“ Kunstverein München presents Scott King’s first institutional solo show.
Opening: 22. February 2008, 8 PM
Kunstverein Munchen e.V.
Galeriestrasse 4, Munchen
free admission