“The Visible Hand” Exhibition

CUE Art Foundation

This event has ended.

Drawing on a business history term for management—the visible hand—as a corrective to the invisible forces of the market, this show posits art as a form of managerial practice. After all, artists already live, breathe and work as single-person institutions.

The artists presented in The Visible Hand set aside the too-convenient narrative of art as an oppositional critique of corporate management, and propose art as existing within and alongside institutions rather than outside of them. The works here reflect on the entire process of artistic production, from early socialization to the arts education system to market pressures to systems of distribution, consumption and storage.

Jen Liu’s The Pink Detachment paintings depict a series of large feminine fingers pushing and prodding, across a semi-abstract manufactured landscape. Liu’s exploration of power in the soft, affective form it often takes today draws on the colors and images of meatpacking, ballet, and Foxconn. These figures stand in for forces that are all around us but still too slippery to point to.

Chloë Bass is a conceptual artist co-creating performances, publications, situations, and installations. The Book of Everyday Instruction is an eight-chapter project about one-on-one social interaction, investigating different iterations of “the pair.” Chapter Six: What is shared, what is offered, focuses on the metaphor of blending flavors. The first “course” of this chapter, to imagine intimacy not just between people, but between people and institutions.

Maureen Connor’s Personnel, initiated in 1999, turns exhibitions into opportunities to solve challenges relating to human resources in the cultural institution. Connor’s installations provide privacy, storage, water, or any other needs that surface during her research into the working conditions of art organizations. Documentation of several of her early projects will be on view, as will evidence of an ongoing new work.

BFAMFAPhD is a collective that works at the intersection of art, technology, and political economy. Ten Leaps: A Lexicon for Art Education is a free resource for educators that can be used to analyze and reimagine power relationships in the arts. The text, workbook, and card game are tools that prompt investigations into the whole life of projects—from sourcing, to production, to presentation and archiving. Susan Jahoda, Emilio Martinez Poppe, Caroline Woolard are the core contributors to Ten Leaps.

Interdisciplinary artist, writer and musician Devin Kenny will present a prototype of a platform for streamlined commissioning systems for artwork; his project proposes to disintermediate the gallery from the art collection process, so that collectors can easily commission new works directly from the artist through an easy graphic interface. Kenny’s project for The Visible Hand is produced in collaboration with Kevin Chen, a graphic designer and illustrator living and working in New York City.