Pages

Wednesday, November 26, 2014

Pentti Monkkonen at High Art

PM_HA01-4

Monkkonen's box-trucks literalize the metaphor: painting as commodity vessels in transit. What were rectangular become parallel grams sent for accelerating markets. The vessels are moving fast, the trucks skull cab and silver toothed grill portend their too-fast-too-young market crash. The flow of brand. Graffiti, produce, logos, brushstrokes, artistic identities all competing for recognition.  Like many interested in the cheap plastic promise of fantastical playthings, it is found perfectly in the toy-form’s commodic pleasure whose projectable fantasy's complete dissolve of use-value mirrors art’s ostensible own. That like childhood figures of action, producing their jism all over town to heroic ends, painting an identity placed over a muscular blank, the vessel, creating a subject.


 See too: S.O.A.P.Y III at What Pipeline ; Mathis Altmann at Freedman Fitzpatrick