Banks Violette

The Ill Seen Ill Said group exhibition is on at St. Louis’ White Flag Projects, opening September 17 and running to October 29.

There is little information on the nature of the show, aside from the artists taking part and the title taken from Irish avant-garde writer and director Samuel Beckett‘s short novel of the same name; an enigmatic text where an old woman waits to die in obscurity.

Artists taking part in the show include Lutz Bacher, Yngve Holen, Jo Spence, Banks Violette and John Waters among others, in an exhibition that surely draws on Beckett’s favourite themes of isolation, absence of hope, and approach of death.

Others artists taking part include John Giorno, Tony Morgan (in collaboration Daniel Spoerri), Robert Morris, Jean-Luc Moulène and Carlo Scarpa.

See the White Flag Projects website for details.**

#LutzBacher @356_s_mission_rd , Los Angeles

A photo posted by @aqnb on Jul 1, 2016 at 7:54am PDT

The Golden Eggs group exhibition is on at New York’s Team Gallery, opening June 23 and running to August 5.

Organised by Alissa Bennett, and featuring contributions from the likes Christine Brache, Chivas Clem, Jessica Diamond and Bjarne Melgaard among others, the exhibition takes its title from Karl Marx’s Das Kapital where he describes the progenerative potential of capital in the value acquired through “the occult quality of being able to add value to itself. It brings forth living offspring, or, at the least, lays golden eggs.”

In applying this principle to the contemporary (art) market, the works presented respond or engage with the capitalist phenomenon of endowing certain objects with the power to “autonomously generate revenue, rendering them self-contained units of profit production”, where they would otherwise have no intrinsic or functional value.

Selected artists —which include Alex Bag, Gardar Eide Einarsson, Hans Haacke, Barbara Kruger, John Miller and Banks Violette —engage with what the press release calls “a caustic antipathy towards contemporary capitalism” and its tendency towards exploitation, suppression and manipulation, “to commodify creativity and extinguish individualism.”

See the Team Gallery website for details.**

Ill Seen Ill Said @ White Flag Projects, Sep 17 – Oct 29

Golden Eggs @ Team Gallery, Jun 23 – Aug 5

Header image: John Miller, ‘Mannequin Lover’ (2002). Courtesy the artist.