Société Réaliste: A rough guide to Hell, P!, New York

• 

  1 / 1

  Société Réaliste: A rough guide to Hell, P!, New York | 2013

“A rough guide to Hell” span several of Société Réaliste’s recent works revolving around figures and forms of capitalist utopianism. Pitting two discrete discursive investigations against each other — the typographic language of global-local media communications and the architecture of anarcho-capitalist modernism — the exhibition resolved into a singularly strange and unsettling total installation. “A rough guide to Hell” premiered a new typeface. Combining the logotypes of international newspapers that include geographic locators in their names, media police (2013) is a Frankensteinian font that belies its diverse origins through a fractured assemblage. All communications about the show used the typeface; this included the storefront awning signage, which hijacked a quotation from Dante’s Inferno. A new room-sized piece, Circles of Errors (2013), introduced a recursive poetic text of common computer error messages. The second axis of the show revolved around Ayn Rand and her provocative political and spatial philosophies. The Fountainhead (2010) is a 111-minute long appropriation of the 1949 feature film written by Rand. While the original film lionized New York as the stronghold of the brave, free world, Société Réaliste have digitally removed all human characters to present an empty narrative. Transforming the film’s heroic buildings into its sole protagonists, this intervention turns Rand’s original view into a nightmarish vision of capitalism’s architecture. The final work in the exhibition, Laissez-Faire City (2013), is a new proposal based on a 1995 advertisement published in The Economist. The original full-page ad promoted investment in a speculative city in Costa Rica, based on Ayn Rand’s principles of self-rule and the rugged free-market. Laissez-Faire City will be on sale in the exhibition for the price of $62,124.75 (£40,050). This cost covers re-publishing the ad in today’s edition of The Economist — a quixotic memorial to capitalism’s idealistic moment.