Leonor Antunes at La Loge

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Some artists compress diapers into tractors. Other make lights whose "fixtures are a discreet reference to the concrete elements designed by Egle Trincanato, the first woman to graduate from the Venice School of Architecture." The point is the same, content pressed into shape, trojaned, smuggled, compositionalized, brandished. The difference is the size of the press release. 

see: Marc Kokopeli at Reena Spaulings Fine Art

Past: Pippa Garner

"Parody is funny, but a form masking the pain of the content, often." 

"Invention becomes the lash of capital, the driving force - internalized as self-flagellation, forced to invent, the jester marionette.... The [novelty] artists are shackled to... Invention becomes survival, requires our renewal continuously, Sisyphean, invention a plea, please, allow my survival, make me interesting."

Full: Pippa Garner at Redling Fine Art, Pippa Garner at JOAN

Marc Kokopeli at Reena Spaulings Fine Art

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"Like the drug smuggler casting his contraband in the shape of Jesus to escape the prying eyes, [artists] recast trash as flimsy endearing objects that we are made to love. ... repackaging, a reincarnation, second life in the only way objects know how: camouflaging themselves as fresh commodities. "

"Composing it into art objects becomes a blessing for sending the objects into the "heavenly" afterlife, a means of delivering them to the majority white institutions to get them to care for them in perpetuity."

Diaper cakes. Why recast your gift as a cake? Because the content isn't nice enough to be product/gift. This is an apt metaphor for art. The form (cake) is pretty far from function (shit napkins). So you jazz it up. This is the compositionalization of art. The diaper giver and the artist (or drug smuggler) - they must stealth their package into a societally acceptable object. You abstract the content.  Of course this is actually the new form, a socially compressed oddity, but we don't treat it as that. We think, press release on, "ooh 'a German bucket wheel excavator, used for industrial coal mining.'"

Caspar Heinemann at Cabinet

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"Cardboard like a sloughed flesh for transit."

"and soggy cardboard is like a rotting flesh"

"Your touch leaves a mark, sews a patch, you reproduce yourself in the objects you attend. Preciousness in warm cardboard, wearing touch, eroding to someone's love."

like a flesh, ornamented and stringed. Dripped pearls and a hole slightly greased.

Ser Serpas st Galerie Barbara Weiss

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Americans spent the last two years tearing down monuments, so there is catharsis here in what was always implicit then, that our ideals were mostly trash anyway. So erect now what you previously pretended didn't. As important as land acknowledgements, a song to the tune of Kanye West's Runaway, "Let's have a toast for the douchebags." Let's have a toast to the trash hole. A toast to IKEA elegance, the shelf that everyone I know has. A toast to waste, yours. 

See too: Jessi Reaves at Bridget Donahue, Gedi Sibony, Laurie Parsons at Museum Abteiberg, Darren Bader at Andrew Kreps, Dylan Spaysky at Good Weather, Ser Serpas

Past: Ser Serpas

"Hoarding as a sort of extended compassion for the derelict neglected of culture ... Composing it into art objects becomes a blessing into the "heavenly" afterlife ... Hooking the hose from the expelling parts of our cultural body to the part that feeds, getting it to eat its underwear."


Ser Serpas at LUMA Westbau, Ser Serpas at Karma International

 Past: Dora Budor

"A Pierre Hughye for the post-apocalypse, Budor's maybe a bit more invested in theatrics, the movies, and less in magic, instead in its dumbness, which is what we love those big sci-fi budgets for, the vast quantity of ash."

Dora Budor at Kunsthalle Basel