AR: DAS INSTITUT at Serpentine Gallery

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Originally Posted: May 17th, 2016

Note: This entry is part of August Review, our annual look back at this season’s key exhibitions. For more information, see the announcement here.

DAS INSTITÜT at Serpentine Gallery

(link)

2009, 7 years ago, 2 years after the founding of DAS INSTITÜT, already, then:

"However, the joke is actually on the curator, as many artists have learned to feed this desire with work made quickly, but with enough conceptual acrobatics to make them acceptable as part of a canon of their own oeuvre—or that of a supposed canon on the critique of modernity. And here, the artist has found a way not only to maximize the circulation of his/her work, but also to reduce the budget in terms of both time and materials—the original shady business of “skimming”, although one that is justifiable considering the low rate of artist fee’s. Within this particular loop, a potential critique of excess is ensnared as another symptom of that very excess. And it is with this dual farce of today’s production and related branding activities, namely the desire for the curator to collect and justify an artistic industry of prefab and ready-at-hand esoterics, that one should enjoy DAS INSTITUT’s irreverent something for everybody with a little for everyone approach.

“DI Why?” treats referents like refreshments at a party, from appropriation, to the politics of representation, to subculture fetishism, to pop, and even Relational Aesthetics—there was an opening event with an “exotic” food import: Currywurst and Berliner Weisse mit Schuss. What is truly unique about this show is that all of these devices are derived from completely blank and empty signifiers..."  -Adam Kleinman TZK

What started as a mock "import/export" business in 2007 became so quickly real, its sham background mattering little in art so long as it looked like it, and the network "featuring non-competing points of attraction at various scales and orientations" and franchise friendibitions and its hard to deny a room full of so much something.

See too: KAYA at Deborah Schamoni, Isa Genzken at David Zwirner,  Ann Craven at Confort Moderne