Scott King, How I’d Sink American Vogue, 2006, 12 Digitaldrucke/12 digital prints, 27,5 x 20,5 cm, Detail.
Scott King, Karl Marx as Roy Wood, 2008, Gipsbüste, Make-up und Farbe, Plasterbust, make-up, paint. |
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Kunstverein München
Galeriestraße 4
München
+ 49-(0)89-221 152
Scott King,
Marxist Disco (cancelled)
February23-April 13, 2008
Scott King proverbially bites the hand that feeds him. He started his professional career as a highly acclaimed graphic designer and worked as an art and creative director for style magazines like ID and Sleazenation in the 1990s. He designed the election campaign of the punk-impresario Malcom McLaren, who ran for mayor in London, a well as numerous LP covers for pop-icons like the Pet Shop Boys, Suicide, and Morrissey. Already in these commercial projects King’s way of working beyond the usual frames of the aesthetic service industries became evident and brought the consumerist rhetoric of commercials to a point of aggressive clarity which reversed it into a paradoxical form of affirmative self-reflection.
Beside his commercial activities Scott King repeatedly initiated independent projects that undermined mass communication on a substantive level by using its formats, types of media and aesthetic vocabulary. King’s cooperation with the English historian Matt Worley on the project called CRASH! since 1997 might be the single most legendary one of them. CRASH! dissects the contemporary phenomenon of an ever increasingly potent public media industry and showers it with scathing criticism in magazines, billboards and posters. With the edition of the magazine Prada Meinhof in the late 1990s CRASH! encapsulated — again appropriately presented for a mass media context — the upcoming chic of fashionably empty revolutionary gestures of former leftist politics. When politics turns into a pose, then the pose becomes political.
The idea of a viral aesthetic of the parasitic, which makes use of the organs of its host in order to bring it down through their own means, also characterizes King’s artistic work. Following the tradition of situationist politics of the image and the graphical punk heritage, he amalgamates publicly circulating signs of our consumerist culture in bastardized icons, celebrating the disease of their own origin. Just like the godfather of the political left once noticed that with the rise of capitalist modernity everything solid melts into thin air, it only gets a few degrees hotter with Scott King’s Marxist Disco (cancelled).
With Marxist Disco (cancelled) Kunstverein München presents King’s first institutional solo show. The artist, who was born in Northern England in 1969, has in recent years participated in numerous international group exhibitions such as Multiplex, Museum of Modern Art, New York, (2007); Moscow Biennial, (2007); Defamation of Character, PS1, New York (2006); Regarding Terror, Kunstwerke, Berlin (2004); Bridge Freezes Before Road, Barbara Gladstone, New York (2005); and CRASH! Corporatism and Complicity (with Matt Worley), ICA, London (1999). |
