Bad Beuys Entertainment 'Spectrum City was the Name'

About

Bad Beuys Entertainment is:
A political party.
A rock 'n' roll band.
A ham-fisted team.
A Zulu's mob.
A company producing works of art.
French collective Bad Beuys Entertainment was founded in 1999, at Cergy-Pontoise, in the Parisian suburbs. The artistic programme of the group can be seen through the play on words in their title. Joseph Beuys was an influential 20th century German artist who had an original artistic program that he coined 'social sculpture', that is, he considered social conventions as material for creation, to model and transform by his actions and statements. Bad Boys Entertainment is the name of the major American rap label fronted by Sean 'Puffy' Combs, whose worldwide distribution is generated by subcultures.

BBE is defined in the crossover of these two antagonistic attitudes, a major company from the show-business industry and an artist intent that social reform begins with cultural production. Stemming from the 'culture of suburbs', the members of this group produce objects and 'repetitions' extracted from urban life. These works, with their basic and minimalist aspects, are feedbacks of perceptions conceived as singular forms, for the audience to have a physical, sensitive relation to them.

Building a constructed reality of scaled models illuminated in halogen and UV lights to relay the urban feeling in the gallery context, they take an ironic sentiment on the society of the spectacle.

Employing a DIY approach they stand counter to the political and economical logic that underpins division of labour. Their technique prefers the hand made and low-fi, breaking away from the systematic subcontracting used by some artists. To quote Thomas Hirschhorn: "Energy yes, quality no". Even if contemporary art can exist emancipated from the self made, one of BBE's main objectives is to re-appropriate realness in a rough and ready sample.