FUNding FACTORY
Dates: 8 May–30 May 2009
How do you negotiate the cultural production line?
The FUNding FACTORY attempts to interrogate the desire that many artists share: to disrupt expectations of the function of art whilst fighting for the right to be paid to do that dismantling.
In May 2009, Open Space Gallery in Vienna will be transformed into a factory for the metaphorical mixing, compressing, tinkering, testing, rejecting, approving, wrapping, packaging and distributing of culture.
The global promotion of the ‘creative industries’ creates a normalised climate of justifying cultural production in terms of economic viability and an artists’ ‘employability’. Artists are reluctantly embracing the opportunity to make a living using the skills or tools of their trade. A common reaction to this commercialisation of culture, is also to try and salvage art from its use-value by burying our heads in the sand or jumping through hoops in the hope that this will allow us to continue practicing our so-called political and critical independent art practices.
Instead, how can we realise our complicity in this process and face head on the dilemmas of commissioned, marketable and profitable critical and political cultural production? What are the consequences of the successful fight for the professionalisation of art as a valid career option?
The factory will be a site to reflect on the issues of the cultural production line we are a part of and how we understand our work to be relevant and critical. It invites us to question the mechanisms of cultural production, creative industries and art commissioning that we rely on, supply and continue to challenge.
Found, discarded and donated material from skips, studios and galleries is recycled to build the make-shift cultural production line. Embedded in the factory are video portraits of staff and associates of Open Space about their experiences of negotiating these dilemmas of survival, ideology and criticality. Students at the University of Applied Arts have been invited to intervene and take over the factory in May to reflect on their own positions as future ‘creative industry-workers’.
What rules do you apply to your working practices as artists, curators, activists, funders or commissioners?
The FUNding FACTORY is a project initiated by Sophie Hope for Open Space with Fahim Amir, Fatih Aydogdu, Gulsen Bal, Barbara Holub, Fran Hope, Domenico Mühle, Tina Raffel, Walter Seidl, Christoph Srb, Corina Vetsch and Reinhold Zisser.
image: section of an illustration for the FUNding FACTORY by Fran Hope (2009)
Opening: 7 May 2009, 19.00-21.30
Open Space. Zentrum für Kunstprojekte
Lassingleithnerplatz 2, 1020 Vienna, Austria.
+43 69911528632
