Eliza Douglas at VI, VII

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Culture/commodities valorize their objects with simple bludgeons: the celebrity holds the product, the commercial assigns attitude. Our knowledge of its arithmetic does not cancel it. The code still functions. Brand is the level we fight on. The Whitney Biennial weathered months of protest until the attacks came at their identity, a rebranding "The Teargas Biennial," and suddenly softened their militancy. (CAWD wrote an essay about this here.) Museum brand in turn forms its signet in the installation view, architecture watermarks the photographs, walls as the celebrity hands cradling the art. Why else would Christopher Williams be shipping walls across continents? More celebrity hands. These celebrity hands have been chopped off, stolen, dead hands made to hold. Like as teen you photoshopped yourself kissing Johnny Depp. It would be interesting if a lawsuit developed. Like when the Guggenheim sued Paul McCarthy and Mike Bouchet (again the attack was at brand level.) But Douglas's theft is probably flattering, who doesn't want people stanning for them, building at home reliquaries to them, Johnny Depp, The Whitney, they live off our reverence to them.  

Eliza Douglas at Neue Alte Brücke

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The setting as the halo, the performance as the backer to the souvenir. Literally. Swirl the cultural object. "appends the abstraction we want, that we associate with painting while giving the value of the photographic, the 'abstraction' performs the work of 'art'. ...the mechanistic process of reproduction doesn't ruin it." The symbolic processes of art become literal, literalification.

Is all art just twirling culture into composition? to make it mean as art? Finding the twist you like?

See too: Eliza Douglas, Calida Rawles at Various Small Fires, 

 

Eliza Douglas at Overduin & Co. and Tina Braegger at Friends Indeed

(Overduin, Friends)

Perform our little tortures of cultures. Twisting its nipples to make it say uncle, make it "speak." This stands for criticality. A corpse forced to dance with all the electricity of abstraction. Take culture, give it a little stir. This is our auto-ritual. This is how we make it "mean." Stand in for meaning. These aren't paintings of the t-shirts, these are the t-shirts. 

See too:Eliza Douglas at Overduin & Co., Eliza Douglas at Air de Paris, “No Joke” at Milieu

Eliza Douglas at Air de Paris

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Paint becomes simply the candied shell to painting's cultural myth. Doesn't matter how thin because it's merely the container/shape of our love for "painting." As thin as marginally abstracted t-shirts. Drawing ripples in surface to activate the beneath, tap the vast depths of painting's cultural wealth, this the watermelon.


Previously: (1)Julie Beaufils at Balice Hertling, (2)Marlene Dumas at Zeno X, (3)Svenja Deininger at Collezione Maramotti
See too: Eliza Douglas at Overduin & Co.

Eliza Douglas at Overduin & Co.

(link)

Not so interesting perhaps from a PierreMenard/Sturtevantian vantage (the whole tongue louse, deterritorial author theft well trod), but maybe as a continuation of Douglas' clever ideas for coating painting in a candy shell, creating frames that exist as excuses for painting. Like before's hands which cast spells for some sloppy "painterly moment." They feel sorta cheap (it would not be the first time the artist has ordered paintings from China) and that seems too, the point, like Smith's lame name, a mere means to fill an exhibition.

In late 2014, hearing that many schools in Europe were free, she called a friend who had gone to the Städelschule in Frankfurt—one of the top art schools in the world, with a reputation for fostering experimental work. She set up a Skype date with a professor, painter Willem de Rooij. Then, with two weeks to go before the meeting, she got to work. 

Douglas began painting abstract forms on random objects around her house—aluminum foil, found images, a set of Batman bed sheets—and photographed the results. She reproduced the images on small canvases using the kind of print-on-demand machines you find at CVS and Walmart, then painted over them again. 

“I thought it was a good way to get a lot of decent-looking stuff made really quickly,” Douglas says now. “I was thinking about how I might be able to get him to think that I was doing something more elaborate than what I really was.” -Taylor Dafoe, artnet