Sunday, February 21, 2016

Henrik Olesen at Reena Spaulings

Henrik Olesen at Reena Spaulings
(link)

I don't know if anyone remembers Garbriel Kuri risen to prominence by interjecting globalist pluralism into modernist austerity, tin cans into rectangles, but Olesen asserts the filthy body into the sexless/bodyless vernacular of conceptualism, all those conceptual gestures of cutting gallery walls, photocopied images, and philosophical referentials, are with Olesen given to an unclean version. Meat and Christian martyrs are two things one shouldn't mention when playing with the neat rationality of conceptual art. It's "dirty." And the screws should be neatly gridded, they shouldn't resemble deformity. Like Alan Turing, paragon of rationality and computer logic - that clean efficient purity - until he wasn't in the eyes of society so bent on binary, was stripped of everything and given breasts as if that would somehow be better to have a breasted man without libido, is its own minimalism, a bent version of society's high ideals, this conceptual art so clean.