EVILSON, Lewin Street, Woodstock, Cape Town, 7926.
The exhibition Bootleg brings together shameless bootlegs of works by artists including Steve McQueen, Bruce Nauman, Braco Dimitrijevic and Fischli & Weiss with cleverly disguised original pieces by various South African artists. Bootleg is about acts of citation and appropriation in contemporary art practice, as well as the decentralising of production in the global economy. The influence of product manufacture on cultural legacy is increasingly clear in the redistribution of the production of specifically ‘cultural’ objects, such as books, texts and films to Asia’s cheap labor markets. The coincidence of this phenomenon with the ready availability of ‘bootlegged’ or ‘pirated’ cultural products around the world, but particularly in emerging economies, casts an equivocal light on the higher value ascribed to ‘original’ products than to their illegitimate copies.
The wide dissemination of images of artworks on the internet both affirms and undermines the special status of the original, ‘actual’ work. Though the idea of the uniqueness of the artwork may be essential to the market, Bootleg suggests that it could be detrimental to critical progress. Conceptual, performance-based and other intangibly articulated artworks only complicate this conundrum. Contemporary art and other authored cultural products are caught in this contradictory position. This exhibition creates an environment for considering the singularity of artworks and their accessibility in a global context.
With works by the following artists:
Fischli & Weiss
Barend de Wet
Braco Dimitrijevic
Bruce Nauman
Cameron Platter
Charles Dreyfus
Christian Nerf
Dan Halter
Ed Young
Francis Burger
Gregg Smith
Henri Matisse
Igor and Svetlana Kopystiansky
James Webb
Jared Ginsburg
Josh Ginsburg
Kyle Morland
Konig, Sven & Bitnik, !Mediangruppe
Nam June Paik
Oskar Fischinger
Paul McCarthy
Ragnar Kjartansson
Richard Serra
Seth Price
Steve McQueen
Info about EVILSON: EVILSON is a new artist-run project space in Cape Town, South Africa. It was founded in 2012 by blank projects and the Contemporary Art Development Trust, an organization committed to enabling contemporary art and curatorial practice in Southern Africa.
