Lisbon City Council and Miguel Amado Projects are presenting the exhibition “The Philosophy of Money”, which opens on June 22 at 10 pm at the Pavilhão Branco of the Museu da Cidade in Lisbon. This exhibition brings together works by 28 artists who, in the light of the current financial crisis, examine money as the “God of the modern age”.

Works by Alejandro Vidal, Alfredo Jaar, Carey Young, Carolina Caycedo, Cildo Meireles, Danica Phelps, Henrik Plenge Jakobsen, Joana Bastos, Liam Gillick, Lotte Lindner & Till Steinbrenner, Mads Lynnerup, Mariana Silva, Melanie Gilligan, Michael Elmgreen & Ingar Dragset, Michael Mandiberg, Nika Oblak & Primoz Novak, Raymond Pettibon, Regina José Galindo, Rita GT, Runo Lagomarsino, Ruth Ewan, Sara & André, Sparring Partners, Superflex, Triiibe, Xurban Collective + Alex Villar, Yonamine e Zanny Begg + Oliver Ressler
Curated by Miguel Amado

Museu da Cidade
Campo Grande, 245
1700 Lisboa, Portugal
www.museudacidade.pt

Through September 5
Tuesday to Sunday, 10 am to 1 pm and 2 pm to 6 pm

A walk-through of my show in Portland at PNCA’s Feldman Gallery. More photos here.

Chas Bowie wrote a really tight insightful essay for the show’s mini-catalogue entitled Total Money Makeover. Pacific Northwest College of Art’s UNTITLED magazine has just re-published the essay here. A choice snippet:

Monuments invariably testify to their own physicality as much as they do to the memory of the subjects they commemorate. Mandiberg’s installation of investment guides emblazoned with the logos of fallen banks is no different. The get-rich-quick volumes that comprise FDIC Insured were purchased from the dollar bins of Manhattan’s Strand bookstore, where they served as pitiful markers of their own failure. For every bank that the government bailed out or brokered into sale, Mandiberg laser-cut the fallen institution’s logo on the covers of tomes such as Nothing Down, The Business Bible, and Dress Like a Million. At more than 220 titles and counting, Mandiberg’s library of financial failure is built upon the promise of buying even when you have no money, trading when you have nothing to trade and profiting when you have nothing to provide.

The full essay is here

The Great Recession is an exhibition of new work exploring the psychic implications of this most recent burp by the American economy, late Capitalism, gold hoarding, and the end of an empire. Some of the works on display include FDIC Insured, a collection of 220+ cast off investment guide books laser engraved with the logos of all of the failed FDIC insured banks, Under the Floorboards, a video about hiding and hoarding, and 1 Million Iraqi Dinars secured in a Zero-Halliburton case.

The show opens April 1st at the Feldman Gallery at PNCA, and runs through the end of May. There will be an opening April 1st during First Thursday from 6-8. Location is: PNCA Main Campus Building, Feldman Gallery, 1241 NW Johnson St. RSVP on Facebook.

I will also be giving a lecture the night before, March 31st, from 630-8pm at The Lab at Museum of Contemporary Craft, 724 NW Davis St. RSVP on Facebook. Both events are free and open to the public.

My solo show “The Great Recession” at PNCA in Portland, OR is a little over one month out. The listing just appeared on the PNCA website. Now I just have to finish making the work! The biiiiig work is mostly done, but there are a number of smaller works that have to be made, or finished, or framed-just-so.

BTW, I am from PDX, so this is officially a homecoming…

Exciting!

A short interview video with Michael Mandiberg shot and Edited by Dan Eckstein (daneckstein.com) in March 2009, with Music from Au Revoir Simone at Eyebeam and Postmasters Gallery NYC.

From the dialog:

I’m Michael Mandiberg. I am an artist, designer, and educator, and I am a Senior Fellow at Eyebeam, which is an Art and Technology Center in Chelsea, Manhattan.

As an artist I am pretty omnivorous. I have a background in photography, so it is pretty image based, but I was also a really really good bad high school poet. So I am particularly interested in words and their meaning, and their nuances and their poetic value. So I am always looking at the world around us visually, informationally, and culturally, and politically for inspiration

Some of my more recent work involves the laser cutter, cutting paper and books, making sculptures and drawings. The laser cutter takes the information from the computer file, and it uses a laser to cut that shape out of the material being cut, which in this case is a newspaper.

A few of my recent works are at The Future Is Not What It Used To Be, which is a show at Postmasters Gallery. One is called Old News, which is a stack of New York Times into which I am cutting daily the phrase “Old News” into it. The other is DATA BASE, which is an Oxford English Dictionary with the phrase “DATA BASE” cut into it.

The show itself is about the promise and the failed promise of technology, and its potential to connect people or not connect people.

Security Patterns is a studio visit installation of recent laser cut work. These sculptures and drawings are made from old books laser cut with poignant words, and drawings made from industrial patterns, all of which explore transformations in technology and their relationships to evolutions (or devolutions) in economies. Some choice examples include: two display bookshelves with an ever growing collection of 130+ investment guide books and get-rich-quick books (e.g. “Weath is a Choice” or “Investing by the Stars”) all laser engraved with the logos of failed FDIC Insured banks, A shrink wrapped bundle of 12 Yellow Pages that have been cut all the way through with the phrase “GOOGLE” and a dictionary with the phrase “OMG LOL” cut from its pages.

I have previously burned the OED, Atlases, and Phonebooks. I am interested in exploring books, especially expensive reference books, as a symbol of technological obsolecense and consumption culture. Once they were a huge symbol of prestige, now they are a sign of a era whose time has passed away. I burn them with word and symbols, as a way of commenting on their technological obsolescence, and simultaneously restoring their aura as precious objects.

More images on this blog post, or on James Wagner’s review of his studio visit

Graham Parker stopped by for a studio visit, and we had a great conversation. The highlight was when he told me to “choose my words less carefully.” In the description he writes:

First in a series of studio and show visits with contemporary artists. I’ve known Michael for some years – probably since a friend directed me to his Shop Mandiberg project. He’s recently been a research fellow at Eyebeam and is having an open studio there soon – mostly showing off work he has been producing with a laser cutter. He invited a few people along to do some studio visits in advance of that and I happened to have my camera with me when I went along. He’d set up a lot of work in one of Eyebeam’s main display spaces, so the effect was much more like a solo show than a regular studio visit.

I asked Michael to talk me through a few pieces on camera and he generously agreed to do so – despite having no time to process what we’d just been talking about in our visit. It’s mainly shot under existing lights with a few stills dropped in, so the footage is a little grainy in places, but it should give an idea of what he’s up to.

James Wagner and Barry Hoggard came to see my installation last Monday. James has written up his impressions. James says:

Mandiberg goes where no laser cutter has ever gone before. Some of the work physically and dramatically distinguishes important newly-established contemporary technologies from their aging or defunct antecedents (many of which could once have been described as cutting edge themselves), The result is a visual dialogue charged with the passage of time and composed in the empty spaces we see “written” in and on various kinds of reference books.

One piece, a work in progress (surprisingly, lasers take their time), is titled “We have never had a year of peace”. When finished it will comprise the three volumes of the “Encyclopedia of the Third World”, lying on their spines next to each other, open at a random page in the middle where the artist has deeply burned the name and year of every war fought by this peace-loving republic since 1890.

Another body of work consists of a wall display of cast-off volumes describing how to make money. Mandiberg has “whittled” with a laser into their hard front covers to describe the logos of, according to the artist, “all of the failed banks of the Great Recession”.

Not directly related to the re-worked dictionaries, encyclopedias, phone directories, or investment monographs are some breathtaking laser-cut drawings of the security patterns ordinarily found printed inside those familiar small mailing envelopes used by banks and similar institutions.

More here (tx James!)