Saturday, August 22, 2015

Rasmus Røhling at Sismografo

Rasmus Rohling at Sismografo
(link)

There's got to be space for boring work too, and if you've got 35 minutes to kill with some maddeningly slow and turgid exhaust you could do worse than sit with Røhling's videos, just know there's no "payoff" at the end, the continually distending thought, adhered with pauses, erms, and ums, layout a mess that like the press release are kin a studio visit with an artist's palsied logorrhea more than any "finished work." This is itself a point in the PR - "artwork is the absence of an artist" and so an ever extending never coallescing complication of an impossible mess of clotting relevance keeps the artist uncomfortably mouth-breathingly close. Autoenucleation, the poetic medical term for a person who, generally mentally unstable, personally removes their own eyes, written in acrostic and adorning a t-shirt, is a nice tagline for the exhibition, because you'll want to, but spooning out your orbitals won't help, (nor smashing the inspid mirror art), because Røhling's t-shirt evidences him as a groupie in the apoclyptic cult of an anti-retinal art, having already removed their eyes for a torturous iconoclasm-against-iconoclasm that finds metaphor in the mental penetration-against-will of overblown violence xenomorph facehuggers, the thinker.