Art Club 2000 was initiated in 1992 by New York art dealer Colin de Land and seven art students from The Cooper Union School of Art. The group, through weekly discussions over the course of a year, worked towards the idea of producing an exhibition. This first exhibition, Commingle, was realized at American Fine Arts, Co. in 1993 and took as it’s subject the retail clothing chain, The Gap.  The show included group portrait photographs, store-display installation, and included texts and documents researched and produced by going through the store’s trash.

Art Club 2000 first exhibited at in the U.K. at The Royal College of Art. During that first visit they produced spreads for the lifestyle magazines Dazed and Confused and The Face, (one of which may be seen here). In the intervening dozen years, Art Club 2000 had seven exhibitions at American Fine Arts, Co., and exhibited internationally.  They did work about gentrification and real estate including a black and white photo exhibit called Night in the City, and Soho So Long, a show and accompanying book of interviews with art dealers, critics and collectors about geographically shifting gallery districts in NYC. They explored cultural identity in cooperation with Jackie McAllister, in the exhibition Jackie McAllister, where they imported works by an expatriate Scottish artist from NYC to the U.K., at Transmission in Glasgow.  Towards the end of the 90’s they produced investigations into the state of concept and critical art forms, starting with 1970, a series of video interviews about the year 1970, including the artists Vito Acconci, Isa Genzken, Les Levine, Alex Katz, Carolee Schneeman, and Henry Flynt. Night of the Living Dead Author approached the subject of postmodernism and commodity critique through the vehicle of Roland Barthes’ 1968 essay “The Death of the Author” and posited late 90’s artists as ‘Living Dead Authors’ in a Jenny Holzer-style L.E.D. text, sculptures and photographs.  In 2000, A ‘Retrodisrespective’ was mounted in Mexico City at the Museo Carrillo Gil, which included Art Club’s final work, a model of an Aztec pyramid constructed entirely of Coca-Cola cans, in reference to the newly inaugurated Vicente Fox’s previous job, as vice president of Coca-Cola Mexico.

The works in this exhibition include a selection of photographs from, Commingle, depicting the group wearing matching outfits from the Gap, which were borrowed and returned after use, taking advantage of the store’s then-generous return policy. Also featured are photographs from Art Club’s second exhibition, Clea, which used The Cooper Union School of Art and surrounding East Village locations as backdrop and subject matter.

Saim, Demircan, ART CLUB 2000: Selected Works 1992–1999, Art Monthly; London Iss. 445, April 2021