Maurin Dietrich

Not Working brings together the contributions by artists, theorists and writers who in their work examine the interdependence of artistic production and social class.

The complex structures and substantial rise in social inequalities, particularly visible in light of the current pandemic, have given the concept of class a wide range of connotations. Despite the ongoing attempts to view contemporary art in the sense of "class homogeneity"; it remains complicit in the reproduction and masking of existing conditions which it often claims to overcome. The texts in this book form a ground were class can be mediated with respect to artistic practices and other structures in the art world.

Published on the occasion of the exhibition Not Working, Artistic production and matters of class at Kunstverein München in 2020.

Contributions by Maurin Dietrich, Melanie Gilligan & Marina Vishmidt, Annette Wehrmann, Stephan Janitzky & Laura Ziegler, Lise Soskolne, Josef Kramhöller, Leander Scholz, Dung Tien Thi Phuong, Steven Warwick, Mahan Moalemi.

The first comprehensive monograph and critical survey of American artist Pippa Garner, Act Like You Know Me surveys fifty years of her radical and transdisciplinary art practice, from the late 1960s to the early 2010s, through ca. 400 photographs, illustration, ephemera, and original writings.

Encompassing Garner's most iconic works, from the Backwards Car to the Half-Suit, alongside never-before-seen photographs and ephemera, Act Like You Know Me serves to introduce a highly-influential, under-recognized artist whose uncompromising approach to life and practice has allowed her to interact with the worlds of illustration, editorial, television, and art without ever becoming beholden to them.

Published on the occasion of Pippa Garner's travelling exhibition at Kunstverein Munich, Kunsthalle Zurich, Frac Lorraine (Metz) and White Columns (NYC).

Born in the suburbs of Chicago in 1942, Pippa Garner (formerly known as Philip Garner) has satirized American-style consumerism for decades, reifying the joys of everyday life and personal liberation along her way. With her prankish sense of humour and conceptual dedication to experimental engineering, she has altered materials of mass production—from Fordism through the pharmacopornographic era—subverting commercial binaries to reveal the transitory nature of material life and her own transpersonal identity.

Edited by Fiona Alison Duncan and Maurin Dietrich.
Texts by Pippa Garner, Shola von Reinhold, Dodie Bellamy, Fiona Alison Duncan.

For more than three decades, Tony Cokes (b. 1956, Richmond, USA; lives and works in Providence, USA) has been exploring in his work the ideology and affect politics of media and popular culture as well as their social impact. Starting from a fundamental critique of the representation and visual commodification of African-American communities in film, television, advertising, and music videos, Cokes has developed a unique form of video essay that radically rejects ­representational imagery. These fast-paced works consist of found text and sound material from diverse sources such as critical theory, online journalism, literature, and­ popular music.

The US artist’s first institutional solo exhibition in Germany also marks the first ­comprehensive collaboration between Kunstverein München and Haus der Kunst. The thematic starting point for Cokes’s new productions is the ideological and propagandistic entanglements of both exhibition venues during the Nazi era as well as their cultural-political role in the context of the 20th Olympic Games in Munich in 1972.

The publication Fragments, or just Moments accompanies the eponymous exhibition and translates stills from the newly produced video essays into a book format while examining the significance of Cokes’s work in terms of a contemporary approach to institutional critique. The essays are written by Tina M. Campt and Tom Holert, with an introduction by Emma Enderby and Elena Setzer (Haus der Kunst) as well as Maurin Dietrich, Gloria Hasnay, and Gina Merz (Kunstverein München).