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Wednesday, September 3, 2014

Ger van Elk at Kunstverein München

Ger van Elk at Kunstverein München

PR willingness towards realistic explication separates this one from the packets of them, even for casual cliches like “slowing down the act of looking,” helping no one.
The paint/picture/screw doodads are a mystery, of interest, but mostly the show looks like your quintessential european museum show; dry, disparate and academic. Schjeldahl once named all new French art lousy, but its more your European allergy to fun, funny, or visually pleasurable art. The slicing together photo-panoramas is a trope that can die anytime now, just unbelievably dead. But, In the context of its conceptual time period, this stuff is a riot. van Elk (RIP) seems to have weaseled some interest under the Anti-fun-dictatorial-radar as subtle means, the way things are put together always slightly off, strangely chosen, mostly hidden here by piss-poor documentation which takes such for granted, the rigging for the panorama-graph, the airbrushing manipulation of photos, the possibly backlit versions, the what-is-going-on-with-the-man-hanging in the background as sort of “Three Men and a Baby” type ghost myth. It puts him in line with the contemporary materio-surrealists of much new contemporary euro art.