Excerpt from the exhibition's catalogue

2 Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art: Footnotes on Geopolitics, Market, and Amnesia

March 1, 2007 - April 1, 2007

Nicolas Bourriaud

Stock Zero, or the Icy Water of Egotistical Calculation, p. 90

When we learned the title of the 2nd Moscow Biennale, which is composed of a set of huge issues ("geopolitics, market and amnesia") topped by an ironic notion ("footnotes", as if today's art actually was no more than some marginal commentaries on the big book of society), I immediately thought of organising a section in the shape of a landscape. The landscape of the global economy. Even more direct: the landscape of capitalism. Nobody uses this word anymore: it was replaced by one of those numerous euphemisms that we like, like liberalism, that does not fit here. I am more interested in the capital, which is the problematic part of the free market. It had to be a quite cold landscape -- the "icy waters" described by Karl marx. Something like the Lars Von Trier movie "Dogville". Partly theatrical too. Why would it be bad to refer to theatre? Because of Michael Fried's writings in the 60s? Theater might counterbalance the omnipresent frontality of signs that is the visual code of capital. That is why I wanted to problematize the notion of display by showing artworks, which deliberately avoid forms of displaying, or making it so extreme that this notion would dissolve itself.

To sum it up: frontal signs and theatrical play. Artists postproducing logos, brands, products and signs (Nemkova, Paretgàs, Peinadeo, Pflumm, Scurti, Sparks, Wohnseifer), along with artists describing the processes of the capitalist economy (Hernandez, Motti, Rottenberg, Tonguo, Starling, Superflex, Young) or exploring its margins (Bonvincini, Coffin, Gréaud, Mecksepeer, Medeiros)... And also Kendell Geers, whose apocalyptic imagery is nothing but the back side of the glossy fashionable decor we are living within: he proceeds by peeling the surface of capitalism.

Among the issues that this exhibition raises, I would stress dialectics, within the capitalist world, between figuration and abstraction. Traceability is the idea of giving a face to power. How do you paint or film the circulation of economical flux? How is it possible to provide an image of capital?

The artist is a kind of "private eye", as they say in the American novels of the 30s, a kind of enquirer, a detective of the real. The one who will be able to find the genealogy, the archeology, the roots of the everyday life. An attitude that also means identifying the suspects and giving a face to power. The real things that make our everyday lives are for 90% invisible to us today. For example, a worker who is fired from a factory will never see exactly who fired him or her. It could be a retired person in Miami who has invested in a private fund; it usually is. Power has no face, stockholders are a faceless army. And one of the truly important things about capitalism is the delusion of power, its invisibility, which completely annihilates the old methods of contestation. It is not possible anymore to use the forms of protest that were used in the 60s and the 70s. Representation is the new weapon. Most of today's important artists are inquiring on reality in order to produce forms: we are living into the information age. The fact that nothing really has changed in the way people produce artifacts is what characterizes this information age. It is just the fact that information now drives the economy, and mastery of information drives the production system. Many of those artists are collecting data, gathering information, and then producing forms that are literally generated by a mass of information. Today's aesthetics is driven by information.