Chadwick Rantanen at Michael Benevento Gallery & Aria Dean at Progetto

(Benevento, Progetto)

Silent instruments, silence musicians. Artists castrate sound. What is the resonance of mute instrument? What is the sound of one hand clapping? Between the form and the lost notes is the gap, the fissure allowing the viewer fill meaning in that distance. Blue ball you until you mean it. 

Aria Dean at Greene Naftali

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The disquiet is a lack, everything here is removal. The crash crash minimalism is instead a computer rendering - the handsy violence of Chamberlin reproduced in silicon gum, printed. Blank assets of a Looney Tunes world. What if we removed all this, life? A gray goo situation, the jouissant world replaced with... the basest simplest desire of self reproduction. The gray goo scenario is a metaphor for art, for everything, what if our propagation is what it's all about? Highest achievement, another art exhibition. The artist gets out the goo. 

Dean making work without any of the generalized signifiers of Black art, while avowing her "ongoing pursuit of art that models the structure of Blackness." Dean's is a work that is scrubbed. This scrubbing would be a fertile ground for critical hooha, but mostly it is an affective one, in the sense that it's almost affectless, chilly. Slaughterhouse modernism, art galleries, the anti-ligature rooms of our age. "A room full of paintings that won't let you kill yourself."

See too: Aria Dean at The Renaissance Society, Melvin Edwards at Daniel Buchholz

Aria Dean at The Renaissance Society

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   Note: the PR contains the password to view the film. 

Slaughterhouse are marked by efficiency in death, a tenet of modernism. So if everything comes to resemble a slaughterhouse... that's true too. Modernism is a slaughterhouse, the utopian impulse was turned against us as efficiency to extrapolate realty capital, turn cities into glass, into "luxury" rent harvest machines. The slaughterhouse curves a Richard Serra - so the bovine experiences a merry temple grand in relaxation of its muscle before getting its captive bolt steel. We all know what happens in slaughterhouses. People say if people only knew what happened they wouldn't eat meat. But people know. People know of world's injustice. They know the the unfairness. The darkness in cobalt mines. That's not the problem. We humans are too adept at compartmentalization. We train everyday on trains full of animals to remove ourselves from the problem of identification with others. Beating hearts in the floorboards of every human on your commute.  But I think we're alone now, where there is nothing scarier than the monster in the closet of your mind, guilt.