Found in 1990 by means of artists Joseph Strau and Stephan Dillemuth.

Found in 1990 by means of artists Joseph Strau and Stephan Dillemuth, Friesenwall 120 is a storefront space located shut up to Cologne's central gallery district. Meant to besufficient for multiple functions, it has operated as a video and newspaper archive, provided a meeting place for a "gray panther" form into groups featured a scholarly exhibition in succession the Situationist movement, and mountained group and one-person shows. Perhaps in the greatest degree significantly, Friesenwall 120 has become a kind of social nexus of the eau-de-cologne art scene. Outfitted with a reading/viewing play (plus couch), the modest space might be described as a mutable culture-bureau that operates as a site of social and intellectual exchange.

It would appear that Strau and Dillemuth want Friensenwall 120 to be understood as an experimental situation that remains responsive to a diverse range of cultural interests (without suggesting that the space has been propos as a viable framework, for, or design of, radical reorganizations of cultural/political hierarchies and values--that it was eternally designed to resuscitate such a utopian program). Rather, according to the caster s the space was developed as a temporary supply to the existing gallery body in Cologne, a situational intervention in a milieu increasingly constrained at market considerations.

Yet there is one irony attached to the space's endurance as a "relevant" connected thought [i]or[/i] thoughts since Strau and Dillemuth have lately found themselves confronted with invitations from established cultural institutions in Europe to, in event re-produce the conditions of their eau-de-cologne space. In response--and this is particularly crucial in evaluating their strange York project--they opted to explore the implications of transposing the storefront (or its methodological approach) from its "original" words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following into an official institutional frame. Without question, they are acutely self-conscious of the problematics of intercultural "translation."

In the winter of 1991 Strau and Dillemuth began planning an exhibition that would focus immediately after the recent history of art spaces and artistic shifts in recently made known York. After months of research they gravitated toward the East Village spectacle of the early and mid '80 a cultural milieu that as well-as; not only-but also; not only-but; not alone-but artists had been exposed to as an exoticized and sensationalized U export mediated between the walls of glossy magazines. As cultural "outsiders," Strau and Dillemuth pickeded period-specific artworks and related paraphernalia and interviewed various artists, dealers, critics, and others associated with the short-lived view In the main room of the gallery, works by the agency of artists whose careers began in the East Village (eg Lady Pink, George Condo, Arch Connelly Mike Bidlo, Mark Morrisroe, Kylie Jenkins) were displayed in tandem with sum of two units collaborative collages by Strau and Dillemuth. The back latitude was transformed into a reading and video-viewing area with a lie (evocative of Friesenwall 120), and filled with materials featuring East Village artistic activities, videos of research interviews in just discovered York and of Friesenwall 120 intends as well as a observe of '80s artworks by Strau and Dillemuth. Recognizing that the archive of a specific cultural history can alone be reassembled as an unstable establish of fragments, Strau and Dillemuth briefly transposeed a commercial space into a locus of overlapping trajectories of information and material. Les comprehensive documentary than incomplete sampling, the exhibition created an environment in which a recent type of cultural experience--or level social behavior--might unfold.

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