Ei Arakawa at Overduin & Co.

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Assembles references as a series of gestures - not quite gathered but shrugged towards. A sort of breeze of its symbols, a perfume of content. The most interesting thing in Arakawa is the ability to be about something without saying quite anything about it. Parental painting turned to digital displays. Content exhumed and glitzed. Quote books. An "opera." A breeze. What is to be learned here is the ability to treat content with the lightest touch, to barely use it, to just sorta let it lift itself barely into air. 

Ei Arakawa at Artists Space

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Was Arakawa's always just a relational aesthetics program upgraded for networks? A restaurant of friends, a social gathering as exhibitionary lighthouse beacon? The Radiants. Less exhibitions than event organizing. You make it up on the spot. This begets The Fear: a "low-grade Stockholm syndrome that many people engaged in participatory art suffer, the primary symptom being their inability to accept that something quite underwhelming could result from so much time and energy spent in captive social engagement." ... "to begin to understand how art institutions might be attracted to participatory art as an instinctive form of biological survival."

Because: the system shifts from content generation to interactivity itself, turning itself into interface for the user/viewer to self-produce. This is the turnkey-operation entrepreneurial dream, in which as long as the structure is up and running "content-revenue" will self-generate, perfect museum lobby bait. It fulfills the institutional functions in their programs whose goals like "outreach" have kids painting in the style of those artist to see themselves as, and mimicking the corporate strategies [speaker invites] as a manic oversized art-as-cartoon-absurdity version constructing a real crowdpleaser if there ever was one.

Ei Arakawa at Kunstverein Dusseldorf

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artwork's origin dates as astrologic charts, your level of trust in the celestially telling matters less than the overall strategy: turning an artwork to an interpretable state and blinking, tea leaf divination in sporty Vegas-odds inkblots. We're primed to see meaning in information, in art, particularly when so bright and shiny, and thus here's lots to be said about these works, interpretation to be done, they'll pour forth all you are willing to extract from them. Perfect analysands. Like the wacky inflatable arm man drawing eyes to dealerships, Arakawa understands the qualifiers for "art," performing them with wacky panache, theatricalizing the artwork as a caricature of attention, art played to show its now quite standardized set of rules.


See too: Ei Arakawa at Taka Ishii & Peter Halley at Modern Art, Ian Rosen at The Finley, And so Quarterly has finally come to pass.

“Lemurenheim” at Meyer Kainer

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Every 10 years assemblage reinvigorates itself as the dumpsters picked through are modernized to the current castoffs and appear new, the waste that evolves along culture until finally an artist is able to rummage up enough LEDs, acrylic panels and Arte Povera catalogs to accumulate the update to our Rauschenberg cardboard clogging the pipes of our forward progress. At least sticks are still in vogue as symbols of the foraging, our original human toil, production.



See too: Ei Arakawa at Taka Ishii & Peter Halley at Modern Art, Kerstin Brätsch at Gio Marconi, DAS INSTITÜT at Serpentine Gallery, KAYA at Deborah Schamoni,

Ei Arakawa at Taka Ishii & Peter Halley at Modern Art

(Ei Arakawa at Taka Ishii, Peter Halley at Modern Art)

Arakawa's funneling of history into technologic codes (1959 Gutai represented on arduino Lite-Brite) isn't so interesting a metaphor for whatever societal technologic umbrella* as it is for artists use of history as content pre-legitimated, as a caricaturesque. And CAD's comparison to Halley here today is apt: expressionist rendered binary, computational, circuitry and cells. History reappears, history still shines through, but you get to exist as it. "Contemporary Art, a system in which the production of artistic meaning is itself made clear as a series of gestures and movements that encode work with whatever aura is distinct to contemporary art separate from the objects subsumed."


See too: “Room & Board & Crate & Barrel & Mother Vertical” at Midway Contemporary Art, Karl Holmqvist and Ei Arakawa at Overduin & Co.

*e.g. PR's "Furthermore, the digitalized and re-appropriated paintings question how our current digital condition and networked society influences the state of painting"

“Room & Board & Crate & Barrel & Mother Vertical” at Midway Contemporary Art

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Delivered with the PR's concepts as talking points, Arakawa's content delivery system continually refreshes itself through chameleon adoption of the background artists and cultures upcycled into its staging system under the spotlight of Contemporary Art, a system in which the production of artistic meaning is itself made clear as a series of gestures and movements that encode work with whatever aura is distinct to contemporary art separate from the objects subsumed. Anyone could play along at home. Arakawa may or may not have instigated the current trend for dancing in front of paintings as a means to accredit them, but he was the one to make it the focal point, and while everyone wants to go back to Gutai, Arakawa didn't need the paint as sediment of the action still mechanistically marking the authorial hand, the semio-social spirit would embed itself without touch.


See too: Karl Holmqvist and Ei Arakawa at Overduin & Co., And so Quarterly has finally come to pass.

And so Quarterly has finally come to pass.

As the water tinges red, accumulating imitators who with ease replicate its system, seeking a piece of its pie, provide competition threatening CAD's monopoly of art world visibility, it evolves new systems, a new hustle to keep it at the forefront of this fragile new visibility-ecosystem of attention.

And so what form does the new extension take but an anabolic enhanced CV, the literalization of artist pedigree. CAD's system still clinging to the mass feed, a linear flow of artist accumulative practice, ignoring the "web" for a singular fount, flow, mainlining the image. CAD has professed disinterest in criticism as part of its institution, and the hegemonic power of the visible remains its brilliant main structure. An accumulative method which monopolizes the territory art stands on: documentation. Control the field of making visible. The only way to beat CAD now is to be faster than it. Other "features" promoted by competing websites has nothing on the completest vision of CAD as the arbitrator of the artworld's visibility.

Perusing the first of the 3, the speed of finding patterns in an artist practice becomes infinitely faster, and here we see the importance of Arakawa's body doing something, anything, an action to conjure the documentation.


See too: "The Sea" at Mu.Zee, Gina Folly and Mandla Reuter at SALTS,  “Dai Hanzhi: 5000 Artists” at Witte de With

“The Radiants” at Bortolami

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"The Radiants."

See too : Karl Holmqvist and Ei Arakawa at Overduin & Co. , Stefan Tcherepnin at Freedman Fitzpatrick

Karl Holmqvist and Ei Arakawa at Overduin & Co.

(link)

At his Bard MFA Arakawa created and ran a bar in the concrete center of the summer program already known for parties, a means of reifying the all important social relations of schools and friends to its site of exchange, and in the several hundred exhibitions since Arakawa’s Friendibitions have become a means of rapidly dispersing the self into a ballyhooed network, burying the author for the friends he can raise. Holmqvists interest in redundancy and quasi-childlike carefree fit almost too well with with Arakawa’s quasi-spirituality and redundant-idealism exposing the bedrock of its child-like unstoppability, that like equating Bucky-balls (the most art over-referenced object of all time) to a Childhood playgrounds as well the mountainous Dolly Parton Nuclear Plant, its less about the objects themselves and more about just getting it filled with everyone linked in.


See too : Ben Shumacher at Bortolami , Stefan Tcherepnin at Freedman Fitzpatrick.html , Will Benedict at Bergen Kunsthalle