Friday, November 25, 2022

David Douard at Serralves


(link)

The trash pile of culture looks different every 20 years. Certain shapes just didn't exist 30 yers ago. Metal logos metastasized and "Every 10 years the art's assemblage reinvents itself as the dumpsters picked through are modernized to the current castoffs and appear new, the waste that evolves along culture until finally an artist is able to rummage up enough LEDs, acrylic panels and Arte Povera catalogs to accumulate the update to our Rauschenberg cardboard clogging the pipes of our forward progress. At least sticks are still in vogue as symbols of the foraging, our original human toil, production."

This "looks like you blew up a shopping mall, like its reassembly after catastrophe, like hangers categorizing airline wreckage. Trying to make sense in debris. Us, a cargo cult. Us, a primitive culture, [these are the] aurochs on our white cave walls. With the debris of culture. Our Mystic auto-anthropology."

"art treats culture as a system of artifacts to be interrogated by its own white light certification process, a factory for meaning production." 

Art becomes cultural waste, the gallery swallows, and you the viewer digest its tract. and "We eat its excitement."

Eventually the malls will look again like this, maybe they already do.