Panel Discussion: "From the Aesthetic of Administration"

About

For a new project proposed for Centrum, "From the Aesthetic of Administration", Canadian conceptual artist Joshua Schwebel invited employees of the Berlin arts funding administration, the 'Senatsverwaltung Kultur und Europa', to propose and realize their own artworks. The respondents, Pauline Püschel and Anne Wesolek, have each composed works reflecting on their tasks at the Senat and their relationship to art. The exhibition takes its title from Benjamin Buchloh’s seminal article, in which he claims that the aesthetic identity of the middle class is one of administrating labour and production. The resulting exhibition reverses the roles of administrator and producer, delegating the production of artistic content to those who normally manage the financial structures underpinning the production of art. The project invokes questions of how funding initiatives determine artistic activity, as well as how divisions between artistic production and cultural administration establish the value and even status of what is recognizable as art.