“Rum, sodomy, and the lash” at Eden Eden

(link)

The fritzing signals of today's art are haywire responses to the stimuli of the world's ever more erratic tone, and artists working to contain that nervous expression with their own affectual means discombobulated and freed from its semantic anchors as a coping mechanism for the staggering inanity of much of the world's power structures. Transgression of course becomes the last vestige of intimacy. Giving in to Melgaard's semantic video abuse in an otherwise thoughtful film guarantees some level of reciprocal investment from its viewers willing to allow it be inflicted upon themselves.

And now the old Sunday group-ex full circle en abyme, to haunt us. Our reflections symptomatic of the ruling parameters of its time, reflections of the entities that govern it, expressions of another hidden corporate body, expressions of the frightened and disdainful anti-socialite. The work in the exhibition feels pained in their reflection of the world. That as much as the ever disingenuous CAWD presents itself outside a system that it yearns for, CAWD getting its cake and eating it too.

Aldo Mondino at Eden Eden & Isabella Bortolozzi

(Eden Eden, Isabella Bortolozzi)

Son, see this is an example of... it's like, you know how we're at those estate sales, or perhaps the awful Ikea your Grandmother enjoys taking you to that you seem to enjoy despite your father's preemptive educationals against incognizance. The one's when we're there you ask me what some strange item that your still fresh mind cannot categorize yet has still somehow aesthetically enchanted your young eye? See these are, in a sense, like that. But instead of your father being there to answer that the object in question is a designed-to-look-designed apple corer made by hands your age, or a mediocre lithograph, or a sextant, imagine instead... The ones where we look for chairs like the ones depicted in the glossy and shadow-less reproductions on unnecessarily heavy bond that woman that your father works keeps on that insipid glass table which book she scolded you for touching? Yes, Son, Eeemes, E. Long E. No, Son, no. That will be the day. Your father just repairs and resells the chairs. Son. No son, don't say that. Son, Eames chairs are representations of the bourgoi- The last nail in the coffin of craft towards the industrialization of representation supplanting the - Look the art - Son you know your father has always preferred the unauthoritative use of Quaker- We're middle cla-  Look this is all beside the point. ... No, educated poor, son, we're not poor. Look happiness is- Son. Son the art. Take a step back and look at the art. It posits a godless world son. Imagine a world where the question cannot be answered of what the thing is. Son, imagine a world where no can tell you what something is, no benevolent over-watch granting the bedwarm comfort of knowing, son. No son. Yes, they do look like something familiar don't they. This is the comfort of everything prefixed with the word "Pop-" Pop-music, pop-culture, pop-art. It's about comfort. These, they seem innocuous, but they illustrate the possibility of horror, of the cold arid land pre-rational humans, pre-language, pre-comfort. You see the more categories the artist can position the object between, the more confusing what the object is, the more successful. The object will exist at the tip of the tongue. It will inhabit its representation, but it will not be it. It will replace what looks like comfort with something cold. Yes it might look "neat" son, the in-technical word you chose, it may describe its familiar and affable surface that it uses, but this is just the shell that your still young mind places around it to justify, to hold back the cold dark thing of uncertainty that it wishes to place deep inside you, because it's not that.

Juliette Blightman at Eden Eden, Karma International LA

(Eden Eden , Karma )

Penises, coitus, sleepers, planes, interior's rumpled sheets and clothes, a predilection for fabrics, drifting across subjects in Wolfgang Tillman's diaspora in Vuillard's bobo perfunctory.  The stasis held by the girl aloft, suspended, above pool, and the bathing orgy exemplify its two worlds colliding of innocence and sociality, the quiet purity prior stretching before the banging of sex.