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KARL MARX dressing UP  - White Columns , New York 2014

 

(the hammer and sickel is used througout my production as if a logo. It is the most dominant symbol used indicate communism. They were labor tools of the working classes and the peasnatry, united here in this overlapping. The star is a symbol nearly any believe system claims or uses in some form - including communists. I am not a communist but i believe in the power for hope, justice, and change brought by people who are not happy with the status quo. I have seen communsim wiht my own eys adn would not want it. But I love the writings of Karl Marx, Lenin and Mao am convinved we can learn a lot from it. I am fascinated by the discrepancy between the potetial for social and legal justice, equality and peace and what we really get. I am interested in these obscene contradictions and cyncial arrangement our worlld is based on and am driven like a revoutionary to study it, to point out to it and to finally make art with it. I am myself full of these contradictions and cannot resolve them in my daily life but I am working on i t.

The hammer and sickle use originated with the Russian revolution and has nothing to do with Marx thought Marxism is inherent to the Russian Revolution - hence the two are commonly conflated and mixed up. I continue this street usage and know that today's exploited and short changed people would better be symbolized by electronic cables around their necks. This adopted naivness and partial inadequateness mirrors partially the strategies of today's world of buisness and it's employment and fight over logos and symbols. In fact this work is actually centered around the legacy of historical and symbolic fights.

In this context I want to point out that the hammer & sickle symbol was so strong that the fascists developped their own response which is today forbidden in Germany. Likewise, hammer & sickle are outlawed in Hungary and other Eastern European countries though it is still part of the official insigna - flag etc. -  of China, today's second largest capitalist driven economy. (Hungery just recently passed that law but is itself accused for neo-fascist politics that threaten all contracts with Europe. It belongs to those places where anti-Semitism is flagrant and the life for  Roma and Sinti is hard and dangerous). The former ex-Soviet members of the EU block proposed a European wide ban of this symbol for which was denied. I still meet people who become overtly emotional about my usage including a family member o Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. (A debate with her on this point will follow): People who want to legally ban hammer & sickle see in it only a totalitarian and repressive ideology whereas others see in it a symbol for hope, justice, equality and positive change in a world that is the opposite.

I myself opt to mix it up for all kind of agendas including internet privacy concerns which translates into BIG BROTHER - the 1950s way of pointing out to that problem of hte century old control of information and privacy.