For ‘The Marx Lounge’ by Alfredo Jaar, the Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam has been transformed into a reading room with comfortable sofas, reading lamps and a large reading table. The reading table offers a myriad of publications with topics spanning Marxist theory, capitalism, neo-liberalism, post-colonialism, globalization, cultural theory, politics and philosophy. ‘The Marx Lounge’ is a direct response to the financial crisis and to the fundamental questioning of the capitalist system it has elicited. Read more…
Jaar: “I believe an intellectual revolution has been going on for the past 20 or 30 years, but I also see an extraordinary gap between this intellectual revolution and the real world… Is this gap a symptom of the difficulty of apprehending this new knowledge, or is it in the interests of the status quo to keep it the way it is? Besides hundreds of books by and about Marx, you will find political theorists and philosophers like Zizek, Hall, Rancière, Butler, Laclau, Mouffe, Jameson, Bourdieu, Fanon etc. For me these writings offer us models of thinking the world. And that is what I try do as an artist – I create models of thinking. I view ‘The Marx Lounge’ as a space of resistance, or as David Harvey would call it, a space of hope”. (Art Monthly, January 2011).