Windows#3 : Why do we fail?

SPIKE is pleased to invite you - Windows#3 "Why do we fail? " & The Performance "Selling the Library" by Rainer Ganahl We will be serving drinks at the SYL Bar until midnight. Why do we fail? Trailing the footprints of Walter Benjamin, Mike Kelley, and Allen Ruppersberg “Good artists copy; great artists steal” is a quotation attributed to Picasso. To justify my appropriation I’d like to modify this and say, “Ganahl buys it or fails to buy it.” I was recently able to purchase Allen Ruppersberg’s colorful print “WHY DO WE FAIL?” but failed to purchase one of Mike Kelley's “silken flags” when it was still affordable. I helped install Kelley’s series when I was an art student working for Peter Pakesch in Vienna in the mid-1980s. Neither of these two pieces has lost their appeal for me since I saw them for the first time. I had set up a trade with Alan Ruppersberg some fifteen years ago but his work got lost in the mail so I finally just purchased it at Greene Naftali and used the question “Why do we fail? ” as my email signature. Asked by Spike for a window piece, I proposed a screenshot from my Instagram account #sellingmylibrary. They rejected this proposal and asked me just to use my email signature, laid out a bit like an ASCII graphic. Speaking of traveling ideas, Allen Ruppersberg already adapted an American Pop design scheme for his series “Preview Suite,” to which" Why do we fail? " belongs. I used his existential question – by the way, has anyone asked himself or herself this before? – simply as my e-mail signature, not remotely thinking of it as a blueprint for an artwork to come. For this Spike commission I decided to go with it and feel in relationship to appropriating Allen Ruppersberg’s questions and Mike Kelley’s materiality: “Buy one, get one free.” Instead of printing it on colored paper, I remembered Mike Kelley’s flag works and decided to print "Why do we fail? " – as well as the question "Why do we fail? " – in black and white on silk. At the event where these window works will be presented on August 4th I will still be able to perform Selling my library, a piece that was inspired by Walter Benjamin’s 1931 essay “Unpacking My Library.” After losing my storage space, I was unexpectedly confronted with many boxes of books that contained my library from 1980 to 2000, clogging up my studio space. It didn’t take long before unpacking changed into the more profitable selling. Therefore I decided to offer the books at Amazon market prices as a “post-Internet” social-network performance piece that uses Instagram to connect all the buyers and post portraits of people holding the books and the money they paid for them. In addition, I invite buyers to join me and read from the texts. At Spike I will sell a small selection of books – logistically speaking I could never present them all for sale at once – and offer weekly communal readings to purchasers if they assemble a couple of people who want to read with us. I can do that during my August vacation time here in Berlin upon request. Details about this offer will be communicated during the sale at Spike and can be requested later. If you can’t make it on August 4th, or if you can’t make up your mind at the sale, you can contact me directly during my summer time here in Berlin, or thereafter in New York. Rainer Ganahl

Windows#3

Spike Berlin
10178 Berlin, Rosa-Luxemburg-Straße 45
Tel: +49 30 2838 6464
Email: spike@spikeartmagazine.com
http://spikeartmagazine.com

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