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4/7/2014

Rainer Ganahl / Loek Grootjans

De Vleeshal, Middelburg

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 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/

http://manhattanmarxism.com/

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Loek Grootjans
Storage for Distorted Matter (Case P.M.)

Loek Grootjans (b. 1955 in Arnemuiden) collects and keeps a record of whatever touches him as an artist and a human being. In 2008 he launched Storage for Distorted Matter, a wide-ranging project that sets out to register and store life. Thus for many years the artist collected the dust in his studio, as well as Vincent van Gogh’s native soil; he also stored the water in which drowned bodies washed ashore on the Dutch island of Vlieland. For De zaak Piet Mondriaan, part of Storage for Distorted Matter, Grootjans collected the light that Mondriaan must have seen when he first arrived in Domburg in 1908. The result is an installation at De Kabinetten van De Vleeshal, entitled Storage for Distorted Matter (Case P.M.). P.M. stands for Piet Mondriaan.

Grootjans claims that the ‘Zeeland light’ Piet Mondriaan first saw in Domburg in 1908 did much to change and shape his work. The light in the province of Zeeland is phenomenal, and according to Grootjans’ research this is due to the influence of the Western and Eastern Scheldt estuaries and the currents in the North Sea and the Straits of Dover. The salt crystals in the water are far larger in the summer than in other seasons and are cast up into the air by the swirling currents, affecting the light. The seawater is at its warmest in September, which is why the crystals are especially large at that time of the year. The way in which the light is reflected by the crystals produces a unique effect.

Grootjans spent a year collecting water from the sea at a point between Westkapelle and Domburg – the intersection with Mondriaan’s line of sight from Domburg to Westkapelle – and letting some of it evaporate. He also took thousands of photographs of the sublime Zeeland light at the same spot. His installation combines historical and contemporary elements to provide an idiosyncratic new vision of art history.

In 1908 Mondriaan first set foot in Zeeland in the province’s main town, Middelburg, and travelled on from there to Domburg by steam tram. Grootjans’ presentation of De zaak Piet Mondriaan at De Kabinetten van De Vleeshal brings Mondriaan back to Middelburg. The installation includes a wall showing all the relevant dates; seventeen edited nautical charts; fifty-two bottles of seawater accompanied by large Petri dishes with the salt crystals incorporated into large display cases; fifty-two framed documents belonging to the storekeeper of Storage for Distorted Matter; a video compilation of thousands of photographs of the sublime light in Domburg; and a work showing Mondriaan’s exact location and line of sight when he produced his painting View from the Dunes with Beach and Piers, Domburg.

www.loekgrootjans.com

Image: Rainer Ganahl, Manhattan Marxism, De Vleeshal 2014

The Visual Arts Foundation Middelburg (SBKM / De Vleeshal) will present Manhattan Marxism by Rainer Ganahl at De Vleeshal (06.07-31.08.2014).

Opening De Vleeshal, 05.07.2014, 5 p.m.

At the same time the exhibition Storage for Distorted Matter (Case P.M.) De zaak Piet Mondriaan by Loek Grootjans will be on display at De Kabinetten van De Vleeshal (Zusterstraat 7, Middelburg).

Opening De Kabinetten van De Vleeshal, 05.07.2014, 4 p.m.

De Vleeshal
Markt, Middelburg NL | De Kabinetten van de Vleeshal, Zusterstraat 7, 4331 KG Middelburg NL
Hours: Tuesday to Sunday, 1 pm - 5 pm
admission free

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