Saturday, April 25, 2015

Andy Coolquitt at Disjecta

Andy Coolquitt at Disjecta
(link)

Coolquitt's assertion of the tube (and tube forms) a sort of Rhoadesian maneuver, imbuing forms with aura through repeated insistence, exhibitionary marketing campaigns. For Rhoades the pearoefoam mocked the artist product (signatures) of artists hands. The Pollock drip-cum-glue reified as object/product.  Whereas Rhoades attempted dismantling the mythologizing of the artist genius to make its brand establishment happen in front of you, Coolquitt, in several exhibitions past, has already retaken ad nausea the process as a cute cleverness that absorbs anything into its ever encompassing fold. Everything makes sense as "The signature product" of the artist, a pareidolia of artistic significance, taking photos of boxes of tubes. In this exhibition water is deployed from tubes, logs people step on are tube, the artist himself a large tube. Eventually everything, however insipid, begins to look like, and therefore brilliantly become justified and even somehow significant as, an inane tube; call it tube theory.