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Tuesday, February 21, 2023

Gowoon Lee at Meredith Rosen Gallery


(link)

An enhanced interrogation on our own childhood's wet eyed tube intake. Art History's torture of Disney rodents: Oldenburg, Foulkes, Pensato, McCarthy, Beeple, et al.  Attaching artistic electrodes to the commodified rabbits and amplifying pain. Our moment today: "the body reappears and it appears as a cartoon, which we're mad about." Why? Abstraction: "Our bodies extrapolated from the growing prevalence of data and numbers domineering discussions of humans. The "broad picture" we use for governance. People as populations. Everything feels like a cartoon in this virtuality because you can do great violence to it. A million jobs lost, a million jobs gained. Tom whacks at Jerry with a mallet like an axe. Jerry distends."

"...comedy premised on slapstick’s violence upon the real, stretching the real into a comic absurdity, teasing a threat to break it, which rationalizing this discrepancy forced laughter in children...What may be interesting about this show is that we have defined the moment, the kids grown on cartoons have arrived and their childhoods have coincidentally, absurdly, become the accurate depictions of the way the world has begun to feel, and will soon become generic, but at least we'll get to stop repeating ourselves."