"The Practice of Joy Before Death; It would just not be a party without you"

a Die Störung situation

Einat Amir

Cara Benedetto

Keil Borrman

Daniel Bozhkov

Mark Dion

Dana Hoey

Jutta Koether

Oz Malul

Gabriel Martinez

Andrea Merkx

Paul Pfeiffer

Alyssa Phoebus

Valerie Piraino

Blake Rayne

Davis Rhodes

Martha Rosler

Carlos Sandoval de Leon

Seth Scantlen

Dana Sherwood

Federico Solmi

Kara Walker

Ann Liv Young

Opening: Saturday, February, 28, 2009

Exhibition Dates: February 28 – April 19, 2009

How shall galleries be opened and what will they look like? This isn’t a question of production: objects, ideas, or social space. Rather, the question is: How do we consume? Like fire? Like a bird of prey? Are not the true virtuosos of deterritorialization hedge fund traders? Those who render the concrete wholly abstract, in so doing creating and destroying in a single terrible gesture? We will be like them: fearless and cunning, useless and piratical, suffused with terror and joy.

Our joy has no object other than immediate life and makes no presuppositions concerning a deeper reality! We want the struggling young and the jaded old; the interesting and the vacuous; the overpriced; the over-hyped; the outmoded; the underappreciated; the highly educated downwardly-mobile spoiled scions of the petit bourgeoisie; fresh meat with plunging market value, arriving upon an ailing art scene which can no longer afford to legitimate them. Though acts of becoming through disappearance are overplayed, and conceptualism’s tropes spun into the fine fibers girding the loins of the world’s art fair booths, we will nevertheless put their art objects to work—make them sharpen knives, serve soup, support us as benches.

We want Martha Rosler’s great defiant marginality; Oz Malul’s futile mechanical thuddings; Cara Benedetto’s repurposing of the toilet seat; Mark Dion’s geeky, savvy Natural History dances with and against the forces of recuperation; Ann Liv Young’s performance anxiety; Davis Rhodes’ ethical painting-substitutions; Federico Solmi’s rowdy, sexually explicit reflections; Dana Hoey’s double-barrel anarcho-realism; Andrea Merkx’s televised ambivalence; Kara Walker’s black vinyl petticoats; Einat Amir’s destitute video subjectivities; Carlos Sandoval de Leon’s super-materialist catwalk; Gabriel Martinez’s non-reluctant institutional incorporation; Daniel Bozhkov’s self-defeating poetics of environmental humanism; Paul Pfeiffer’s happy losses of self; Valerie Piraino’s Angelina Jolie spittle illuminations; Seth Scantlen’s horrible goop; Jutta Koether’s German disco transcendentalism; Dana Sherwood’s fake Pagan ontology; Alyssa Pheobus’ Luddite power art; Blake Rayne’s tactical absences; Keil Borrman’s redistribution of soup.

Life requires a set of sheltering norms and to live outside them is to court death. We want you to have money and redistribute what you can. We hope for a return to the decadence of the past decade, to have our youthful art gestures bathed in vivifying streams of harmless criticism and easy speculation. Prior to individuation we are given over to each other by virtue of our very embodiment. The happy trauma of your presence amidst this collection of your authorless objects makes it a party; greets us beyond being; practices joy before death.

Die Störung is a collective for the arrangement of situations against Art and Politics, whose membership includes, but is not limited to: Arlen Austin, Keil Borrman, Jason Boughton, Clayton Deutsch, and Alyssa Pheobus. Past Die Störung situations have included include Cloaca Maxima: The Moving Image in Contemporary Art, LeRoy Neiman Gallery, Columbia University; German, a temporary occupation of Miguel Abreu Gallery; and Imaginary Perversions, a panel discussion and screening staged at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council's Swing Space. Volume 2 of Die Störung Magazine, the organ of the collective, will be released in March.