TVDC™ : PROPERTY PORN by Halvor Rønning and Martyn Reynolds

TVDC™ and Holodeck present: PROPERTY PORN by Halvor Rønning and Martyn Reynolds

Opening September 2nd 2011, at 7pm

Open: Saturday 3rd and Sunday 4th, 12:00 – 16:00

Modernist criticism in the 1960s brought a surplus of moral commitment that was the relic of an earlier dream of art as the focus on an ideal public sphere; a total gesamtkunstwerk encompassing both citizen and city – the avant-gardian idea of a liberated subject in a collective. Beware of what you wish, runs one moral of modernism as seen from the present, because it might come true – in perverse form.

Today you don’t have to be filthy rich to be cast as designer and as designed – whether the product in question is your home or your business, your sagging face (designer surgery) or your lagging personality (designer drugs), your historical memory (designer museums) or your DNA future (designer children). This designed subject is the offspring of the constructed subject so vaunted in the post-modern culture of the 90’s.

Grünerløkka has recently been transformed into such a Kreuzberg-Epcot Center dream for lifestyle junkies and retro nostalgists. In this silicon city scape where use-value is replaced by art-value, individuality is expressed in every nail and the dialectic of reification and reanimation continues with greater intensity than before. On the one hand, as a digital reordering transforms artifacts into information, it seems to fragment the object and to dissolve its aura absolutely, leaving object autonomy in flux. On the other hand, any dissolution of aura only increases our demand for it, or fabrication of it, in a compensatory projection that is now very familiar. Digital reproduction enables aura to be located and constructed as a searchable entity in a third site beyond site/non-site.

You could say autonomy is a bad word, but it’s not always a bad strategy: call it strategic autonomy, an agent for aura production.

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Tanga Volante Designers Club (TVDC™) was founded in 2011 to demystify artistic intentions and motives, and to promote both conscious and involuntary performativity through curated projects and events. Recent projects include ACICS – pure affect by Rønning/ Reynolds at MFAPS, Oslo and RETRORESPECTION by Ragna Bley at Semikolon Gallery, Oslo.

Halvor Rønning (1984) is a Norwegian artist based in Oslo. He graduated with a BFA from Oslo Academy of Fine Arts and Akademie der Bildenden Künste Wien in 2011. Recent projects were shown at MFAPS (Oslo), Former Bell Street (Vienna), Cervantes Institute (Belgrade) and The Linneanum (Uppsala).

Martyn Reynolds (1981) is a New Zealand artist based in Vienna. He graduated with a BFA from Elam School of Fine Arts in 2005. Recent projects were shown at MFAPS (Oslo), Former Bell Street (Vienna), Sue Crockford Gallery (Auckland) and The Physics Room (Christchurch). He is a founding member of Auckland artist-run space A Center for Art (ACFA).

tanga.volante@gmail.com