Stephan dillemuth biography samples
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References ranged from John Maynard Keynes’ interpretation of ‘animal spirits’ – a theory which asserts that our positive activities (analogous to contemporary art, capitalism and risk-taking) are formed by a spontaneous urge to action rather than any firm logical or mathematical expectations, whether moral, hedonistic or economic – together with comments on hedge funds, diversification and the economy of art’s ‘dinner party aspect’.
Inside, the darkened cavern looked like a temporary squat, with three bed bases providing seating.
Yes, see you in Basel … blah, blah, blah …’.
This relationship between consumer and art-world insider is rendered vacuous by Dillemuth and Norman, and through the whispered soundtrack of their DVD’s narrative it comments on the mystery of art’s functions and values in a wry way. Dillemuth’s art has gained currency for showing how notions of an ‘artistic life’ have wandered out of and in to capitalism’s control and valuation structures, and how the ‘creative lifestyle’ has been co-opted by mainstreaming mechanisms – an adoption for which art is still partly culpable.
‘Retrospective’ is one such term under investigation, and ‘Sound and Smoke: A Revue in Pictures’ pairs recent, occasionally gimmicky works of animatronics, sculptural bodily figuration and installation with mirror and plexi works from the 1980s.
Despite many arguments to the contrary, it’s not impossible to resist the increasingly overwhelming pressures from every angle to succeed on a commercial level.
Stephan Dillemuth
Since the 1980s, Stephan Dillemuth has investigated the terms under which ‘artists’ exist, do, and do nothing in society. As in capitalism, the artist is turned into an orchestrator of his own dispossession, zombification and exploitation.
Here they allude to the contradictory nature of bohemian artistic lives: a courtly class apart from society, but beholden to the forms of power that sustain them.
What of the old bohemians? ‘Making it public’, here, is tantamount to seeing it go up in smoke.
Looming silently, sphinx-like, in the main hall, are two oversized, black-and-white clocks displaying times between 3:30 and 4:30 (Viel Spaß mit Zeit, Have Fun with Time, 2017) – according to Dillemuth’s artist friends, the most boring hour of their day.
Despite a history of working collaboratively and prioritizing artistic research, at the Künstlerhaus Dillemuth exposes himself as a solo artist, reconstructing the history of his work from the margins of group life that has taken shape in the midst of it. It’s a self-portrait of the artist as an orchestrator of his own automaticity – out of joint and out of shape, curiously observing his lost, or wasted, time.
The value of this show lies in such friction: bohemia’s proximity to institutions of power, and uneasy retrospection at an ‘alternative life’.
Whether this was intentional is debatable, and I get the impression that both artists are more likely to have wanted to point directly towards the pitfalls and irrationality of Romantic aestheticism through a straightforward parody of its various stylistic traits.
In contrast to the elusive veneer of the artists’ installation, Dillemuth and Norman’s curatorial project, also titled ‘F.A.
One of these, an obvious caricature of an art collector, utters to a dealer in a measured monotone ‘blah, blah, blah … OK, great, I love it … I’ll buy it. So it makes sense that, in the next room, the 45-part gallery of ‘Schönheiten’ (Beauties, 1985) are painted after King Ludwig I of Bavaria’s ‘gallery of beauties’ in Munich’s Nymphenburg Palace.
His gallery turns against the idea of external beauty and how it is represented in art. Sie erforscht die Probleme des Alltags, Probleme, welche die Forschenden wirklich betreffen. This was accompanied by a group exhibition that the pair had organized based on the late dealer Colin De Land’s seminal New York gallery; American Fine Arts Co. Ltd., which was active between 1988 and 2004 and where both Norman and Dillemuth had exhibited work.
The first thing that struck me was the unusual nature of the gallery’s entry intercom system.
On a stage-like platform, mechanical sculptures rotate on hand-built, rudimentary robotics; on a gridded, mirrored floor, desiccated deer limbs and cow ears are bound with white cog sculptures (Critters&Creatures, 2016-17). Resultat dieser Experimente sind Installationen, Inszenierungen und kollaborative Arbeiten, ebenso wie Videos, Vorträge und Publikationen.
Ein wesentlicher Ausgangspunkt für Dillemuths Überlegungen ist die Idee bohemistischer Forschung: „Damit meine ich eine außerinstitutionelle Forschung und die freie Assoziation der Forschenden.
Dillemuth and Norman’s DVD I’m Short, Your House (2007) kicked things off by telling us that the nature of ‘bohemianism’ has been irreversibly changed by the market’s complete control over artistic expression. The paintings, like the faces, develop a life of their own through the process of painting, which makes it possible to see a new kind of “beauty.” Works that Dillemuth produced in the late 1980s in Chicago, exhibited for the first time, resemble disco decorations, and glitter in the light of a video projection.
Later we see various characters talking on the phone. In Schönheitsgalerie (1985), featuring over fifty works, Dillemuth explores questions of representation. and Daniel MacDonald all gave practical accounts of the reality of life for artists in New York. A spinning goat sculpture incorporates live CCTV footage of both space and viewer (Ziegenkarusell, Goat Carousel, 2012–2017), rendering the retrospective convention of the ‘survey’ into a form of self-surveillance.
Of those artists included, Art Club 2000, G.R.E.A.D.