The Promise of Total Automation • Kunsthalle Vienna • 2016
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Artists • Athanasios Argianas • Zbyněk Baladrán • Thomas Bayrle • James Benning • Bureau d’études • Steven Claydon • Tyler Coburn • Philippe Decrauzat & Alan Licht • Harry Dodge • Juan Downey • Cécile B. Evans • Judith Fegerl • Melanie Gilligan • Peter Halley • Channa Horwitz • Geumhyung Jeong • David Jourdan • Barbara Kapusta • Konrad Klapheck • Běla Kolářová • Nick Laessing • Mark Leckey • Tobias Madison & Emanu el Rossetti • Benoît Maire • Mark Manders • Daria Martin • Shawn Maximo • Régis Mayot • Wesley Meuris • Gerald Nestler • Henrik Olesen • Julien Prévieux • Magali Reus
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Curator • Anne Faucheret
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Today, humans aren’t the only ones linked to the global network: machines and things communicate with each other and with their environment without any human agent. Disposing of this autonomous quality, technical devices and things, as well as ritual artefacts, begin to lead a life of their own and challenge the common separation between subject and object. This is the technological condition.
Have technical devices, originally designed to satisfy our desires, enslaved us already, or will they enslave us in the future? Is it at all the right question to ask? Or rather, do they open new ways of thinking, acting and creating?
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The “promise of total automation” was the battle cry of Fordism. What we nowadays call “technology” is an already co-opted version of it, being instrumentalized for production, extraction, communication, control and body-enhancements, that is for a colonization and rationalization of space, time and minds. Still technology cannot be reduced to it.
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In the exhibition, automation, improvisation and sense of wonder are not opposed but sustain each other. The artistic positions consider technology as complex as it is, not indulging in the binaries between technophilia and technophobia, between the rational and the irrational, between the human and the technology. Ritual artefacts, production machines, technical objects, images and artworks populate the space, coming from the archaeology of the digital age as well as from utopias of a technological future, to challenge today the capitalist political economy.
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Link to the exhibition's website
https://kunsthallewien.at/en/exhibition/the-promise-of-total-automation
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Link to the exhibition's booklet
https://kunsthallewien.at/assets/exhibitions/2016-03-the-promise-of-total-automation/The-Promise-of-Total-Automation_Booklet-EN.pdf
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Link to the publication
https://kunsthallewien.at/en/about/publications/the-promise-of-total-automation
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Image credits from left to right, from top to bottom
1 • From front to back: Harry Dodge, fuck me/who’s sorry now (consent-not–to–be-a-single-being series), 2015, Courtesy of the artist; love fuzz/many mr. strange (consent-not–to-be-a-single-being series), 2015, Courtesy of Beth Rudin DeWoody; electric skin/rat salad (the inhuman is not what it used to be), 2015, Courtesy of the artist; Judith Fegerl, still, 2013, Courtesy of Hubert Winter Gallery; Peter Halley, Total Recall, 1990, Private Collection. Courtesy of Hauser & Wirth.
2 • From left to right: Harry Dodge, fuck me/who's sorry now (consent-not-to-be-a-single-being-series), love fuzz/many mr. strange (consent-not-to-be-a-single-being series), 2015; Wesley Meuris, Case R-Y3.001, 2016, Courtesy of Annie Gentils Gallery, Antwerpen and Galerie Jérôme Poggi, Paris; Steven Claydon, Orion (prepared spinet), 2012, Courtesy of the artist and Sadie Coles HQ Gallery London.
3 • Front: Tyler Coburn, Waste Management, 2013-15, Courtesy of the artist.
4 • Front: Benoît Maire, Sexe, 2016, Courtesy Thomas Bernard et Cortex Athletico Paris.
5 • Magali Reus, Leaves series, 2015, Courtesy the artist and The Approach London.
6 • Front: Zbyněk Baladrán, Automated Subject, 2016, Courtesy of the artist.
7 • Left: Judith Fegerl, Amnion #1, 2007, Amnion #2, 2013, Courtesy of Hubert Winter Gallery; Right: Melanie Gilligan, The Common Sense, 2015, Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Max Mayer, Düsseldorf.
8 • From front to back: Harry Dodge, electric skin/rat salad (the inhuman is not what it used to be), 2015; Wesley Meuris, Case R-Y3.001, 2016; Nick Lessing, Galvanic Reaction VII (Copper), 2013; Galvanic Reaction X (Zinc), 2015, Galvanic Reaction XI (Copper), 2015, Courtesy of the artist.
9 • Installation view. Front: Harry Dodge. Back: Peter Halley.
10 • Installation view. Front: Philippe Decrauzat, Anisotropy, Sculpture, 2011, Courtesy of the artist. Middle: Benoît Maire. Back: Nick Laessing.
11 • Installation view. From left to right: Tyler Coburn, Thomas Bayrle, Kleiner koreanischer Wiper, 2012, Courtesy the artist and Barbara Weiss Gallery; Steven Claydon, Antenna, 2015, Courtesy the artist and Sadie Coles HQ London; Mark Manders, Finished Sentence (August 2010), 2010, Courtesy of the artist, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery New York and Zeno X Gallery Antwerp; Konrad Klapheck, Der Chef, 1965, Collection Museumspalast Düsseldorf; Cécile B. Evans, How Happy a Thing Can Be, 2014, Courtesy of the artist and Barbara Seiler Zurich.
12 • Installation view. From left to right: Lick Laessing, Tyler Coburn, Thomas Bayrle, Steven Claydon.
13 • Installation view. From left to right: Athanasios Argianas, Silence Breakers, Silence Shapers (Aberrations on Percussion) No. 9, 2015, Commissioned by NEON Foundation for Culture and Development D. Daskalopoulos; Mark Manders; Běla Kolářová, Large Fastener (Scattered) II, 1971, Kontakt. The Art Collection of Erste Group and ERSTE Stiftung.
14 • Peter Halley, Electric Slide, 2014, Courtesy of Jablonka MaruanI Mercier
Gallery, Brussels; Athanasios Argianas.
15 • Athanasios Argianas, details.
16 • Left: Bêlá Kolárová. Right: Athanasios Argianas, Song Machine No. 7, 2007, Collection of Daman Sanders and courtesy of the artist.
17 • Left: Jacquard loom attachment, approx. 1805, Collection technisches Museum Wien. Right: Tyler Coburn, Sabots, 2016, Courtesy of the artist.
18 • Shawn Maximo, Going Green, 2016, Courtesy of the artist.
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Photo credits from left to right, from top to bottom
1 • 2 • 12 • 14 • 15 • Stephan Wyckoff
3 • 4 • 5 • 6 • 7 • 8 • 9 • 10 • 11 • 13 • 16 • 17 • 18 • Jorit Aust
