Guided by Invoices is pleased to present AgitPOP, a group exhibition born of the growing occupation movement, curated by Anthony Haden-Guest. He describes the genesis of the show as follows:

 

The model of the art world as a system feeding the upper end of the luxury goods market, a one percent thing, is as sleekly potent as ever. But, thanks to the recession, ubiquitous geo-political turbulence and an ever more vertiginous wealth gap, other equally ambitious models can be discerned. And it was to my mind the double whammy of simultaneous shows of Marina Abramovic and William Kentridge at MOMA in 2010 which signaled that politics was back with a wallop.

 

‘Issues’ can be a mixed blessing in art, a fertile source of sanctimony and kitsch, but they can also animate a Goya, a Hogarth, a Grosz, so it was to be expected that certain artists should be able to deal with what’s going on with relish and vigor. And so they do here. Only some of the work deals directly with Occupy but all of it rides the wave of energy that Occupy generated and expresses our profound and well-founded sense that we inhabit a world of horribly specific, theoretically soluble but desperately urgent problems.

 

Artists in the exhibition include Betty Beaumont, Nin Brudermann, Molly Crabapple, Martha Colburn, Adam Dant, Gregory Green, Paul H-O, Naroa LIzar, Liz Magic Laser, Lucia Love, Marjan Moghaddam, Alexandra Penney, Bill Plympton, James Romberger, Blake Sandberg, Stik and Ulrike Theusner.

 

Anthony Haden-Guest is an Anglo-American writer, art critic, cartoonist and performer of his own verse. His drawings have appeared in the New York Observer are now up on Standard Culture and he has reported major publications including the Sunday Telegraph, Vanity Fair, Paris Review, Sunday Times (UK), Esquire, GQ (UK), The Observer, The Art Newspaper and Radar. In 1997, he was a guest on Charlie Rose while discussing his book True Colors: The Real Life of the Art World, published by Grove Atlantic. He was awarded a New York Emmy for writing and narrating the PBS documentary The Affluent Immigrants.