german documentaries 2011

COUNTERATTACK.
Art takes aim at the economy
by Nico Weber and Piroschka Dossi ARTS | CULTURE | ECONOMY | SUSTAINABILITY | SOCIETY | SERIES
Each of the four films of ‘Counterattack. Art takes aim at the economy’ will present a single work or a
series of works of an extraordinary artist that explores – through special artistic means – complex economic
and financial phenomena of the 21st century and questions underlying assumptions which fuel
what analysts like to call economic processes.
German title: GEGENANGRIFF – WIRTSCHAFT IM FADENKREUZ DER KUNST
4x26min15sec | HD | 16:9 | German or French version, English on request
COUNTERATTACK part 1: MONEY – Circulation of Values
The Roman artist: Cesare Pietroiusti with his performance ‘Eating Money – An Auction’
Money is an enthrallment. In itself it is nothing but one can buy nearly everything with it. What is
money? What are the analogies between art and money? Is exchanging money for art, as Daniel
Spoerri put it, just the exchange of one abstraction for another one? Is value the same as price?
Is art the same as money? Following the footsteps of Marcel Duchamps and Yves Klein, Cesare
Pietroiusti develops a method for ‘irreversibly transforming money’ and hence turns galleries and
museum into laboratories for his anarchic experiments. By making banknotes his object of artistic
intervention, he extinguishes the difference between money and art. He transforms money into art
and economic into artistic value. One of his actions is the performance ‘Eating Money – An Auction’.
COUNTERATTACK part 2: SPECULATION – The Siren Song of the Stock Market
The Italian composer Fabio Ciffariello Ciardi with the sound installation ‘Nasdaq Voices’
First we hear single cords played on a guitar, then the sounds of a marimba, and finally a flute. One
instrument after the other joins in. Where are we? What do we hear? The Italian composer Fabio
Cifariello Ciardi developed a special software that allows to reflect the fluctuations of the NASDAQ
index in real time. By adding the sound of various musical instruments to the NASDAQ’s movements,
transactions on the markets become audible and visible and are translated into a fascinating and at
the same time irritating collage. In his work data and information that are normally represented in
exact mathematical terms, like graphs or diagrams turn into a sensual experience. – the siren song of
the stock exchange. Ciardi himself calls this process the ‘hidden emotionality’ of the stock exchange.
COUNTERATTACK part 3: CONSUMERISM – Capitalism’s Promise of Luck
The London artist Michael Landy with the video: ‘Breakdown’
Michaels Landys work is radical and extreme too but the radicalism can not be found on the surface
but it lays in the action it is based upon and crosses borders. In an art performance in February 2001,
he systematically destroyed all his possessions. Over 7,000 objects, including his birth certificate,
personal photos, his car and his furniture, were taken apart and pulverized. A video documents this
act of destruction. It was not just a radical self-experiment that paralysed his artistic creativity for two
years, but it also uncovered the otherwise hidden relation between the individual, property and
identity. Who are we without our possessions in which our identity is materialized?
COUNTERATTACK part 4: INEQUALITY – Poor and Rich
The New York artist Tina Barney with the sries of photographs: ‘Theater of Manners’.
The photographs that made Tina Barney famous in the 1980s are large-format color photographs of
her friends and family, handsome members of the American gentry among whom she was born and
raised in New York and Rhode Island. Where documentary photographers have traditionally focused
on the underclass – immigrants, refugees, the poor and dispossessed – Barney claimed the wealthy
upper class as her territory, determined to photograph her own experience rather than observing that
of others. While INEQUALITY is focusing Tina Barney’s series ‘Theater of Manners’ it discusses the
global promises to achieve greater equality. We are living in a world that is becoming ever more
economically polarised. The rich become gleefully richer while the poor majority remain mired in an
inescapable morass. The middle class is squeezed between the two. This elite is portrayed in Tina
Barney’s pictures, therefore the artwork discusses social mobility and the structure of the elite itself.
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german documentaries 2011
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