Connor Crawford – Life in the big city
I go up high. I see the city. It’s big. Lots of places for me to land and be almost perfectly still on. Being still makes me feel like I am a part of this great structure. Something bigger. I see myself reflected in the window. That’s me.
exhibition text by Juan Camilo Velasquez & Shahan Assadourian
Review (Artviewer)
Flat Errth
Sophia Eisenhut, Felix Krapp-Raczek, Max Eulitz, Kira Scerbin
at Rhythmus Messi Cambio (Basel), initiated by Scherben
“The Dadaist is a realist (Wirklichkeitsmensch) who loves wine, women, and advertising,” wrote Richard Huelsenbeck, known as the “Reklame-Dada,” in 1920. By subsuming advertisement to the category of realism, Huelsenbeck sought to counter other poets and artists, mostly expressionists, who held a sentimental resistance to modern life, that, in the 1920s was one of increasing semioticization: ads, signs, postered walls, advertising pillars, newspaper stands, “Heuschreckenschwärme von Schrift” (Walter Benjamin). The Dadaists understood the expressionists’ hatred of press and advertising as typical of “people who prefer their armchair to the noise of the street.” Hans Arp echoed this view in a retrospective account of his chance-based writings for which he incorporated text selected at random from newspapers: “Wir meinten durch die Dinge hindurch in das Wesen des Lebens zu sehen, und darum ergriff uns ein Satz aus einer Tageszeitung mindestens ebenso sehr wie der eines Dichterfürsten.”
Updating Dadaism’s remix of the language of commodity promotion and that of poetic imagery, artists Sophia Eisenhut, Max Eulitz, Felix Krapp-Raczek, and Kira Scerbin —on invitation of the independent Berlin-based art space Scherben—placed different advertisement artworks, collages of found and self-created images and text fragments, in the summer issues of Artforum, Frieze, Monopol, Mousse, Passe Avant, Provence, Spike, and Texte zur Kunst, using Dada techniques for a critical evaluation of the current state of the art magazine world, a rather flat earth.
Somewhere between critique, nonsense and self-referentiality, the ads appropriate the Dada approach to advertising, often dismissed as a provocative self-promotional gambit or reduced to a simple satire of bourgeois consumer culture, to attack the intersection of art and commerce, both in the flat space of the art magazine and the blown up materiality of the financial art market. During Art Basel, the ripped out magazine pages were presented as framed editions in the independent art space Rhythmus Messy Cambio, turning relatively valueless flat prints into three-dimensional, buyable wall objects. As a self-declared “meta exhibition,” the exhibition “Flat Errth” not only aims at a critical investigation of the medium of the ad, but also of the sites of its circulation, magazine pages and art fairs.
For the Provence issue on real estate, Max Eulitz and Felix Krapp-Razcek placed the logo of the Berlin real estate company Gewobag (“Die ganze Vielfalt Berlins”) next to a cool guy in a denim jacket, lasciviously smoking and saying “waiting for you.” The slogan, ornamented with emo stars, reads less like a sexy cheesy pick-up line than a real threat posed by the cruelty of the Berlin housing market. Advertising as storytelling, a fiction realizing itself through the promises of commodities and the cruel optimism of the good life. In Artforum, the art magazine gets caught up in its own hyperstition. Here, Sophia Eisenhut and Kira Scerbin placed an ex-voto-drawing of an alien version of S. Caterina de Manresa, the (anti-)protagonist of Eisenhut’s book EXERCITIA S. Catarinae de Manresa. Anorexie und Gottesstaatlichkeit inside a depressed, apocalyptic landscape left with only some power poles, perhaps an allegory for the contemporary art scenery itself. The advertisement is figured as a votive image, the commodity (offered by advertising and criticism) a promise of salvation. As motif of the votive, votary, symbolic sacrifice and saint, Catarina seems to embody the ambiguous role of contemporary art criticism: friendship service or distant outside perspective, advertisement or damning review, criticism as its own art form or criticism in service of art’s salvation?
For an ad in Spike Magazine’s issue on art and crime, an illustration from Marquis de Sade’s The 120 Days of Sodom, or the School of Libertinage, written while he was imprisoned in the Bastille, serves as the backdrop for a mirrored version of the Nestlé logo birds (reminiscent of the Situationists’ détournement ads) that reads, “mimesis is murder / diegesis is innocent.” All adorned with human blood, perhaps from cutting and tearing apart art magazines. Given the exhibition title “Flat Errth,” an appropriation of a right-leaning, anti-science conspiracy theory insisting on the disc shape of the Earth, this take on violence, sadism and morality might be read as a commentary on Ana Teixeira Pinto and Kerstin Stakemeier’s controversial “Glossary of Social Sadism” published in Texte zur Kunst’s 2019 “Evil” issue. The text surveys the pathology of an art milieu that rejects the repoliticization of contemporary art or any form of social responsibility, flirting instead with the language and symbols of the alt-right. The art sadist’s “categorical rejection of any scrutiny over one’s own implications in the perpetual oscillation between subjectivization and subjection under the cloak of ‘artistic freedom’ or ‘freedom of speech,’” is, according to Teixeira Pinto and Stakemeier, symptomatic of a “wounded narcissism, unable to divest from the pleasurable investment in the (increasingly besieged) notion of its own universality. Nursing its injury, it sets out to injure.” Spike Magazine, perhaps feeling provoked and offended by the text, responded with an issue on “Immorality” (which, funnily enough, is misspelled as “immortality” on their website: “Immortality is a response to the widely held idea that art needs to be moral. The world’s fucked up, and the art world is guilty too, so in some ways that makes sense”)—and a round table on “Cancel Culture” including edgelords Mathieu Malouf and Nina Power. Despite or because of the polemics on both sides, this was one of the more interesting art critical debates of recent years, playing out between two of the most influential art magazines and serving real antagonist positions rather than the usual IAE and polite reviews symptomatic of a criticism in crisis.
Today, the art critic functions both as a “citizen of a thoroughly financialised present” (Stakemeier) and, as cultural critic and lesbian icon Jill Johnston described it when calling for the disintegration of criticism, as “an unpaid publicity agent.” In the press release of the panel discussion “The Disintegration of A Critic—An Analysis of Jill Johnston,” she writes: “My purpose […] was to offer my name as a sort of sacrifice if you like for the idea of a disintegration of criticism, which I view as an outmoded form of communication. Reportage may be necessary and interesting. I like it myself. Poetry and all forms of fiction, history, autobiog., etc., I accept as forms of speech and writing not coercive as to the salesmanship of immediate artistic events, i.e., reviews in the newspapers and the magazines.” In “Flat Errth,” it is the form of fictional advertising rather than sell-out art criticism that takes on the role of critique. While art criticsm is confronted with an unsolvable dilemma—“that critique must insist on the fiction of another world and standard of value while remaining embedded in capitalist relation”—as Isabelle Graw and Sabeth Buchmann write in a 2019 essay on art criticism and discrimination published in Texte zur Kunst, advertisement can easily circumvent the question of complicity, as its economic embeddedness and compulsion to sale are its very conditions of existence.
Graw and Buchmann argue not to cling to “romantic stock fantasies of subversion” but to focus on the counter values immanent to the system, a position also held by art theorist Marina Vishmidt who propagates a critique that moves beyond the comfort zone of reflexivity, a critique that makes cuts and takes it upon itself to find or make the gaps and voids through which the infrastructure of art comes into view and which, in the undiminished awareness of negativity, holds the possibility of the better.
The presentation of the ads at Rhythmus Messy Cambio in the enigmatic building K-102, shared by a Jungle Yoga community and a local padel club, during Art Basel in the eponymous Swiss city, the annual proof of the possibility or even necessity of a smooth simultaneity of a “radical” critique of the capitalist value form of the artwork and a fetishization of the same, was accompanied by an enduring twenty-four-hour performance during which the artist quartet produced an album. It’s a mix of music, sound poems, spoken word (based on and sampled from texts in the art magazines in which Eisenhut & Co placed their ads), and often silence. The record is loosely based on scores consisting of attitudes and structures of feeling rather than strict musical instructions: verses without words, audience insults, nihilism, chance, low key, slow pace, improv, fun, humble, casual, modest punk, life in papers, friendship, unpretentious, drugs, comfortability. This remix of punk and coziness describes well what went on at Rhythmus Messy Cambio. While someone played the guitar gently, perhaps weeping, others cut and tore out magazine pages, bleeding, reading out single words from the art magazines, “propaganda” or “propagandada” (all in socks on a carpeted floor). A rock’n’roll and chill performance, a concert, recording, rehearsal, a hang-out spot, an after party, a lasting insignificance.
Creeping into the pages of the world’s leading art publications and thus inscribing themselves into the canon of art criticism, “Flat Errth” dodges the pretense of performing critique from a place outside economic and institutional structures, claiming and insisting instead on a place inside, while simultaneously looking at it from above (meta), being against it (anti) and not caring at all (exhaustion). “Flat Errth” performs a critique that is critical of critical distancing, understanding it, like Andrea Fraser, as “a form of negation in the psychoanalytic sense: a defensive maneuver that serves to disown the emotional investment in the object of critique and especially desire for that object, including identificatory or narcissistic desire.” But rather than dramatically acting out these affective investments in the object of critique (the art space, the magazine, the fair), here, in a punk anti-attitude, a fake-meta position and in the style of hot but exhausted millennials, they are reduced to a bare minimum, a calm, relaxed attitude in the face of one’s own entrapment, throwing themselves, quite comfortably, in the container that contains them.
by Sophia Roxane Rohwetter
Plasma shows works that underscore the proximity of art to the everyday life of the artist, in order to interrogate the effects of varying social conditions on the development of subject hood. Contend enters and exits the legitimizing framework of art. The liquid aspects of the work are emphasized. Context plays its own role. What happened to Duchamp’s Bottle Rack once his sister placed it in front of his house after he left for New York? It probably drifted away, down Rue Saint Hippolyte.
exhibition text by Tarik Kentouche
Sculpture Show & Album Release
From the printed to the spoken word, from the acoustic realm to the material world, from Basel to Berlin: This is the last chapter. The absence of text will be the centerpiece, the release of our album merely a muted voice from the past.
Sophia Eisenhut, Max Eulitz, Felix Krapp-Raczek, Kira Scerbin
with
Anna-Sophie Berger, Burkhard Beschow, Zoë Field, Kolja Gollub, Frieder Haller, Mara Jenny, Katharina Keller, Nina Kettiger, Evelyn Kliesch, Salome Lübke, Philip Markert, Tomás Nervi, Paul Niedermayer, Brigita Noreikaitė, Ella Pechechian, Eliza Penth, Gunter Reski, Carla-Luisa Reuter, Jonas Roßmeißl, Micah Schippa, Anne Schmidt, Phillip Simon, Michael Sullivan, Luise Thile, Raphaela Vogel, Michel Wagenschütz, Eugen Wist
Stories From The Edge
Alicja Rogalska
Opening September 1
September 2 until October 14 2022
as part of the Berlin Art Prize 2022
curated in collaboration with Leonie Huber
Hunter Shaw Fine Art is pleased to invite you to the second iteration of Klammern aus denen Blätter Spriessen, an exhibition with works by Colleen Hargaden, Filip Kostic, Yein Lee, Andrew Rutherdale and Jonas Schoeneberg. The exhibition is a collaboration between HSFA and Berlin-based independent space Scherben, who hosted the first iteration in April 2022.
Klammern aus denen Blätter Spriessen assembles a group of artists who have independently sought to investigate different strains and subcultures of escapism, found in DIY maker movements, mysticism, gaming culture, biotechnology, virtual reality and the extension of bodily formations through social and scientific techniques. Showing in this ensemble for the first time, Colleen Hargaden, Filip Kostic, Yein Lee, Andrew Rutherdale and Jonas Schoeneberg venture out of their studios in Berlin, Los Angeles, Montreal and Vienna to open up their practices to mutual encounters, allowing their perspectives and interests to intersect, converge and enter into conversation with one another. Together they offer conceptual variables to understand situations excluded from normative notions of the real. Like the seemingly irreal scenario of “brackets, from which leaves sprout” (Klammern aus denen Blätter Spriessen), alternate patterns and cognitive abilities emerge from which to think anew the escape button commonly associated with configurations of virtual reality. If one of these pathways was projected in spacetime, it would read: “Once you’ve made a gateway of brackets, slipping into the embrace between them, you unlock the control console and peer into its memory slot. There. Expect a beautiful but unreal setting.”
The exhibition is kindly supported by the Checkpoint Charlie Foundation and the Austrian Consulate General.
Exhibition Text by Steph Holl-Trieu
Review (The Brooklyn Rail)
A collaborative project by two Los Angeles-based artists, this exhibition shows the artifacts of a set of characters traveling through a multitude of spaces. Some of these spaces are real, some fictitious, some contemporary, and some from long ago; they have all enabled these multidimensional explorers to draw on, distort, cite, and warp the different ideas and themes that have come to them.
The alchemical product of manipulating the experienced logic is a travelogue; an absurd yet serious documentation.
Exhibition text by Vanalyne Green
Brian Tarpey and Tyler Morrison write that their work pertains “to the pitfalls of collaboration as an enterprise.” They are true to their words, creating art works that respond to a remit of collaboration as, “a series of specific issues … taken and placed into a cerebral bingo caller”. This is a bingo game you want to play. There are so many artefacts of their explorations — video, sculpture, and paintings, for example — and so many ways to enter their show, that I felt as if I were following breadcrumbs laid out for an audience, but with breaks between episodes — taking meaning as one can or chooses to, relaxing into a folly of collaboration with no fixed abode, point of view, or narrative closure. The work is generous, brave, and legion.
Among the clues dotting the path through the Tarpey/Morrison universe are friars in floppy outfits with no attention paid to fit, in which they trudge through tunnels, cow muck, and fake Stonehenge columns. There is nothing heroic in their actions, other than, perhaps, performing as actors in fetid underground tunnels. This isn’t the myth of the hero; this is the myth of a reluctant Bartleby the Scrivener who prefers not to but does. The players scrawl cows’ images in candlelit tunnels, have the obligatory face-off with a Minotaur, and perform their assigned rounds in a dairy farm, acting as a human indexical project that ticks the boxes of ancient myths with the gusto of two men waiting for their prescriptions of anti-depressants to be filled. They chart their path in collaborative exploration caring not for the machismo hullabaloo of phallic pride, whether of an ancient Cretan or a suited-and-booted business executive.
Their paintings tell a different story. Whether they are scrawled (the cows) or meticulously constructed, another form of negotiation is at work, one that weds Morrison’s commitment to paint qua paint with Tarpey’s background in sculpture and performative pieces. In “Berlin, Vermont” and “In Search of Lost Corn”, paint as background and treated aluminium as foreground insist that the eye can’t rest on one plane, though there are densities that act as proposed punctums: the black-and-white tondo in the middle of the barn, say, or the peach/pastel necco-wafer colour of a square in “In Search of Lost Corn”. The works hover between figuration and abstraction, driven by a palette that either deploys complementary colours (“Barn”) in one instance, or evokes in “Lost Corn” a hallucinatory corn maze mapped out in blues, dark browns, and hay-bale yellows. The colours radiate in various directions, but there is a compositional true north that makes it impossible to get lost.
As in the corpus of each artist’s work, Morrison and Tarpey deploy multiple iterations of their given themes. Some of the iterative gestures in the current exhibition take the form of sculpture, such as a three-dimensional bull’s head. Another embodies the market and a banal heroic, which is to say, coins of the artists’ profiles as a sort of NFT, referencing the entirely un-banal history of accounting as it was proposed in the early Renaissance by Luca Pacioli. This matters because of the ethos of that time, which encompassed discoveries in mathematics and compositional space (Pierro della Francesca and Leonardo Da Vinci), for which each was a requirement for the other. That mapping between areas of research is as much the subject of the Tarpey/Morrison exhibit as anything else.
In the video, “The Golden Calf and the Brazen Bull” two people traverse the Los Angeles River and enter tunnels only to exit through Vermont’s stone chambers, resonant with the unsolved mysteries of their origins. Without the magic of CGI, we watch the two actors transit through space and time like silent movie characters, then walk later onto a vast desert, quoting along the way sacrifice, torture, heroic achievement, mysteries, quests, faith, ecology, and the banalities of pop culture. Although this is video, and the objects that accompany it form a travelogue, as Tarpey and Morrison define it, they are also a love letter and homage to the space between people and things. To quote E.M. Forster, “Only connect!” It does — and we do.
June 10 – July 10 2022
Bailey Connolly & Isabelle Frances McGuire is the second exhibition by the two artists in as many years, following their debut Dresses Without Women, at Mickey, Chicago in 2021.
For this exhibition McGuire’s breathing, blinking, grinning historical cosplay sex automotons have been reduced to a small metal enclosure connected to an amplifier. Inside the enclosure, two filtered oscillators produce sine waves, utilized for their relation to the human voice, that reverberate at a constant throughout the space. Two heart shaped sockets frame LEDs that blink in patterns which correspond to data-sets visualizing the heart beats of McGuire and Connolly, evidenced by the letters “b” and “i” in the title. Here, in lieu of the automaton’s life-size cosmetic likeness, the body’s kinetic physical properties have been severed to reveal their essential components. The speaking voice and beating heart become surrogate equivalents of the oscillator, knob, and light emitting diode. Accompanying the synthesizer are two images that function as a kind of memento mori for the transformations described above. The framed still life photographs with black mat document the lifeless 3D printed skulls of the absent life-size automatons before the application of silicone, hair, pigment, and animation- a moment of the life or death cycle only possible in the non-living-living entities of our present robotics age.
Two large painted foam sculptures titled ex (crush) and b (crush) occupy the floor of the gallery. Connolly’s forms are resonant of cattle crush apparatuses that are used to hold animals in place while being examined to minimize the risk of injury to both the animal and its operator. Cattle crush technology was famously appropriated for use by people with autism spectrum disorders who find relief in the physical sensation of being hugged without any direct human contact. Like the initials in McGuire’s heart beat visualizer, the titles of these works suggest multiple readings beyond reference to the individual forms themselves. It is not hard to imagine Connolly’s allusion to the self and others behind the variables “b” or “ex” and also, given the fate of the cattle being held on their way to extermination, their absence. The decision to retitle and repaint ex (crush) for this exhibition is also telling. Produced at a smaller scale relative to the size of the animal itself and not the referent machine, these works ask to be considered as both subject and object. Like Connolly’s sculptures of modernist housing reduced to the bare minimum parameters for ethical lab mice habitation, the shift in scale recalls the skeleton of the animal subject. The architecture of the apparatus has seemingly come to replace the object of the machine’s intended function.
KW
Wrinkles on a white lab coat fold into themselves,
cover blind spots the naked eye often neglects and hug one another tightly. They briefly brush against each other and rush along about their day, scratching the surface of their neighboring menace, touching each other’s fingertips. Carefully, meticulously placed they frame a beautiful calligraphy
that’s stitched onto someone’s right chest pocket.
Brackets are symbols that wrap around words, phrases or sentences in a piece of writing. They mark what should be considered a separate organ to the main body of text. Most machinic screen readers will gloss over them, meaning a. they will just leave the brackets including their contents out, or b. they will read the contents without hinting to the existence of the brackets, all that (in text) is hugged in by the brackets then swims (in speech) in the same soup as the remaining text.
It’s not just machines though, because a human translator from text to speech encounters the same issue. [To open and close brackets, or not to open or close brackets? (In speech, that is.)]
No beauty for the profane. In mathematical operations, brackets determine the order of those operations, meaning brackets are algorithmic devices. When brackets are nested, the rule is that you must work from the inside out. Some birds work differently, often dropping stuff into a chosen tree, relying on spider silk and saliva to make it stick. As we know, trees grow leaves, but so do brackets. At least that is one possible scenario in the not-so-distant future.
Hence, brackets do (sprout, grow, shape) matter. Imagine for a second the Bed (PC), or the (Bed) PC, or (automatic) drawing vs. automatic (drawing), or synthetic (organism) in relation to (synthetic) organism. Though you can’t really continue this exercise indefinitely, because madness will overtake meaning, which is a good sensation in general, but only in moderation.
Consider these brackets, the green foliage of a plant yet to be discovered:
(Oh the joy of working on a warm body)
52.511343580883555, 13.395318379788897: {a viral medium that undergoes mutation and reproduces itself like a symbiotic culture of…}
{a painting reaches for the handle of a window, opens itself into its surrounding, oh! it spilled a living organism all over the ground, hope no one minds}
34.04929626162093, -118.35784986105523: [leave society, leave all of it behind, the need to not sleep where you eat or not to eat where you fuck or not to play where you build a castle in the sky that is on the ground that is on a mattress that is in your own grind, just switch the way you think about it]
<Like brackets, a capsule encloses something. It preserves something in a stable environment by cutting it off from another. It remains to be seen whom or what this tendency serves. Escape fear, escape hope!>
Once you’ve made a gateway of brackets, slipping into the embrace between them, you unlock the control console and peer into its memory slot. There. Expect a beautiful but unreal setting.
(Tbc.)
