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1/6/2000

Nobodies Home

Kunstbunker-Forum, Nuremberg

A group show concerned with living space and alienation

'Nobodies Home' is a group exhibition that takes its cue from the current celebration of 'lifestyle culture' so prevalent in today's news and entertainment media, where an endless parade of magazine and television spots seems to reduce the image of life to an hypnotic discourse on domesticity. With television news offering tips on which supermarkets to avoid, and magazines offering lengthy articles on how to find the right contractor for luxury home renovations, the only significant problems these days seem to revolve around consumption and decoration.

The artworks for this exhibition have been chosen for their relevance to the alienation produced by an ever-expanding corporate capitalism that, in its tireless need to create new markets around the world, is leaving increasingly homogenized cultures in its wake. Recognizing that this process is not taking place in a vacuum, the scope of the exhibition is intended to be broad enough to include reflections on shifts in economic and political agendas necessary to pave the way for the further progress of 'The Society of the Spectacle' which, thirty years after Guy Debord first described the phenomenon, continues with what appears to be a renewed vengeance. For the most part reduced to playing the important but obsequious role of cheerleader to these events, the major media, dependent on advertising revenue which in turn requires the allegiance of consumers, has become extremely adept at stimulating the public's fears and desires in a largely successful bid to distract it from any doubts that might develop during infrequent moments of quiet reflection. 'Nobodies Home' might be seen, in part, as an effort to entertain these doubts and expand upon them.

The artists chosen for this exhibition are not necessarily chosen because their work subscribes to its premise but on the basis of specific pieces that might, when seen in the overall context of the show, loosely describe the alienating effects these conditions might have on our cultural experience of a home.The artists and works to be included are:

Betty Beaumont
A group of 5"x 7" photographs taken in 1978 at Love Canal, NY, of modest homes that were condemned and boarded up after Federal and State governments declared the area unsafe due to environmental toxins. Because all the photographs are taken from the same frontal view, an emphasis of the homes formal qualities develops that barely contains the melancholy of their history.

Oliver Boberg
Photographs of what appear to be non-descript architectural spaces which under scrutiny are revealed as carefully constructed models that are built and photographed by the artist. Although constructed with a great deal of care, the images themselves depict anonymous urban settings that are impressive only in there banality, passageways through forgotten parts of the city that seem retrieved from memory and yet remain pure fiction.

Michelle Bertomen, David Boyle and Brooklyn Architects Collective Addressing the problem of corporations' tendency to reshape local economies in order to satisfy the needs of global capital, BAC, through a catalogue essay and a schematic drawing describe how a community like Williamsburg, Brooklyn (the original site of the exhibition) with its awkward zoning and narrow streets, offers a model of inconvenience that might thwart this process.

Jim Costanzo
Jim Costanzo's photographs' entitled 'Tourist Pilgrimage' describe the routine surveillance a consumer experiences on their summer holiday. Costanzo grafts the 'Global Positioning Systems' information(the satellite that gives a credit card user's rough location), time,date and type of purchase over photographs of his European trip, creating a set of visual documents of one's leisure time as a thouroghly scrutinized commercial event.

Herman Gabler
Paintings of domestic-looking utensils done in a dry, realistic style on a flat ground with text that has an incomplete relationship to the object. The stillness of these pictures suggests a genuine discomfort with the mundane nature of everyday experience.

Dan Graham
A photograph of the model for 'Alteration to a Suburban House', which replaces the facade of a suburban tract house with a glass wall and divides it in two with a mirror that runs parallel to the now transparent front wall. In Graham's words "The glass facade reveals the interior living quarters and displays it like a show window... One could also see the cutaway facade as a metaphoric billboard, but one depicting a non-illusionistic view: a cutaway view of a family in their house surrounded by greenery and other houses in the background. But unlike a billboard, the outside spectator observes the actual space in the house behind the picture plane as well as the actual space he is in."

Larry Krone
A discreet floor piece that made of simulated parquet flooring tape. The tape is applied to irregularities in the concrete floor around the gallery perhaps to hint at a possible residential past for the site of the exhibition.

Allan McCollum
One of the plaster surrogate paintings which in this context describes the limitations of meaning in a culture devoted to commodity fetish while also conveying the seductiveness of such a culture.

Donna Neild
A pair of large photographs that offer a birds-eye view of cosmetics' counters in a department store. From this perspective the figures walking among the products appear to be caught in a maze; consumer somnambulists whose spells are broken by the sound of a cash register.

Mauricio Dias and Walter Riedweg
'Question Marks', a video piece that identifies the "counter - results of the American dream" through the artists interaction with those caught up in America's expanding penal system which was originally produced for the show "Conversations at the Castle" in Atlanta, Georgia in 1996.

Heidi Schlatter
A series of images of 'El Chorillo', a depressed Panama City housing development in the International Style that exists far outside the utopian goals originally associated with modernism. Printed on vinyl, like advertising banners and mounted on metal studs used for interior walls,the work leans against wall of the gallery, as displaced and temporary as this neighborhood, part of which was leveled during the U.S. invasion of Panama in 1989.

Peter Scott
A photograph that was taken of a studio set-up of a somewhat elegant domestic room containing what appears to be a mirror but is actually a one-way glass behind which a painting depicts an image of stylized violence. While not obvious at first, once seen the image projects an element of fear into the relative comfort and stability of the setting, suggesting a possible discrepancy between physical and psychological security.

Day Gleason and Dennis Thomas
Using a real estate card from the MONOPOLY board game as a format for a silk-screen, this work addresses the issue of gentrification in the East Village, replacing 'Park Place' with 'Second Avenue' and listing the value of the property according to the amount of boutiques or galleries on the premises.

Anton Vidokle
A facsimile of lawn furniture that has a spare and beautiful appearance. It has the look of being mass produced but its reductive qualities call its popular appeal into question. It is what lawn furniture might be in a world without advertising.

Curated by Peter Scott
Kunstbunker-Forum f Zeitg. Kunst e.V.-Bauhof 9, 90402 Nurnburg, Germany
tel: 49 911 244 8494
Opening, Friday, June 2, 7pm

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