Art Club 2000

AC2K was influenced by the rise of institutional critique, conceptual art, and the work of the Pictures Generation, with their emphasis on appropriating commercial imagery and the language of advertising towards critical ends.^[2] Some commentators have pointed out that they were coming of age in a time of hyper-commercialism for New York City and the art world, but also attended Cooper Union tuition-free and studied with radical artists like Hans Haacke and Mark Dion, forcing them to embody the contradictions of being young artists in the city. Like the collective Bernadette Corporation, also started by Copper Union students, they worked adjacent to fashion.^[3]

Colin de Land founded American Fine Arts, Co. in 1986, after moving his gallery, which had been titled 'Vox Populi' to 40 Wooster Street. He had formerly held odd jobs such as writing blurbs for TV Guide, and was known as a dealer for favoring conceptual work, going as far as exhibiting 'fictional artists' like John Dogg.^[4][5] In 1992, de Land invited a group of students who had studied with Hans Haacke to do a project, and they formed the association that would become Art Club 2000.^[6]

From 1993 to 1999, AC2K produced annual exhibitions at American Fine Arts, Co. (AFA), in collaboration with dealer Colin de Land. Some observers referred to them as "the gallery's house band".^[7] AFA had a reputation for showing experimental work, such as that of Vito Acconci and Earthworks artists, but presented within the identity of art-dealing and the market.^[5] De Land's wife was prominent dealer Pat Hearn.^[8]

AC2K's first exhibition Commingle (1993) focused on the Gap corporation's cooptation of youth and arts culture. The Gap's East Village arrival on St. Mark's Place in 1988 was seen as a step in the gentification of spaces associated with Downtown counterculture. The Gap's infamous "Individuals of Style" ad campaign featured stark black and white portraits (by Annie Leibovitz, Steven Meisel, and others) of well known figures from the arts, including Spike Lee, Joan Didion, William Burroughs, Madonna, Anthony Kiedis, Jim Dine, and gallerist Leo Castelli. Responding to the campaign, AC2K photographed themselves wearing Gap apparel in sites around New York City, examining the Gap's idealized, market-driven depiction of artistic style as reinforcing individuality and unstated conformity. In group photographs, a format that the artists would use in future projects, AC2K staged themselves within carefully selected Manhattan settings such as Times Square.^{[9][10][11][12]}

All of the artists in the group applied to work at the Gap in an attempt to access corporate materials. When none were hired, they scavenged corporate trash from Gap store dumpsters to recover employee loss prevention and sales manuals, customer service protocols and reports, and other directives. Physical installations and sculptures made of slat wall, Gap shoe boxes, and other materials collected from the stores' refuse were constructed at American Fine Arts into an exhibition that combined research, reportage photography, trash-as-art, and authoritative wall text. By putting the corporation's cultural branding in conversation with its standard corporate practices, the group created a humorous and chaotic take on Institutional Critique, which was a large discourse in the art world of their time.^[13][14]

In the lead-up to the exhibition, the group produced a pastiche of a Gap advertisement featuring a portrait of Colin de Land as if he was part of the "Individual of Style" ad campaign. Foregrounding de Land as its iconic promotional representative, AC2K acknowledged his fundamental role as producer and industry impresario. Following the ad's publication in Artforum, the Gap faxed a cease and desist letter to American Fine Arts, Co. Commingle would become a model for subsequent projects, where sociological investigation was undertaken via narrative photography, conceptual art, documentary, or more chaotic happenings.^[15]

Clear (1994) was an installation and fashion-based project. The project consisted of a series of transparent vinyl garments displayed on mannequins, along with photographic and spatial elements that referenced retail display and youth fashion. By adopting the visual language of commercial clothing while withholding functional or expressive detail, Clear blurred distinctions between art installation, fashion branding, and commodity display. Contemporary critics noted the work's engagement with visibility, surface, and consumer desire, situating it within broader 1990s debates around appropriation, identity, and the aesthetics of retail culture.^[16][17]

In 1996, the group released Soho So Long, a publication interviewing artists, gallerists, and collectors about the shift some galleries were making from SoHo, once favored by the NYC art world for the availability of cheap real estate following the flight of light industry of the neighborhood. As SoHo became more expensive, some art dealers began to move to Chelsea after the Dia Foundation established a building there. At the time of AC2K's interviews, it was not clear if galleries would have a permanent presence in Chelsea, which in the 21st Century became the primary arts district in New York City for commercial galleries.^[18][19][20]

1970 consisted of a series of interviews with artists from the 1970s presented as a video sculpture. The work, titled Untitled (Video Interviews with Artists on the Year 1970), featured conversations with figures including Carolee Schneemann, Vito Acconci, Henry Flynt, Isa Genzken, Alex Katz, Les Levine, Simon Cerigo, and Niki Logis, displayed simultaneously on a grid of vintage television monitors.^[19]

The project was conceived as a way for the collective to engage with the "vanished '70s glory days of New York art," presenting the interviews in a format that referenced both media culture and art historical memory. It was a continuation from the kind of meta-sociological inquiry that framed their previous project, Soho So Long.^[17]

For the 1994 exhibition 'Esprit d'Amusement' at Grazer Kunstverein, their first time showing outside of the US, they produced the work Kaputtmachen in Graza, a large-scale print of themselves in a trashed hotel room.^[20]