Scott King
Marxist Disco (Cancelled)
February 23 – April 13, 2008
Scott King bites the hand that feeds him. He started his professional career as a highly acclaimed graphic designer and worked 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, a well as numerous record covers for pop-icons like Pet Shop Boys and Morrissey. Already in these commercial projects King’s way of working beyond the usual frames of the aesthetic service industries became evident and brought the consumerist rhetorics of advertising to a point of aggressive clarity which made it flip it into a paradoxical form of affirmative self-reflection.
Beside his commercial activities, Scott King initiated independent projects that used the formats, media and formal vocabularies of mass communication undermining 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 and showers it with scathing criticism in magazines, billboards and posters. With the edition of the magazine „Prada Meinhof“ in the late 1990s, “CRASH!” encapsulated – again appropriately packaged in the rhetorics of mass media - the emerging
radical chic emptying out the revolutionary gestures of former leftist politics. When politics turns into a pose, the pose becomes political.
The idea of a viral aesthetics of the parasitic, which makes use of the organs of its host in order to bring it down with its own means, characterizes King’s artistic work. Following the tradition of situationist image politics and the graphic heritage of punk, he amalgamates the signs 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 it now gets merely a few degrees hotter with Scott King’s “Marxist Disco (cancelled)“.
Scott King, born 1969 in Northern England, has participated in numerous international group exhibitions in the last few years, such as Multiplex, Museum of Modern Art, New York, (2007); Moscow Biennial, (2007); Defamation of Character, PS1, New York (2006); Regarding Terror, Kunstwerke, Berlin (2004); Bridge Freezes Before Road, Barbara Gladstone, New York (2005); CRASH! Corporatism and Complicity (with Matt Worley), ICA, London (1999).