Cooper Jacoby at High Art

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"the surface veneer of this illusion has cracked as it runs up against climate catastrophe, confronting humanity" - great we've cracked the symbolic hieroglyphs. What the PR doesn't answer is why this doomsday is so fucking sexy - there's even a bench to tell you how hot your ass is. But hadn't we just realized global cataclysm was actually pretty fucking banal, refrigerated semis full of corpses just another byline in the inexorable spread of stupidity. This is like the hotrod version, the hollywood version. Lesson:  There is money in making the interior of our doom fun. 

Death Drive Designer: Cooper Jacoby

Cooper Jacoby at Freedman Fitzpatrick

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Apocalypse fabulous, death drive design for-your-home. Designer military, bio, and technologies. Fashionable. Heat sinks in beehives, or the pollinator wasps we'll use to replace them. Ham-handedry matters little with such sexiness; intentional: they're supposed to look like the high-end commodities that they are. An enviable press release reading like a lookbook for the rich's post-collapse homes. Our world's end, celebrate it with a commemorative lamp, luxury mirroring your wealth's participation in it.


See too: Cooper Jacoby at Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden

Cooper Jacoby at Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden

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The Microbial Home, on which these are based, is a fantasy fetishizing design as control, and already, hubristically, forecasting this control onto the Nature it assumes will yeild to it. It's a pretty fucked up proposal, surely. Bees are lovely, but not lovely enough. They must be sold, and thus must be packaged. Jacoby's recasting the bee houses as foreclosed slums would seem to be a critique predicting the ends of these best intentions as in the production Detroit hive like a colony experiencing its own collapse, the ends of production utopias, if the art weren't so sexy too. Like Timur Si-Qin or any of the other techno-fabulists, critique of power often comes with the fetishization and deployment of it, with all the sex that sells in a sort of post-apocalyptic gloss we all seem to have some type subconscious drive toward, this death.


See too: Timur Si-Qin at Carl Kostyál, Simon Denny at MoMA PS1, Ben Schumacher at Musee d’art contemporain de Lyon

“Transatlantic Transparency” at Mathew

(“Transatlantic Transparency” at Mathew New York, Berlin)

In the intentionally bathetic ending of Lerner’s novel (quoted in the press release) the Poet, throughout stricken with self-reflexive paralysis, described by one reviewer as an “examination of just how self-conscious, miserable, and absurd one man can be” arises from the dream of his Madrid fellowship discovering his problems somehow gone the moment he leaves them.

Not that there's anything wrong with that. The exhibition's formalism is criticism only in the sense of contemporary art's allergy to the word, but of course Wilde’s “It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances...” and so. Appearances are politics, and in an age where the image replaces thought, the formalism often exists as an interesting necessary tool. So why does this exhibition feel so defeated before born? Like the press release, it itself uses its stylistic assemblage to bog itself in its own mire, only to get sad about it, defeated by its own appearances.

HE HAD ENOUGH RESPECT FOR PAINTING to quit. Enough respect for quitting to paint. Enough respect for the figure to abstract. For abstraction to hint at the breast. For the breast to ask the model to leave. But I live here, says the model. And I respect that, says the painter. But I have enough respect for respect to insist. For insistence to turn the other cheek. For the other cheek to turn the other cheek. Hence I appear to be shaking my head No.
-Ben Lerner from Angle of Yaw.