Monday, January 22, 2018

David Lieske at Lovaas Projects


(link)
Thomas Meinecke: Yes, and did you come to any results? 
David Lieske: Not really. In the end, this magazine embodies complete ambivalence altogether and, as it is, that’s enough for me. Even more so that’s what I find particularly interesting and admirable about it as the same is true for the art that I want to exhibit and that I am promoting – its greatest aim should be to generate the highest level of ambivalence. In the same sense I am unsure whether what I am proposing here as my exhibition could still be called art.

An ambivalence at the heart of much of art today displayed as presentations of objects left to the viewer with a "deal with it" coolness, figurative sunglasses donned. An ambivalence stemming from the pictures generation, authorship and authority questioned, and now artists - as stated previous - picking through semio-rubble and arranging it in quasi-mystical totems of the anthropologically alienated. Artists are like primitives to droppings of powerful Mass Culture, even its "special interest magazines," sifting through it with an almost reverence to its ability to "mean" in a way art likely never will, artists become in awe of Culture, develop intense interests in its niches, its ability to generate slight amounts of slack in its culturally tight bunghole through the ambiguity of its insertion, the insertion that art attempts to duplicate with its ambivalence, as if ambivalence itself opens new space, like one where maybe art doesn't have to mean.


See too: David Lieske at MUMOK