Saturday, March 28, 2015

Leo Gabin at Elizabeth Dee

Leo Gabin at Elizabeth Dee
(link)

It's easy to make fun of Gabin putting themselves out there as a band in so many photos with sunglasses and distressed jeans, in front of fashionably distressed paintings, but they are putting themselves out there, naked behind a front of the Pop posture lost in attrition to an artworld that claims interest outside it. Though I think this kind of stuff is more acceptable in the less image-neurotic Europe.
For the video at Dee, a question that will never be answered but continually asked is whether this "faithful" adaption of Korine's novel is of interest itself, or an excuse to lace together internet's already wildly great "found" footage (like insipid painting's thieved from so many painters) under some rational pretense of a "cover" to give it a rationality and making it mean something "more" than the libidinal enjoyment they had already previously contained, a video akin so many music videos; to which the answer is that it of course, cynically, doesn't matter because it's merely meant as the reflection of American culture in the sunglasses of these young men, Belgian to Bushwick. Korine's launching of conceptual black-holes worthy of Jordan Wolfson into mass culture was at least a Trojan horse worthy of its morally blinding spectacle, here its cover seems to have taken a step back into the mild mannerism of art. At least this kind of reprehensibility is enjoyable.