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Thursday, September 26, 2019

Lucy Bull at High Art


(link)

Psychedelia; Google deep dreams of Kahlo's flowers. Vulvas like volcanos, magma, geologic surveys. Abstraction was once "what you see is what you see" until what you saw became convoluted, full of hallucination and sexual. The press release says as much, and is good to admit as much, our complete return to surrealism. With better psychoactives. Surrealism works for today as art must be a fount eternal, and so the point today is to overlay as much as information as possible, until it blurs, slips, make inkblots with lsd.

"The boringness of Google's "Deep Dream" project was in making explicit the pareidolia latent, [what was] hidden in carpets and noise and threatened distrust in seeing, those momentary misrecognitions and ghosts in corners. Humans are apophenic machines - made to "see things." The inkblot innuendo was an essential of abstraction that was far too impure for post-war painting to deal with: it would have limited abstraction to the mere human, like Cecily Brown's meaty innuendos, very untranscendent in an era when people were throwing around the possibility of universals. Op-art was a cheap imitation of the purer form's sanctity; Op-art rested on physiologic parlor tricks of biological mechanics rather than the more strict and thus universal forms of abstraction that could communicate with dolphins and gods."


see too: Larry Poons at Michael Jon & Alan