(link)
manifesting pedagogy and social reproduction in object form was never going to be exactly "fun," and the soft-authority is deployed with a humor so dry as to almost be nonexistent (its own form of comedy) and even when the stand-up exists it is deprecated to near loss, fury, all but calling the whole thing, whole project, the teacher that Nogle is as "fucking losers." (admission-of is repeatedly the point). Assessment and authority and its role in social-reproduction is as an aesthetic as much as anything and one that Nogle has for some time now enjoyed erecting in art spaces. (It seems the funnier stuff goes to storage.) And Nogle's interest in this loveably unfun thing we call bureaucracy* seems to be for its hairy, ensnaring and otherwise tangly qualities. Enjoyment seems less important than the slowly painting and then identifying one's hands, yours and hers, with a faint perfume of red, so that "you're going to regret clapping in the end." But reproducing it in you, teaching.
*conceptual art has always had some sort of quasi-love affair with bureaucracy, legalese, instructions, and always pressing "expression" through this grate of whatever schematics. Nogle, a grade school teacher and graduate of Mary Kelly's UCLA program (a program supposedly DEEP into Lacanian psychoanalysis) and who herself, Kelly, had her own malignant-bodily comedy-spoof on conceptualism. And so it's no surprise that Nogle's is obviously in the grand lineage birthing some demon form of bureaucratic "socially-adjusted" conceptual art, forcing it to speak through the lenses of current dominant forms of socially "tuned behavior."
Pregnant bureaucracy: Marianne Wex at Tanya Leighton
