 | John Knight (USA)
Lange Tage der Freizeit
(Long days of leisure)
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Lange Tage der Freizeit, 2010
(Long days of leisure)
A work in situ 46 flagpoles
Herrengasse
Cultural production is a form of work that above all concerns the leisure of those who visit the numerous exhibitions, performance, concerts, etc. These events, as they are commonly called today, have meanwhile become an integral part of the aesthetic formation of advertising in public space. This advertising, in turn, is indebted to an economy of attention in which organizers of cultural events are also increasingly involved as a result of the (politico-cultural) pressure to prove “success.”
John Knight makes use of one of the modes of advertising of steirischer herbst to explore this question of converting work, leisure, economy and aesthetics. In Herrengasse in Graz, a section of the flagpoles used for advertising and managed by the local council is presented without the usual banners for the duration of the festival.
This intervention as reduction thus engages in the public conversion of attention into capital (be it as visitor income or as a better opportunity for increasing public funding – with the latter increasingly turning out to be wishful thinking). John Knight raises the question as to the relationship between cultural production and the public sphere with regard to an economy of attention of advertising and commercialization, whose mechanisms are increasingly being transported into the field of cultural production. By focusing on the question of promoting a cultural institution such as steirischer herbst, John Knight uses a subtle intervention – removing advertising space – to initiate a debate on the role of the relationship of cultural work, its funding, and its exploitation as a leisure industry (as a representational medium for politics?).
To what extent do “we,” in turn, “exploit” this cultural work in order to define ourselves as social individuals by means of cultural consumption? To what extent are we operating in a loop that is, among other things, political? What, then, is the link between cultural production and identity politics, cultural production and work, cultural production and consumption, cultural production and politics? What does this tell us about our conceptions of work, consumption, culture and politics?
Commissioned by steirischer herbst
In co-operation with the Center for Social Research at the Karl-Franzens University Graz & Institute for Contemporary Art (IZK) of Graz University of Technology
With thanks to Hans Kupelwieser
Project supporter Land Steiermark
Project sponsor Think!, Gebrüder Weiss & Alpenländische Schilderfabrik
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