To ‘celebrate’ the forthcoming conflict between Rocket Man of North Korea and Dotard of the United States of America the artist Mischa Kuball (DE) has been commissioned to create an installation and music score to be placed on The Fifth Column of the White House. Named Curator Of The United States (COTUS) by the Museum of Contemporary Cuts, Lanfranco Aceti announced this new video and installation as part of The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Cards art project at the White House.
Aceti explained, “Kuball has suspended over The Fifth Column on the north lawn of the White House two drumsticks that play an electronically revisited version of the Radetzky March. Issues related to the throes of collapsing empires and the destruction that accompany their falls oblige contemporary viewers to take notice of the twisted marching of patriarchal idiotic rhetorics of war. Twisted tweets and insults are the quotidian background beat of the de-construction of a world descending into the madness of Fascism. This is a fascistic world in which people have a responsibility via their a-critical resigned participation, cowardly derelictions monumentalized in persistent silence, or fake revolutionary stances out of convenience.”
“This solemn new march will give the beat to the continuous threats and always impending confrontation between North Korea and the United States of America is unveiling the real measurements of tiny hands and tiny minds,” Lanfranco Aceti explained. “We are in contact with numerous schools in the US and across the world in order to have the march played every morning for opening classes, but also to mark the beginning of everyone’s daily activities in the public and private workplaces. A petition has been presented to the American Congress for the march to substitute the current national hymn.”
Mischa Kuball, Drums for the President of USA, (Radetzky-March), 2017, follows previous installations on The Fifth Column, with artists like Maurizio Cattelan, Grayson Perry, and Sarah Lucas.
Aceti explained that Kuball had been chosen because of his artistic practice which, spanning over 40 years, has faced up to the challenges of artworks in public spaces and uncomfortable social themes and issues.
“As #COTUS,” Aceti concludes, “I have been contacting a number of international artists and making poignant selections which reflect the spirit of contemporary political art, activism, and aesthetics. Countercurrent to a partisan criticism rooted in political ideas of moral superiority and divinely inspired righteousness, the artworks chosen question at large the framework which have characterized the past two thousand years of history and that, unequivocally, continue to be repeated—cyclically and blindly—across time, geographical areas, political landscapes, and pseudo-cultural contexts. It is in this unreasonable presence of the reality of the unimaginable characterizing this turn of the twentieth-first century that outlandish artistic and curatorial projects find their raison d’être as rational counterpoints to the decline of collective social reasoning.”
Drums for the President of USA will stand on The Fifth Column for the next forty-nine days, after which it will be substituted by a new artwork selected by Lanfranco Aceti, Curator Of The United States or #COTUS.
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