Kunstverein NY

In the context of, On View, Worldwide, for the Month Of…, a project devised by Kunstverein NY, artists are invited to insert an image of their work onto the pages of corporate and drugstore calendars. These artifacts are pasted onto an existing calendar, layering the images by way of montage to decode the office calendar through accumulation rather than deconstruction.

As part of a network of programming throughout the city of Amsterdam on Sunday, Febraury 6th, On View, World Wide, for the Month Of… will be presented alongside new publications from Kunstverein sister organizations in Amsterdam (with Ginger&Piss #2) and Milan (with I’m On Your Side) and followed by a performance by Nils Bech.

The project is a signal that corporate culture is never far away, whether reflected in the museum setting, on the ink and paper used for this publication, or even in the very source material from which some artists’ images are derived; thus pointing to its viral, ubiquitous nature. The commonly evoked opposition between labor and leisure is also put into question within the grid of the calendar days, where artists and writers have intervened by substituting excerpts, quotes and poetic notes for the holiday, national, memorial, and religious residues of a Judeo-Christian legacy that uses a Gregorian calendar with Arab numerals.

These actions respond to the question: How to offer an alternative to the Monday-Friday work week?  Especially within the art world’s post-Fordist work ethic and schedule?  The answer is a compromise in itself.  The designers simply start every day of the month with the corresponding day of the week – a slight acrobatic shift within a consensual structure. This publication, like many Kunstverein NY projects, needs the reader, the user, for its completion.  In this case the viewer completes the work by adding a layer through notation of their own subjectivity, enabling each work to be, “On View Worldwide, for the Month Of…”