Juliette Blightman, Dorothy Iannone at Arcadia Missa

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...tarot, images drawn and illuminated shine to bounce around in your head to alight some new substance inside, like any painting. The further you believe in the drawing the more deeply it affects. A charm for wealth eventually brings it through stubborn physical existence to remind you that's what you value, seek. Any object's aboutness, its meaning, it tautologically enacts like a string tied around your finger: the string doesn't necessarily intrinsically symbolize "pick up eggs;" its meaning is conjured by the reminded who tied it. Thus objects are imbued with meaning. Tarot cards tell you they are meaningful.

Which is why Tarot cards are such powerful meaning creation devices - humans are apophenic machines - seeing sense where there may be none, they create it for themselves. Art comes to resemble it.

Magnus Andersen at Neue Alte Brücke & Dorothy Iannone at Air de Paris

It's impossible to measure earnestness. Time de-ironizes and jest is made serious by attention. Saying one is more authentic, or by comparing hierarchically these two is a set-up for defeat. You could say (with a long enough timeline) "the necessities of circumstance turn to virtue." Andersen knows that to survive is to triumph. And so with defeat you must accept its march into visibility. Andersen even got a theme-song for his parade. You can like one more than the other, but you can't say no to it, and like Darren Bader, the one willing to destroy something is the one who controls it, to paraphrase Dune. Thus Andersen straps a bomb to his chest walks into the vault of images, which we his visual hostages, on a long enough timeline, learn to love, and pied man leading children to their deaths.


See too: Darren Bader at Kölnischer Kunstverein, Dorothy Iannone at Peres Projects, Group Show at Neue Alte Brücke

Dorothy Iannone at Peres Projects

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It’s hard not to think of these in terms of what was to come later, this early work stripped of the later iconic cartoon sex of which the artworld’s allergy continually presented itself, that these early works are more pleasing, tasteful, and thus contemporary than the radically “uncomfortable” figures dressed in an unironic over-presence that still don’t get much play today.

See too : Judith Bernstein at Studio Voltaire.