Saturday, December 15, 2018

Nina Beier at Metro Pictures


(link)

The world converted to nougat, or asphalt. Expeller pressed in great lengths. Would you like your tar with nuggets? Adding peanuts makes it a Snickers, emulsification with added soap and water makes it cold-mix asphalt-concrete.  The Mars bar is similar to the American Milky Way (which is different than the European Milky Way which is more like an American 3 Musketeers.) The American Milky Way produces about 25 thousand miles of its bar a year. This is about double the 13 thousand of miles of roadway the US adds a year. Weirdly human use of asphalt predates human use of chocolate by a couple millennia, and weirdly nearly 99% of asphalt concrete is recycled, turned back into roads, whereas all those miles of chocolate nugget are passed down pipes in brown cigars. How many miles of brown cigars does the average person move?  We can convert things to other things through these points of pass through, surrealism predicated on making things look like other things, this ability for misrecognition that capitalism has gotten so adept at my making everything so convertible for other things that everything really does feel like a number, like a cartoon, like nugget, like asphalt, feel like shit, because the world fungible with it.


See too: Nina Beier at David Roberts Art Foundation Nina Beier at Kunstverein HamburgNina Beier at Croy Nielsen