Published 6 DEC 2024

30 NOV until 8 FEB 2025

When it comes to the question of how to frame a challenging creative position amid the push and pull of history, Alice Creischer is a profound voice of political art in Germany. Her fourth exhibition at KOW is about art and overproduction in the age of climate-disaster capitalism and proposes—hear, hear!—an encouraging deliberation.

More, always more! There is no other way. The machinery of production cannot be shut down. Not even the machinery of art production. For art does not simply drop from the sky like plums from a tree. Art is production. In fact, it is part of the overproduction, the too-much, that humans bring forth in capitalism. Art wears out and overheats the planet, burns too many resources, and so causes scarcity elsewhere. Like many other things that people do today, it acts in disastrous ways. Art, to put it bluntly, is part and parcel of the disasters that are in store for the Earth and for every single one of us, too. Ouch.

What is there to see: poems on the walls and fruit on papers connected to each other by strings. Eye cores in the suit box. Two men on film on a meadow. Reflections and writings, mostly letters, from the past several years that Creischer gathers and confronts with video and painted windfalls. As the beholder traces the threads she has strung through the gallery space and the space of ideas, a subtle, almost nimble discussion unfolds, although, as it turns, its historical weight is near impossible to gauge.

There are writings from Creischer’s correspondence about the “extractivist” exploitation of Latin America, about strikes at the iPhone factory, about absurd accumulations of things in the markets of the world. And there is a dialogue between Creischer and the monster—an important juncture in and highlight of the exhibition. Because the monster is allowed be outspoken about what the discourse does not permit to be said; too crass, too insolent, perhaps too true are the statements that tear the artist’s credibility to shreds. Pointing to the market for her art and its bogus relevance, it beats her round the head with her complicity in the current state of global affairs: You … frothy whitecap of overproduction! (…) And don’t even get me started on your emancipation attitude!

What are artists in the age of the cultural climate overload if not frothy whitecaps of overproduction? The phrase should be enshrined as the gibe of the year.

Yet Alice Creischer and her exhibition do not throw up their hands at this point. The artist meets the monster head-on: what if art were like the plums? Like the fruit that falls from the tree every autumn, too much and too much again, dropping into the grass to the joy of the insects that worm their way into it. Art not as overproduction (from the studios and the cultural mediation industry) but as overabundance! As superfluous even in the perspective of capital. Plum-tree art. Art as part of the planetary metabolism in a global closed-loop economy.

But an art with zero resource footprint, an art that causes no wear and tear, that does not heat the planet and makes the seas recede, would not be of this world. Creischer would be foolish to claim anything else. No, what she does is make explicit the tension with which we have to grapple today and in days to come: between regimes of productivity and machineries of overproduction for which we do not yet know alternatives or a domain beyond—and the surpluses, the overabundances, the superfluities of a practice that, in the final instance, is ecologically integrated, that is even universal in a new sense of the word because it is situated in the whole.

Let art rain down on us like plums!

Alexander Koch

Fiddle-dee-dee, says the monster, the present situation calls for decisions. If you at least lived on the periphery, where not everything is buttered up, where you can’t close your eyes to the empty stomachs bustling through the mountains of garbage, you little foam crown of overproduction! But here you don’t even dare to enter the basement of your own house to say “how d’you do” to the construction workers who sleep there in bunk beds in order to continue building the investment, pouring hundreds of senseless tons of concrete onto steel grids day after day – and waiting for their unpaid wages.