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Sunday, October 12, 2014

“Flat Neighbors” at Rachel Uffner

"Flat Neighbors" at Rachel Uffner

Assemblage surrealism 2.0
The fallout of semiotic manicism/collapse/supernova* of the 00’s assemblage, Harrison, Genzken, Pernice et al, the exploding of Unmonumental’s detritus, left the next generation picking cultural rubble. A post-apocalyptic cargo-cult, artists, still wanting to believe, began to reassemble totems of cultural meaning. Staedelschulites rehashing a form of ready-made-marxist-surrealism, societie's tchotchkies made to “speak” the tongues of the Invisible Hand, worship of gods who must be crazy. Post-Lieske - the real rabble of Neue Alte Brucke, Pro-Choice, etc. - Ceccaldi, Yngve Holen and everyone else - rearranging/collaging/juxtaposing the signs of capital as some sort of anti-altar to them - the whole mandala phenomenon, tableaus of cultural artifacts, seen again and again and again on the rugs of art fairs everywhere - finally hitting bedrock in the strip-mine of Darren Bader just arranging capital’s objects on the floor.

But so look see, at Rachel Uffner, as the next generation assembles, re-erect, no longer a strange spiritualism in letting the markets speak their hallucinations, but primordial constructions in its own. Still highly surrealist in its mashing of lobster- biology with tele-electronics in the continuously re-imagined sphere of bio-tech. Future's frogs in glass housing shan't live alone. The Bivalve shell rises, the new theory of design, Rough and smooth, coarse and erotic. The oyster like a hand made to hold the Apple product, what a perfect symbol for our biomechanical cybernetics. The limits of the hard body turning over into soft. Look at us evolve to our newfound worlds underwater. Do we really think a PowerRanger would own Elad Lassry?.

*so caught up in this chaos of signs and surface effects, it's
precisely because it's so serious about space: In a time when space
and image lose their distinction, and the old, ideal distance
between viewer and object is always already filled up and
occupied by a thousand communications, sculpture, too, finds
ways of making itself multi-surfaced and schizo-temporal. In
order to re-occupy our contemporary no-space, it trades in its
timeless pose for a temporary one, or for a manic series of
apearances. - Kelsey on Harrison’s semio-manicism.