Saturday, June 20, 2015

Rivane Neuenschwander at Tanya Bonakdar

Rivane Neuenschwander at Tanya Bonakdar
(link)

The trope of conceptual art is the semantic rupture between signifier and signified, a loss in meaning becoming is pathos.  Each Neuenshwander work comes with a set of conceptual instructions documenting this translation. e.g:
Fear of fear (dengue fever), a series of photographs taken with a pinhole camera depicting a person dressed in the guise of a dengue mosquito traveling through the streets of the artist’s hometown, Belo Horizonte, Brazil. Recalling carnival costumes worn in Brazilian villages, the image of the mosquito may inspire dread as Brazil currently combats a sharp rise in dengue fever cases due to people hoarding water (the insects’ breeding ground) in the wake of a severe draught in the south eastern part of the country. Traveling through Belo Horizonte’s tourist sites, parks and peripheral neighborhoods...
 A "misunderstanding" of tone, forcing a culture's vibrance to speak about its malady, affords a rupture, an irony of Foster-Wallacian sadness of a culture, colliding opposite symbols apposite, losing their signifieds (vibrancy championing death, and death mocked childishly); a loss at the heart of most Neuenshwander work, and trope of much permutation-conceptualism, signs run through culture in pre-packaged ways to make it "speak" of that culture.
Interestingly this work isn't even shown in CAD's documentation of the show, it seems it needn't be either, the signs merely becoming metonyms for this extended narrative, each object a blank abstraction until limned by the text.

And see too: On Kawara at the Guggenheim