Curated by UN-SdA
02/25/2024—03/17/2024
Katja Aufleger, Milena Büsch, JPW3, Klaus Merkel, Lisa Rave
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The guiding hypothesis of the exhibition series is that of a new subject of collective imagination and agency, here called "Californian", which is mediated by new capitalist modes of production that are no longer structured around industrial labor, but around affect, creativity and intelligence in order to exploit it. In this way, the associated concepts are examined for their coherence - without completely abandoning the counter-thesis that the alleged new exchange value is a phantasm of the inflationary credit system and that the values generated in this way are fictions. For the decisive point of this alternative must be formulated differently than in terms of reality and fiction. The phantasm of a subject is also realized and materialized: The exchange value that is detached from the commodities themselves and exists alongside them as a commodity is - money. Money forms a system of social relations. It is not a mere reflection of value, but an effective and reality-distorting, even productive force, even if it is not completely disconnected from labor and value. Spontaneity lies in the representation of value through money: the intention of representation, production, imagination and agency. The question at stake is therefore whether the real changes that we perceive are rooted in the automatisms of economic circulation - in which case they are determined by the logic of the economic system as a whole, which changes of its own accord and independently of our ability to recognize and act. Or whether these changes are decoupled from economic
logic, because it is precisely the inner logic of the system's self-decomposition that causes the automatisms to disappear and creates the need for political and consciously controlling external intervention. In this case, the real changes in society would be necessary but spontaneously formulated. For example, in order to prevent the enormous amount of money without value from disappearing into thin air in a corrective crisis - and with it a difficult-to-estimate number of institutions that stabilize social relations - we could agree to give up a certain freedom of economic activity that created both a certain social subject and regular crises. Guiding ideas of freedom, equality and individuality could be abandoned in favor of a social system with fixed hierarchical relationships, a centrally controlled allocation of values and monitored standards. But we could also decide otherwise.
As a continuation of the first two exhibitions on representation and on the mediating structures between
material and value, "Real Abstraction - The Californian Subject 3" will take up the thesis of a new subject
of capitalism in the form of a new authoritative exchange value and attempt to examine and test common
central concepts in comparative modeling of theories of political economy and artistic works. Artistic
works are understood as semiotic models in which a certain constellation of meaning production, communication and evaluation is explicated, making them comparable with theoretical concepts. In a comparative examination of the concepts, the path dependency of specific disciplines can be avoided and the terms for a common practice can be sharpened.
UN-SdA is a collective with an unfettered practice and a shared authorship founded in 2018.