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European exhibits showcase work of UB experimental artist Steve Kurtz
Installation by Steve Kurtz consists of a vertical bar graph the height of a crane, which depicts global wealth disparity.
Steve Kurtz, UB professor of visual studies and a social critic known for his work in bio art and electronic disobedience, has had a busy summer in Europe, where he has been involved in three high-visibility projects.
Most notable is “A Public Misery Message: A Temporary Monument to Global Economic Inequality,” an installation for the exhibition Documenta 13 in Kassel, Germany, a cultural event of world standing.
Documenta, which runs this year from June 9 through Sept. 16, is presented every five years in an effort to offer a snapshot of the global state of contemporary art. It features 100 international artists for whom inclusion is a major distinction.
Kurtz’s work for Documenta 13 and his other exhibitions feature the Critical Art Ensemble (CAE), which he co-founded 25 years ago. This collective of five tactical media practitioners from across the U.S.—and with various specializations—famously operates at the intersections of art, technology, radical politics and critical theory.
“A Public Misery Message” consists of a vertical bar graph the height of a crane that depicts global-wealth disparity. It represents the economic wealth of the world population in quintiles—as fifths of the whole—with each .39 inch representing $100 in U.S. currency. The top 1 percent owns more than 15 times more wealth than that of the rest of the world combined—an amount so great that, if depicted graphically, would require the graph to be 738 feet tall. So the CAE employs a helicopter that rises 738 feet into the air, a point at which it represents, hyperbolically, the top 1 percent of us.
On June 9, the opening day of the exhibition, a red carpet stretched along the grass of Kassel’s Orangerie and the first 50 people who could afford to buy tickets for the helicopter flight lined up. The other 99 percent could a purchase a lottery ticket in any currency for a chance to win a ride.
From Sept. 20 to Oct. 21, Kurtz and the CAE will present “New Alliance” as part of a yearlong, eco-art project with Parco Arte Vivente (PAV) Center for Contemporary Art in Turin, Italy. It will address the question, raised in workshops held by the CAE in November at the PAV, of whether plants and men can be allies. The group will present in-house research and the methodology developed in the field during the production process.
“Seized,” a June 13-29 exhibition at the Aksioma Contemporary Art Institute in Ljubljana, Slovenia, is the work of the CAE and the Institute for Applied Autonomy, a group of anonymous artists known for employing technology in protest.
The complex installations in the exhibition grew out of Kurtz’s infamous 2004 arrest and the FBI seizure of his art materials, books and archives, as well as his wife’s corpse. These were used as evidence to support allegations of bioterrorism against him.
After the raid, CAE artists confiscated pizza boxes, Gatorade bottles, hazmat suits, biological sample bags, written notes and a single cigar butt—all left behind at Kurtz’s home by FBI agents as they collected the evidence ultimately presented against him. This material was presented in the installation at Askioma, along with critical text. The artists called it “a subversive strategy of counter-appropriation” and a window into the anatomy of this infamous “bio-terror” investigation as it was opening up. In 2008, Kurtz was vindicated when a U.S. district court judge dismissed the case, declaring the indictment “insufficient on its face.”
The exhibition also included a screening of “Strange Culture,” Lynn Hershman Leeson’s award-winning film about the Kurtz ordeal.
In addition, the exhibition featured the installation “True Crime.” Grounded in the assumption that everyone occasionally breaks the law, even if only in small ways, Kurtz et al. invited the public to send in painted, drawn, photographed, scanned or output images of illegal objects, an object obtained illegally or any illegal act in which the individual was specifically connected. The stated purpose of this effort—and subsequent exhibition of the images—was “to make visible this secret structure of everyday life and in some cases, to even celebrate moments of resistance to authority.”
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