Michael Beutler at Spike Island

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Making monumental art with unimpressive tools whose roots in the child-like art-n-crafts freedom of imagination are run amok fueled by grandeur: a work ethic showy while retaining its unpretentious strategies of the vernacular. Like Tuazon its interest is in the wonder of construction itself, but whereas Tuazon's protestant ethic posits a lot of somber logs Beutler seems interested in the impressive monumentality of structure itself, seeing your imagination huge and erect.


See too: Oscar Tuazon at Le Consortium & Paradise Garage, Chris Burden Metropolis II at LACMA

Josephine Pryde at Arnolfini

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The instantaneous comfort of Pryde’s generalized image is the flip side to Pop’s surface, not its “style” but its mass consumability. Pop art and its current derivations so concerned with the look they forgot that style was merely the disposable package which delivered the "fun" it promised, artists tricked as though the image itself was desired, forgetting that medium was merely the massage for swallowing the masses, its opiate. People didn’t enjoy Lichtenstein they enjoyed comics, and within its soothing fantasy. Pryde uses Pop's function, the saccharine of instant recognition, variations on the common, whose comfort allow defenses dropped and desire for and easily expended, digested, disposable sweets, a populist bent to criticality, a vehicle of its own propaganda, a shutterstock imaging of normalized categories; if DISimages was the overproduction of shiny new image stock, Pryde delivers instead within the pre-existent of Trojan genres, in which the politics of aesthetics is - one hopes - redistributing the look, the sensibility, of touch.

Willem de Rooij at Arnolfini

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Every bouquet is the package of “nature’s” beauty amped to steroidic artificiality by its mechanization under Capital’s fuel. Beauty produced by destroying natural significance given over to its industrialization. Flowers no longer natural rarities of amazing sensuality but disposable and instantaneous orgies. Of which De Rooij’s 95 variety bouquet is its endgame, numbers governing the bottom line (95 of any variety) over attunement to any individual heterogeneity of genus, species, taste, knowledge or sensitivity. It is to flowers what the frenzied visible of pornography is to sex; the natural giving way to industrial significance. Like 2.5 years of “Riots, Protest, Mourning and Commemoration” photographs, in their accumulation they speak not to individual situations but, through their ordering, instead render how a culture itself chooses to visualize and represent and thus define its concepts, and de Rooij within that, artificially cold, useful only for what can be conceptually extracted (produced) from it, by say a writer.