EIN BILD ROMAN STÜCKEN A Pictorial Novel In Pieces - Captain ...

terms of today’s art, a man who submits unconditionally
to the demands of fashion.
The project Captain Pamphile—we assume that the
translation of the word capitaine into the lingua franca
of English is more suited to the internationalism customary
today—is a collaborative enterprise, but not a
piece of teamwork. The diversity of artistic approaches
is essential to the project. No longer bound to an
educational mission, ideological rules, and aesthetic
guidelines of representation, art has long become the
correlate and cultural substratum of a world that is, for
good and ill, free.
With the failures of the classical avant-gardes, the idea of
using art to change society has been shelved. Art is more
and more turning into a luxury accessory sold at exorbitant
prices to the few wealthy individuals of this world.
No more than twenty galleries and dealers in New York,
Los Angeles, Paris, London, and Zurich as well as international
art fairs and auction houses set the pace and
confer the status of nobility on art while making sure
that the supply remains constrained. But that doesn’t
mean the idea of the avant-garde—its origins lie in the
military field—as a pioneer of strategic action is dead.
To the contrary, business needs a constant influx of new
impulses. The underground has been and still is the territory
where creative artists and avant-gardists define the
newest trends, while business and the art world forever
threaten to appropriate them for their purposes. And so
today’s art reflects a sort of two-class society, divided
into an upmarket sector with recognized names for the
independently wealthy representatives of the establishment,
and young and provocative art for connoisseurs
and trend scouts. In an age of restoration and re-feudalization,
anything between those extremes finds itself in
a tough spot. Captain Pamphile provides a model of this
development. As the culture shifts from writing toward
the more easily accessible medium of the image, which
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crosses linguistic barriers and national boundaries and
creates new forms of communication, the influence of
commerce rises. The project plays with this nexus, betting
on traditional material but then transforming and
transposing it into the present. It offers much food for
thought, in many respects.
Sammlung Falckenberg and the Deichtorhallen, Hamburg,
initiated a cooperation agreement in January 2011.
The exhibition program and the Sammlung Falckenberg/
Phoenix-Hallen in Harburg will be operated as a subsidiary
of the Deichtorhallen. Captain Pamphile is the first exhibition
to be presented under the direction of Dr. Dirk
Luckow, the new head of the Deichtorhallen. And it is a
pilot project. In 2010, we already granted artists the liberty
to use the rooms in Harburg to present their work
as they saw fit; the show, entitled Weißer Schimmel, was a
great success. Captain Pamphile takes this programmatic
idea one step further; in late 2012, we plan on presenting
another exhibition of media art to be designed by
the artists at their own discretion. By providing “space
for free art,” we hope to counterbalance the established
major powers in art. The present publication is intended
not so much as a catalogue of the exhibition but rather
as a book accompanying the exhibition.