NUMBER SIX: FLAMING CREATURES

A "love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration," is how writer Susan Sontag described the concept of "camp," which forms the red thread running through this exhibition from the Julia Stoschek Collection.

"Camp" is an exaggerated kind of perception that emerged in the course of aestheticism and dandyism. "Camp" first came into being at the turn of the 20th century and peaked in the 1950s and 1960s.

A key starting point for the exhibition, and one of immense historical importance, is the work of US artist, performer and underground filmmaker Jack Smith (born in 1932, died in 1989); his scandal-sparking film Flaming Creatures (1962/63) is the source of the title of the new presentation.

Jack Smith's oeuvre strongly inspired an entire generation of artists such as Andy Warhol, Robert Wilson, Cindy Sherman, John Waters and Mike Kelley. Without him, "Camp," Punk and Pop-Postmodernism would be inconceivable, as would experimental theater.

Flaming Creatures is a surrogate for something that manifestly materializes as an extreme, excessive and exuberant element in the positions taken by the individual artists. In this context, Jack Smith should be seen not as the source of the idea, but as a key position in a critical enquiry into reality and fiction, identity and gender.

An appropriation of fictitious realities or creaturely processes is common to all the works represented in the show.

NUMBER SIX: FLAMING CREATURES

Künstler: John Bock, Lizzie Fitch, Birgit Hein, Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, Bruce Nauman, Tony Oursler, Paper Rad , Peaches , Aura Rosenberg, Ed Ruscha, Jack Smith, Gwenn Thomas, Ryan Trecartin