Saturday, June 27, 2015

Marte Eknæs, Sean Raspet at Room East

Marte Eknæs, Sean Raspet at Room East
(link)

Fincher turned the Calculation of Negligence into nihilistic mantra for millions of angst ridden boys, finding solace for their jade in a new schizo-sado-masculinity, solace in a brutality ending in terrorist fantasies of high-rises burning. It felt like relief. The main character's lavish condo exploding from a gas leak was ostensibly the best thing that ever happened to him. The non-accident we later learn is a symptom stemming from the very repressive bourgeois lifestyle it destroys. That the terrorist act was itself an expression of late-capitalist detachment, the same thing that Baudrillard would later claim in his "The Spirit of Terrorism" that capitalism expressed a sort of auto-terrorism, boredom itself bringing the towers down. The Pop success of both at least clarifies the latent cultural desire we have for the fantasy of watching the world burn so long as they are sublimated (make us able to believe we would never actually desire to see them enacted) through the filters of acceptable and neutering forms, pop-film or philosophy, and here art.

Anyway Eknaes and Raspet set the gallery on pins and needles, priming it for any disaster always unknown, anything because everything looks pretty spooky.

But we desire it.


See too: Sean Raspet at Société and Sean Raspet at Jessica Silverman