Simon Fujiwara at Dvir

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Among those trying to reassemble meaning in the fallout of Genzken and Harrison's cultural TNTing, Fujiwara's accumulations of content are not the endless permutations of cultural arrangements that make culture "speak," ala Danny McDonald et al. Instead they seem a return to narrative invested in its display systems that constructs that cultural story, history, myth, not just our garbage. Whether or not it actually assembles meaning, it at least looks a little more like it, by rebuilding the structures that construct it.


See too: Gertrude Abercrombie at Karma, David Lieske at MUMOK, Simon Fujiwara at Dvir (1)

Latifa Echakhch at Dvir

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These occasional perspective oddities, switches to god's eye view. Exchanging the usual viewing experience for a maximum the information. A maximum information which stands in for the viewing itself, a purely fictional realm made for documentation. "Like a cartography on the ground" like god arranging his terrain, the pins on the map arrange the world, only the overseer, the omniscience we crave.


See too: Jessica Vaughn at Martos

Simon Fujiwara at Dvir

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"In Dvir Gallery in the south of Tel Aviv, Israel, Fujiwara is showing Hope House, a life-size reconstruction of the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam.""The installation is based on a 3-D model of the Anne Frank House sold at the house’s gift shop." -artnet.com

Fujiwara: "I was teaching in Amsterdam and wanted to take the students to see the house as we were discussing monuments and how ideology translates into material language."
"The Anne Frank House [...] is one of the few places where every mundane detail of a home—door handles, wallpaper, floorboards—transcend their material status and become symbols of tragedy and hope."
"Inside the house, I was told by the guide that almost nothing of the original house remains except for the structure. That the house was only purchased after the making of the first Hollywood film about Anne Frank and that it had since undergone several renovations to make it look as authentic as possible."


The "Authentic" being the sort of transpositional point for slippage, i.e. the selection of what is an "authentic" experience of a house that people wait 3 hours to see hungry but full of preconceived notions of what the Anne Frank house is. Accuracy isn't necessarily Authenticity (and even "accuracy" historians will note allows the latitude for ideologic creep). An authentic experience becomes the decisions of a group of people whose individual definitions and desires of what constitutes "authentic" are physically manifested in decoration, their subjective desires as carpet choice, photo arrangements. Fujiwara's garishly contradictory furnishing provides a sort of metastasized version, cartoonification of ideological creep, a funhouse of representation, the subject of the creator on view more than any historical artifact, like any historical retelling.



See too: Mathis Altmann at Freedman Fitzpatrick