Notes by Alun Rowlands

1
Supposedly, when the Baader-Meinhof Gang started hot-wiring BMW 2002s, the BMW acronym became known as the Baader-Meinhof Wagen. Sales for the cars exploded. Eventually, the gang became so widely known for their 2002 hijacks, that they had to move on to different car makes. Records show that the company was faltering through the late 1960’s as their cars were considered sober and demure. BMW refused to acknowledge any connection between the Baader-Meinhoff Wagen tag and the companies new cachet.

2
‘Our youth is turning on us!’- In the summer of 1971, German authorities printed millions of these wanted posters. With an almost equal number of women as men, the Baader-Meinhoff Gang was intimidating the patriarchal fortitude of the German state.

3
These European Revolutionaries felt that the people were slumbering in the temporary comforts of a crippling Capitalist society and needed to be awakened. Attacking the state and its super-structure provoked a response that revealed the state’s true nature to the people.

4
This collective ‘mutating bureaucracy’ allows the Szuper Gallery to explore whether new institutions from outside can be grafted onto the contemporary art world. Conflating the production and reception of art the Szuper Gallery maneuvers at boardroom level through various institutions such as Bloomberg Television, Christies and the Stock Exchange. Intricate activism highlights the thorny relationship between the cultural worker and culture broker. The weaving in and out of complicity with the corporate financiers through mobile tactics is integral part of the Szuper Gallery. These itinerant positions of ‘self –institutionalization’ are more than mere appropriation and subversive play. Just as the plans for the proposed nomadic Szuper Gallery indicate, the language, structure and elasticity of intent do not allow the crystallization of a self-sustainable institution By piggy backing existing institutions this fluid approach reaches different constituencies of people.

5
‘Nomadology’, Deleuze and Guattari translated Brian Massumi. Published Semiotext(e) (1986) p.148

6
Harry Graf Kessler also pursued mobile strategies of display, exhibition and mediation. He was a junction maker between artists, writers and architects. From time to time he would organize exhibitions to put the art of his salons into a larger social and political context.

7
‘Rainer Werner Fassbinder: Die Anarchie der Phantasie’ edited Michael Totenberg (1986) p.46

8
‘Die Dritte Generation’ (1979), in which a computer sales man finances a group of terrorists. Fassbinder's own opinions about terrorism were ambivalent - he showed understanding to their political goals but criticized their desperate acts.

9
‘Broodthaers. Writings, Interviews, Photographs.’ Edited Benjamin H.D. Buchloh (1988) p.137

10
‘Josef Albers: Glass, Light, and Color’. Philip Rylands. Guggenheim 1994. cloth, small quarto, 152pp. Monographs.

11
See the German economic magazine ‘Capital’. They publish an annual list of the hundred artists who have been exhibited and written about the most, thereby supposedly giving a guide for sound investment. The original defining equation- that tallied column inches with money made- was continued from Willi Bongard who published the lists in his ‘Art Aktuell’ between 1971 until his death in 1985.

12
I'm thinking here of Marcel Broodthaer’s fictional museum operating from within the confines of his apartment. Although different in intention to the Szuper Gallery his Musee d'Art Siecle also fractured any self-evident taxonomy and hierarchy. Broodthaers fictional museum decamped and moved 40 miles to an alternative space in Antwerp (transporting its guests by bus) within 24 hours. As a model the fictional museum sidles up alongside informal, evolving and temporal activities offering them a new platform. The exhibition as form of public relations materialized in constantly revised forms. Both the Szuper Gallery and Broodthaers focus on the artwork’s institutional framing conditions. The pretense of the art opening, letter of announcement, ‘buffet froid’ and inaugural address are replicated in the current climate. The Szuper Gallery’s specifications for the proposed ‘gallery residency’ suggests a space where culture and capital co-exist. The burgeoning collection ‘Contemporary Art I/II’ is an active archive seamlessly presented - equal care and attention is paid the gestures, typography and considered costumes that surround the collection. The gallery as site for corporate play speaks of the intention to cultivate client contacts and engender a completely different set of narratives. This fictional approach, perhaps, avoids the absorption of the traditional institutional critique with its ambiguous request for a secret door. Is this the escape route from an all too familiar discourse?

13
I recall the advice from the financial shark George Soros, who warned us that with the Cold War being over, capitalism could detach from its political justification, democracy, and in the name of expeditious pragmatism, could assume an authoritarian validation.

14
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15
‘Borrowing stolen works of art is now a criminal offence’ David D’Arcy, The Art Newspaper, No. 105, (July-August 2000). New York Governor Pataki signed the lawgiving prosecutors in New York State authority to bring criminal charges against institutions that borrow stolen works of art. New York’s non-profit institutions that had been exempted by the 1968 law opposed the move. The introduction of the new law follows the subpoena in January 1998 of two pictures by Egon Schiele on loan to the Museum of Modern Art from the Rudolph Leopold Foundation in Vienna on the
suspicion that they had been looted from a Jewish family in Vienna during the Nazi era.

16
Through most of the seventies, Michael Asher displaced or permuted discrete elements belonging to the exhibition apparatus to question the linear way in which galleries and museums communicate their history to the viewer.

17
See [working title] cat. ‘Interview with Susanne Clausen and Alun Rowlands’ published Stanley Picker Gallery (2000). The exhibition would always remain a ‘possibility’. It could mutate and drift across the rules that govern the demarcation of the model, before disappearing. Perhaps, the gallery/ institution, therefore, becomes just another vector within the imaginary.

Alun Rowlands