Ben Schumacher at Weiss Falk

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Trading one techno for another, all the gloss of server racks, acrylic and glass exchanged for a roughdraft music fest. The success of fail of this artistic gamble, trading laser cut aluminum for cardboard, is placed on whether people cared for your ideas or that your art had looked like a new idea. It is a proposal.


See too: Ben Schumacher at Musee d’art contemporain de Lyon, Ben Schumacher at Bortolami

Ben Schumacher at Bortolami

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An exhibition as a proposal for an architecture, an exhibition preparatory, preliminary in its sketch, everything here is a “performance,” an inference for projection, the techno-materialism of Schumacher’s practice spun to threads, to the lines of schematics, doodles on photographs reneging the objects that once adorned his exhibitions in favor of the documentary plans, a conceptualism you assemble yourself like IKEA, components stretched thin to dissolution in the dilation of time as speeds approach ludicrous. Look at this documentation, without a thing to be seen anywhere. Schumacher no longer the contractor but the architect, setting up a chains of command as entrepreneur, the only way to increase speed is to oversee those who have been sourced, soon to be Schumacher the CEO.
Techo acceleration useful in limits fraying, swelling with hot-air, to loft itself out of exhibitionary containers and coursed to see itself in skyscrapers, fueled on the fumes of gaseous networks of friend-ibitions, accumulative and outsourced models of growth. If it can get off the ground.

Ben Schumacher at Musee d'art Contemporain de Lyon , David Douard at Johan Berggren , Simon Denny at Portikus

Ben Schumacher at Musee d’art contemporain de Lyon



Since Schumacher’s breakout show at Bortolami its been a speed test of formal attempts to invent himself ahead of the wave of what is sure to be a new style of Techno-conceptuo. Simon Denny too. But it’s an accelerative model, one in which the formal gamesmanship, the hunt for the new october after an eternal september, must continually increase speed if not to be bogged in a style quickly homogenized as the spaces fill. An accumulative method against obsolescence, shiny new newness standing in for conceptual spark. Nothing will ever stand in for the initial rush of the first hit of an exhibition. It’s a Genzken style arms-race premised on art’s competition with the speed of culture as a whole. A losing battle, but a least Schumacher’s good at it.