THE CLUB

THE CLUB is pleased to announce its new group exhibition "Defacement,"
“Defacement”― The incisive attack which alters, spoils, or obfuscates the surface or original image and revalorizes a new form, reading or meaning.
New York based curator Amanda Schmitt has organized more than forty exhibitions, screenings and performances and garnered critical acclaim as an emerging socially-aware curator whose deliberate curations and reflection on the issues that burden contemporary society, as seen through art, have put her on the public spotlight. Schmitt was also one of the women featured as the 2017 TIME Magazine“Person of e Year.”
Inviting Amanda Schmitt as guest curator, "Defacement" introduces twelve contemporary artists, and presents them in context alongside ideas of The "Situationist International,”was an intellectual, social and artistic organization active from 1957-1972 which included figures such as Asger Jorn and Guy Debord, among others. The Situationists aimed to critique the evolving mass-consumerist society resulting from the globalizing force of capitalism. At the core of the exhibition is a re-reading of the strategy détournement, specifically interpreting the concept of defacement. The exhibition includes painter Jacqueline de Jong, who was one the original members of“Situationist International,”Andy Warhol, whose use of repetition of silkscreened pop art negated the concept of preciousness and posed a question to our conception of value, and Gerhard Richter’s iconic“Over Painted Photos,”as well as other contemporary emerging and mid-career artists.
"Defacement" is formulated around ideas of the Situationists in order to reassess our current values in artistic creation, which even five decades after the critical movement, witness the cycle of production, consumption, and waste at an untenable scale. e exhibition aims to illustrate the value of Defacement, investigate what surfaces when an artist defaces the surface, and how artists sacrifice the past to make way for the future.

Amanda Schmitt is a curator, currently the recipient of a MOBIUS fellowship, and Director of Programming and Development at the Untitled art fair in Miami Beach and San Francisco, where she is in charge of the ongoing program Untitled, Radio and Untitled, Cinema. Schmitt has curated over 40 exhibitions, video screenings and performance series internationally. She is based in New York City.

In 1961, Asger Jorn and Jacqueline de Jong (artists and original members of the Situationist International) began working on a multi–volume publication of photographic picture books called the“Institute for ComparativeVandalism”whichaimedtounderstand how the evolving defacement of Northern European cultural objects and edifices could alter and supersede the meaning of the artifacts that were vandalized (perse). is concept of revalorization, enhanced by the Situationist strategy of détournement ––“the integration of present or past artistic production into a superior construction of a milieu”– was further explored in the publication e Situationist Times (published and edited by de Jong from 1962 – 67). Jorn further contended that détournement is linked to the ability to sacrifice the past to reinvest in one’s own culture.
In order to understand Defacement, we must understand the complex term, vandalism, an action involving deliberate destruction or damage to public or private property (such as a graffiti). To vandalize is to steal or destroy; the works in Defacement, however, détourn the connotation of this action and investigate both the meaning of an image or object’s destruction and its revalorization. Defacement, as diametric to vandalism, iconoclasm or desecration, revalues, rather than devalues. Presented in Defacement is work by twelve contemporary artists in which the artist has execuated an incisive attack on the surface or original image in order to alter, subvert, or deface: to revalorize a new form, reading or meaning.