Finissage and Artist Talk: 25 October 2024
6:00-8:00pm
Addie Wagenknecht in conversation with Michael Connor, Rhizome
As the upcoming U.S. election approaches, Addie Wagenknecht revisits her work Believe me originally commissioned for the Whitney Museum of American Art's Artport in 2017. In this site-specific installation part smart contract work, Addie Wagenknecht transforms the gallery with campaign posters. Updated throughout the exhibition, the performative durational work reflects the current social and political climate, becoming a living commentary that evolves with the work. Installed and removed by artists in a performative act, the work blurs the lines between performance, labor, and art's role in media.
This new durational work builds on her previous piece, Believe Me, with the title itself that carries weight. Jennifer Sclafani, an associate professor of linguistics at Georgetown University, identified "Believe me" as Trump's most-used phrase during his previous campaign. Sclafani's analysis, featured in a popular Scientific American piece, highlights how language shapes political persona. Wagenknecht's updated version focuses on reimagining American culture, including the national flag, echoing Jasper Johns' "Three Flags" (1958). She's been exploring the flag as a symbol of the American Dream and its failed promises for a decade. As the artist puts it, "like a cracked screen, we often view the world through it for ages before trying to fix it." The failed or failing pixels change the colors, spaces, and meanings of the project's imagery, which ranges from politically charged scenes to the vernacular of the online environment, familiar interface elements and Internet folklore. It questions how we perceive reality through our screens in an era of fake news and "post-truth."
The original work referenced cracked screens as a metaphor for digital distortions in our understanding of the world. In this installation, the physical act of wheatpasting parallels the digital cracks, emphasizing the labor and temporality involved in both the creation, perception and dissemination of the art as the posters are torn down and replaced.
In addition to the site specific installation, Wagenknecht links the work to a time-locked system tied to the November 5th election results, employing smart-contract as a medium. It uses [aside], a protocol that temporarily freezes tokenized assets on the Ethereum blockchain. This makes NFTs non-transferable. By taking NFTs out of the market temporarily, this challenges the view of what can be considered an asset and why. Wagenknecht uses [aside] to comment on how politics are lobbied by and funded for, and by whom.
Opening: 27 September 2024
6:30-8:30pm
