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27/9/2001

White Collar

White Collar, Berlin

White Collar presents an array of aesthetic positions touching on aspects of the white collar state of mind, with artists drawing on elements of its interior and exterior environments and design, social rituals, economic preoccupations and operational systems as they examine and subvert the visual and formal languages of urban professionals by misapplying, inverting, falsely representing, forensically capturing, inventing and extrapolating from the detritus of the white collar world.

Coining the term 'white collar' in the early 1950s, the American sociologist C. Wright Mills provided a trope for an emerging 20th century middle class keeping its hands clean as it toiled behind desks in the banal working environments of the industrialised world. In their bid for gradual ascension up the corporate ladder, the white collar workforce constituted a rank, a milieux, a kind of social orbit - but the socio-economic fruits of conforming to the daily routines and regulated climates of the office brought with them a disaffected and precarious psychological life. Half a century later the white collar world is out of orbit - the faceless goals of multinationalism, the collapse of the new economy, the euphemistic ambience of the pink slip party and the persistent uncertainties of globalisation conflate to leave today's cell-phone-toting generation pondering the feasibility of a sure footing on the slippery slopes of the white collar pyramid.

The exhibition foregrounds the ambivalence of contemporary artists as they respond to the contemporary corporate values, systems, hierarchies and aesthetics by which they are surrounded.

Hours: Wednesday / Sunday, 1 - 7 pm and by appointment

stampa

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