Dora Budor at Nottingham Contemporary

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The less things are sci-fi, the more they get drab. Sci-fi, even at its most dystopian, portends a certain hope: there is a future we can think. But as things turn, they become more minimal, more mud, you become more present, grounded, which is dull. Surely this is point of experience. To be here, interminably. 

This cardboard thing reflects piss onto your shoes, your thought onto your shoes, your blood pounding in your ears, your tinnitus at 11. The world becomes so beige that your functional biology becomes of interest. Boredom is when you most feel alive. Again, again, again, the artist shows, the world turns, heart beats. The press release redirects thought like piss towards the 19th century, pissing on your shoes for you. I feel alive being peed on. This is life, but let's do science fiction as dystopian: imagine you can pee on the gallery. See, hope. Territory marked with thought, piss.

"...which is what we love those big sci-fi budgets for, the vast quantity of ash." Dora Budor at Kunsthalle Basel

Dora Budor at Kunsthalle Basel

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A Pierre Hughye for the post-apocalypse, Budor's maybe a bit more invested in theatrics, the movies, and less in magic, instead in its dumbness, which is what we love those big sci-fi budgets for, the vast quantity of ash.

“Flat Neighbors” at Rachel Uffner



Assemblage surrealism 2.0
The fallout of semiotic manicism/collapse/supernova* of the 00’s assemblage, Harrison, Genzken, Pernice et al, the exploding of Unmonumental’s detritus, left the next generation picking cultural rubble. A post-apocalyptic cargo-cult, artists, still wanting to believe, began to reassemble totems of cultural meaning. Staedelschulites rehashing a form of ready-made-marxist-surrealism, societie's tchotchkies made to “speak” the tongues of the Invisible Hand, worship of gods who must be crazy. Post-Lieske - the real rabble of Neue Alte Brucke, Pro-Choice, etc. - Ceccaldi, Yngve Holen and everyone else - rearranging/collaging/juxtaposing the signs of capital as some sort of anti-altar to them - the whole mandala phenomenon, tableaus of cultural artifacts, seen again and again and again on the rugs of art fairs everywhere - finally hitting bedrock in the strip-mine of Darren Bader just arranging capital’s objects on the floor.

But so look see, at Rachel Uffner, as the next generation assembles, re-erect, no longer a strange spiritualism in letting the markets speak their hallucinations, but primordial constructions in its own. Still highly surrealist in its mashing of lobster- biology with tele-electronics in the continuously re-imagined sphere of bio-tech. Future's frogs in glass housing shan't live alone. The Bivalve shell rises, the new theory of design, Rough and smooth, coarse and erotic. The oyster like a hand made to hold the Apple product, what a perfect symbol for our biomechanical cybernetics. The limits of the hard body turning over into soft. Look at us evolve to our newfound worlds underwater. Do we really think a PowerRanger would own Elad Lassry?.

*so caught up in this chaos of signs and surface effects, it's
precisely because it's so serious about space: In a time when space
and image lose their distinction, and the old, ideal distance
between viewer and object is always already filled up and
occupied by a thousand communications, sculpture, too, finds
ways of making itself multi-surfaced and schizo-temporal. In
order to re-occupy our contemporary no-space, it trades in its
timeless pose for a temporary one, or for a manic series of
apearances. - Kelsey on Harrison’s semio-manicism.