Thursday, February 12, 2015

Josephine Pryde at Arnolfini

Josephine Pryde at Arnolfini
(link)

The instantaneous comfort of Pryde’s generalized image is the flip side to Pop’s surface, not its “style” but its mass consumability. Pop art and its current derivations so concerned with the look they forgot that style was merely the disposable package which delivered the "fun" it promised, artists tricked as though the image itself was desired, forgetting that medium was merely the massage for swallowing the masses, its opiate. People didn’t enjoy Lichtenstein they enjoyed comics, and within its soothing fantasy. Pryde uses Pop's function, the saccharine of instant recognition, variations on the common, whose comfort allow defenses dropped and desire for and easily expended, digested, disposable sweets, a populist bent to criticality, a vehicle of its own propaganda, a shutterstock imaging of normalized categories; if DISimages was the overproduction of shiny new image stock, Pryde delivers instead within the pre-existent of Trojan genres, in which the politics of aesthetics is - one hopes - redistributing the look, the sensibility, of touch.