In Vienna, THE BIG FLAT NOW Enters the White Cube

THE BIG FLAT NOW opened at Galerie Crone in Vienna last month as a part of the annual “curated by” gallery festival, which this year explored the theme of “Circulation” through 22 exhibitions in various locations around the city. Curated by Joerg Koch, THE BIG FLAT NOW approaches circulation through the lens of our 032c Issue #34 cover dossier, a guide to the flattened creative landscape of the present day. Scroll on for the full exhibition statement and installation images, featuring work by Rosemarie Trockel, Jonathan Castro, Eli Russell Linnetz, Thomas Lohr, Mike Meiré, and Sterling Ruby.

On view through October 19, 2019.

We regret to inform you that there is no future. Nor is there a past. Music, art, technology, pop culture, and fashion have evaporated as well. There is only one thing left: THE BIG FLAT NOW caused and driven by circulation.

THE BIG FLAT NOW is the infinite plane on which our culture operates today. Its frictionless surface is composed of the obsolete hierarchies that have been melted by the internet. Its shallowness belies a seamless texture that allows for the rapid collision of ideas. In a fiberoptic landscape, the difference between next door and next continent is a matter of imperceptible nanoseconds. Northern Baroque paintings, Triassic fossils, and yesterday’s op-eds are tabs on the same browser. Raised by a global chorus of voices, our identities are voluntary, malleable, and unprescribed. We are everywhere, anytime, and everyone at once.

In THE BIG FLAT NOW, gesture, friendship, and amateurism have replaced jargon, messaging, and expertise. Product design has become a form of DJing, and vice versa. Contemporary art and luxury fashion have come to operate through the same logic, sharing practitioners who glide freely between each field. Film, music, fashion, visual art, and the marketing machines that support them have been compressed into a unified thing called “content.”

At the power core of this ecosystem is circulation, which creates the feedback that serves as an endlessly renewable energy source. If in order to unlock the total potential of a networked society, new languages and strategies for cultural production must be formed, this includes a revisioning of how we circulate – our ideas and their material products, our knowledge and our fictions, our data and our codes, our capital and our bodies. Circulation is the dynamic and the fuel of content in the present day. Like the proverbial tree in the forest, it may even be the condition of our creative and cultural existence.

The exhibition features artistic theses on this new paradigm.