Anna Uddenberg at The Perimeter

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The Greeks revolutionized ancient sculpture with contrapposto serving cunty, but now we've appropriated whole new asanas. Update figuration with fashion, this makes new. And new fabrics, new frills. You no longer paint the model, you tell the model how to dress. A thrill to play with dolls - they'll wear whatever, bend however. Matisse proved bending women till they're blue everyone found fun. Compositionalizing women for culture. It works! This is cynical but it is maybe naturalism.

Art loves women in culturally approved bondage gear: Cindy Sherman at Metro Pictures, Amalia Ulman at The Gallery at El Centro

Anna Uddenberg at Meredith Rosen Gallery

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Cronenberg baby furniture? American BDSM Airlines x BabyBjörn? You can make distinct things look like other things because the microtization of affect becomes an all encompassing sign system. Think of the distinction between "tactical" t-shirt, "sport" t-shirt, "yoga" t-shirt. The detailing designates the meaning - both real and fake at the same time. Meaning emerges like gender identity. My baby is a tactical baby. Mine is liberal. A performance without origin. So of course the high end sex toys begins to look like baby toys - they are catering to the tastes of the same buyer - who assembles a closet of identity, no different from meaning. These affective layers are what AI is so good at spinning. Certain AI generators ban the  word "Cronenberg." His is too powerful. You start to see things that were always there. The "suggestification" of art. 

Theory of the couch.

The reason we've gotten into upholstery, into couches, chairs and gotten into sleeping bags, is that they infer us. They contain the ghost of the human they were made for. Every chair is a bodily innuendo. And the pervert knows what the decorous don't.

Anna Uddenberg at Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler

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Uddenberg works with the obvious message that's unspoken, that you almost have to force, make explicit, that our cars look like tanned bodies, lingeried accoutrements, there's a sexuality to the leather curves of car interiors.  Which like the bootied bits of Uddenberg's before all but force the issue: the mass majority of sculptural history's content sexual and unspoken by the MET's blue haired.  And everyone now tearing at couches to reveal our innuendo's innards, digging for the implication from the things that caress us.



See too: Jessi Reaves at Bridget Donahue, Olga Balema at High Art (1), Olga Balema at High Art (2),  Torbjørn Rødland at Henie-Onstad Kunstsenter, Anna Uddenberg and Nicolas Ceccaldi at MEGA Foundation, Caroline Mesquita at T293, Alexandra Bircken at Le Crédac & BQ, Nairy Baghramian at Museo Tamayo, Jessi Reaves at Bridget Donahue, Bergen Assembly, Katja Novitskova at Kunsthalle Lissabon

Anna Uddenberg and Nicolas Ceccaldi at MEGA Foundation

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Ceccaldi now making paintings like high-school students from the internet, and Uddenberg's physically manifesting advertorial fetish for both tech and flesh in cyborg refresh to Allen Jones, all the odder for their ambivalence.  Both engaged with embodying cultural representations (which might explain the odd cardboard modernism) where identity is emergent from cultural signs rather than any sort of inherence, becomes currently impossible to imagine an identity outside of cultural signs. Uddenberg's recent sculpture are weirder than Jones' because they seem to emerge from the surrealism of culture itself, rather than the artifact of some dirty boy's head.

See too: “About Face” at Kayne Griffin, Nicolas Ceccaldi at Project Native Informant, Nicolas Ceccaldi at Mathew, David Rappeneau at Queer Thoughts