Frances Stark at greengrassi

(link)

Country and date of US coups looming over pop songs from that year. The level of frission between the two varies.* Grand Funk Railroad's 1973 hit is pretty apt: "We're an American band / We're comin' to your town / We'll help you party it down." Others are less on the nose. The discrepancy provides the interpretability, that poetic fissure. The internal disjuncture on a semantic completion, allowing that sort of blank state that you dear viewer get to ink your own adventure into, wall text or otherwise.  This would be a much less interesting if Stark hadn't for a long time now been investing in bedroom posters as self-construction, adolescent in the good sense. The point isn't being political but in construction oneself as political.


see too: John Baldessari at Sprüth Magers

Frances Stark at Gavin Brown

(link)

You have to admit, artists are grass to the hammering of cultural winds, growing sternly against it while sternly whipped with it.  So more text in space, the billboard space of advertising, of ad copy, of slogans, mottos, quips, of the ability to deliver a phrase into you. Clipped from its context, it floats, wafts with a sort of empty vigor. The blunt brunt of the advertorial, slapping you with words you can read, recognize, but fail their handshake of emotional resonance, whacked with a Whiffle bats, the lack of becomes its main force. The bathos of artistic text, failing, becomes the means of overcoming that hollow form of advertorial address by embodying it, deploying it for all its tragic cruel means.


clipped words: Matt Keegan, Kay Rosen at Grazer Kunstverein, Hanne Lippard, Nora Turato at Metro Pictures, Gene Beery at Shoot the Lobster, Karl Holmqvist at Sant’Andrea de Scaphis, Sue Tompkins at Lisa Cooley, Jenny Holzer at Blenheim Palace, Barbara Kruger at Sprüth Magers Peter Fend at Essex Street, CAWD on Fetish, Frances Stark at Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Frances Stark at Daniel Buchholz and Daniel Buchloz

Frances Stark at Museum of Fine Arts Boston

(link)

Stark's, like Lecky's, a shared concern with the bedroom posters of adolescent coolness, the affective strategy of marketing that often form subjectivity under. And each poster/film a new and effective marketing strategy of coolness, the exhausting inventiveness of the painfully cool, picasso of teenage cool. Cool of any merit expressed with vulnerability: the manufactured cool of Vanilla Ice has nothing on the supreme empathetic but-also-if-not-manufactured-at-least-laying-the-blueprint-for-its-future-pruduction-line cool of, say, K Cobain. But, the point being Stark's cool is a self-manufactured, small business production. They're her own bedroom posters, rather than those of a post-Leckyian sort willing to post those they grew under as some cultural "criticism." Pay attention because even though its exhausting its an outline of escape from that, subjectivity can conform to the vessel without losing its shape, or so Stark would wager.

Past: "[Stark's] a gesture towards admitting the cultural disposability of an art practice of images today that stands over the face of the Deep, Instagram, that Artists can’t get over, blasted in an unstoppable deluge of culture daily. With so many “dealing with it,” detourning it into art  (as if that was meaningful) launching conventional artist weapons in atomized age, Stark’s insistence in the form's cheapness itself, its mixtape assemblage of a disposable music video, affirms her as one of the few who actually get it." Click: Frances Stark at Daniel Buchholz and Daniel Buchloz


See too: Mark Leckey at Haus Der Kunst + Kunsthalle Basel, Frances Stark at Daniel Buchholz and Daniel Buchloz

Frances Stark at Daniel Buchholz and Daniel Buchloz



Stark’s teenage formality distinct Matthew Brannon’s hypochondriac bourgeois, her posters and videos, though clean, contain a level of humanist existential goo. Stark drawing from DIY-punk ethos letting it all hang out the canvas, a gesture towards admitting the cultural disposability of art practice based in images today that stands over the face of the Deep, Instagram. Artists can’t get over it, blasted in an unstoppable deluge of culture daily. With so many “dealing with it,” detourning it into art, as if that was meaningful, launching conventional artist weapons in atomized age, Stark’s insistence in the forms cheapness itself, its mixtape assemblage of a disposable music video, affirms her as one of the few who actually get it.