After the Crisis is Before the Crisis

A solo exhibition by Oliver Ressler curated by Marco Scotini

Galleria Artra, Milan, Italy

http://www.artragallery.com
February 29 – April 15, 2012
Opening: February 28, 06:30 pm

Oliver Ressler has returned to Milan for his third solo show at Galleria Artra, entitled After the Crisis is Before the Crisis. The exhibition, opening on Tuesday, Feb. 28, 2012, is the second stage of a new project that started at Basis in Frankfurt, and is meant to develop as a series of exhibitions. Following a 14-metre wide slide projection with sound featured in his last show, the Vienna based artist is now presenting a series of works realized over the past two years.

Directly engaged as usual with the here and now, Oliver Ressler’s new project focuses on one of today’s most complex and urgent issues: the crisis of financial capitalism. For Ressler, however, the theme is not new.

Indeed, his entire body of work might be seen as a kind of a critical anticipation, if not an actual premise, for the current situation and for the forms and subjects that go with it – not only with regard to his semiotic investigations as an artist, but also due to the political activism performed in his art, by using counter-information and movement’s methods. Ressler’s multidisciplinary approach always leads back to a zone of undecidability lying between aesthetics and politics.

One of his first projects, The Global 500, presented in 1999 in Austria and Canada, was a critical examination of the forms of communication and self-legitimisation employed from the 1980s onwards by prominent firms of a neoliberal economic structure: from McDonalds to the Phillips Petroleum Company, Eastman Kodak and Goodyear. As Georg Schöllhammer wrote at the time: “It is Oliver Ressler’s merit that his work analyses the symbol politics behind the self-presentations of the global players in economic life.”

Whereas The Global 500 was the first episode in a long series, Ressler’s next exhibition project was the large-scale Alternative Economics, Alternative Societies, which focused on defining a possible counter-model to capitalism after the collapse of socialism. And, as Brian Holmes pointed out, Ressler did not confine himself to offering perspectives through recordings of theoretical contributions by Holloway, Dalotel, Burnicki, etc., but also sought a profound answer by personally documenting in the work Venezuela from Below the occupied factories and workers’ cooperatives created under Chávez. Hence it is no coincidence that the project, begun in 2003, preliminarily ended in 2008 with the current banking crisis.

In After the Crisis is Before the Crisis Ressler presents wall texts, photos, videos and installations in which the documentary nature of his research seems to give way increasingly to fiction. An example of this is the recently completed film The Bull Laid Bear, his second collaboration with Australian artist and activist Zanny Begg, which uses animation and soundtrack featuring a reinterpretation of a song by Billie Holiday in order to illustrate not so much the banking crisis, than the image that governments created for it, presenting it as a budget and public debt crisis. Another example is the series of three photographs, We Have a Situation Here, in which heaps of managers, police and soldiers lie on the ground like puppets at the end of a show, the show of the great puppeteer of the market who controlled it from the shadows using Adam Smith’s principle of the invisible hand.

It is undeniable that in this totally reversed situation, in which an economic system is capable of turning the politically impossible into the politically inevitable, one has to show the falseness and fictitiousness as a moment of truth. As Christian Marazzi, an expert on financial capitalism, has explained, we are no longer dealing with the lie of the fetish, whereby merchandise conceals the truth behind the social relations of production. Nowadays, lurking in language, in communication itself, are the social relationships that deceptive action wants to conceal. This is why Ressler not only resorts to fiction, but also to other types of semantic reversal.

In the short film Robbery (2012) Ressler shows young unemployed people illegally looting shops during the days of the London riots in August 2011 and contrasts this with the legal, everyday robbery carried out by governments to rescue the banks. Resist to Exist (2011), a project originally conceived for Copenhagen, documents a symbolic action. It deals with how metal fencing surrounding a storage facility for containers by the Danish Maersk Group could be reappropriated and restored to domestic and social use. The huge wall textToo Big To Fail (2011) is another act of reappropriation. The text, a common expression of our times for avoiding the collapse of banks and financial capitalism, has another meaning hidden inside its lettering. Close up you notice that the letters are pasted on top of a black and white photo of the great mass demonstration of 28 March 2009. There is no doubt that the 99% of the population now in debt and dispossessed can turn into a real opposition force.

---