SCOTT KING ”Marxist Disco (cancelled)”23 February - 13 April 2008 |
Scott King bites the hand that feeds. He started his professional career as a highly acclaimed graphic designer working as art- and creative-director for the style magazines ID and Sleazenation in the 1990s. He designed the election campaign of the punk-impresario Malcom McLaren, who ran for mayor in London in 2000, as well as numerous record covers for pop-icons like Pet Shop Boys and Morrissey. Already in these commercial projects King operated beyond the common frameworks of the aesthetic service industries and pushed the consumerist rhetorics of advertising to a point of aggressive clarity that made it tip over into a paradoxical form of affirmative self-reflection.
Beside his commercial activities, Scott King always initiated independent projects that used the media, formats and aesthetic vocabularies of mass communication in order to undermine them on a substantial level. King’s cooperation with English historian Matt Worley starting in 1997 under the pseudonym CRASH! is probably the most legendary one. CRASH! dissects the contemporary phenomenon of an ever more powerful public media industry
in the shape of magazines, billboards and posters and subjects it to scathing criticism. With the edition of the magazine „Prada Meinhof“ in the late 1990s, CRASH! targeted – again appropriately packaged in the rhetorics of mass media - the emerging radical chic emptying out the revolutionary gestures of formerly leftist politics. When politics turns into a pose, the pose becomes political.
The idea of a viral aesthetics of the parasitic making use of the organs of its host in order to bring it down with its own means, characterizes Scott King’s artistic work. Following the tradition of situationist image politics and the graphic heritage of punk, King amalgamates the signifiers of our consumer culture in bastardized icons, that celebrate the disease of their own origin. If Karl Marx once remarked that with the rise of capitalist modernity all that is solid melts into thin air, then with Scott King’s “Marxist Disco (cancelled)“it now gets a few degrees hotter.
