Martin Beck
Strategy Notebook
2015
HD video, 1080x1920 aspect ratio, color
6:59 min
July 23 – September 5, 2021
(Schaufenster am Hofgarten & online)
Martin Beck’s artistic practice is concerned with strategies of communication, mechanisms of display, and exhibition making in all its paratextual forms. Drawing from the fields of architecture, design, and pop culture, his works often explore communication systems and ideologies inscribed in cultural spaces and their artifacts, while negotiating display as a condition for aesthetic perception and image making.
This also pertains to Beck’s 2015 work Strategy Notebook on view here. In the video, cognitively associated verbs appear and fade out against changing backdrops of color. The combinations of words and color fields are suggestive of a relation determined by the artist but are ultimately organized by chance, which allows for the viewer’s unfettered projection of meaning. The words like the work’s title stem from an eponymous 1972 pamphlet by David Straus, a corporate analyst concerned with various forms of problem-solving strategies. The video elaborates on how corporate (visual) language shapes our behavior and communication, and thus also artistic activity.
Installation view: Martin Beck, Strategy Notebook, 2015, as part of Schaufenster, Kunstverein München, 2021. Courtesy the artist and Kunstverein München e.V.; photo: Sebastian Kissel.
Video stills: Martin Beck, Strategy Notebook, 2015. Courtesy Martin Beck and 47 Canal, New York.