Ghislaine Leung at Museum Abteiberg

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The detective novel. evidence. monoliths. clue. diversion. Suspicion. Creep. examination under light. walls dusted for prints. reading for signs. to solve. to produce MEANING. a portrait, forensic psychology. But, you say, CAWD has railed against the viewer deputized as detective, making exhibitions as hunt for the story trailed clues. (i.e. That's a Kippenberger in a frame by Leung, the Beuys drawings have a history, the onions' backstory. The walls reveal writing.) And you, dear viewer, on the hunt. The goal of this art is to produce a meaning-like affect in objects. The greatest goal is a suspicion without end - a mechanized fount of art. On the other hand, It feels like we can get rid of all this, say these objects do not meaningfully add up, preferably, and still there is something here. A distinction important. What Hainley called "the affect and the sensorial in a tradition of conceptual or minimalist work." or question of "when is the smell coming from the item and when it is manufactured without the thing." Important:  a meaning not generally associated, a meaning dissociated. "an emotional response repeatedly evoked in situations in which the action tendency that is associated with the emotion proves irrelevant or unnecessary" causes desensitization. "WELCOME"

What Fatima Hellberg called Leung's "ambivalent logic spaces" - their care for us is dissociated- which is our general experience but which we are socialized to endure.  The replacement of [sensitivity, emotion, humanity, our utterance] with not necessarily colder forms, but more efficient. A provided more efficient sentiment. (A more efficient conceptual art? Museum space architecture as invisible socialization.) Made apparent by the continuous multiplying of forms, "Welcome", into a chorus of commodified sentiment. Signing "The Boss." Capital providing our utterances with balloons that kill turtles. ("The hospitalization of sentiment.") The socialization of space or more accurately that spaces are socialization. Now estranged. Ir-relational aesthetics?

See too: Philippe Parreno at Esther Schipper, Carolyn Lazard at Essex Street, Ghislaine Leung at Cabinet, Ghislaine Leung at Chisenhale & Essex Street, Ghislaine Leung at Künstleraus Stuttgart

Ghislaine Leung at Cabinet

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0465773005 is the title of this show, a glowing sign within the show, as well as an H&M "cashmere blend" sweater that is only 10% cashmere. This could be a coincidence (though the number itself sorta relays its odds) but Leung's sort of abide it, the gradual creep of its suspicion, the John Knight cold cut ominousness in staging. Why must the light be blackout? Why the floor silenced? Why does the carriage require staves? The creep builds suspicion: a house haunted under glistening sterile light. A crime scene scrubbed, we, detectives.

see too: Ghislaine Leung at Chisenhale & Essex Street, Ghislaine Leung at Künstleraus Stuttgart

Ghislaine Leung at Künstleraus Stuttgart

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(continued)

So the point intended,

1. The continual retelling (1 novel, 2 films, 3 made-for-tv movies) of The Stepford Wives is evidence of the films resonance, to a common cultural fear: suspense/horror story of human subjectivity molded to robotic subservience.

2. This fear, plotted during a time of accelerating convenience of "modern miracle" kitchens, is predicated on a subconscious understanding that we are in some way socially reproduced by the objects around us. As our kitchens become increasingly convenient so too we will need to become convenient: the level of pleasance required around our tyrannical-husbands we intuit is in direct correlation to the level of convenience of everything surrounding us. As the world become more convenient, as kitchens threaten to replace cooks, as what we provide is continually warned to be replaceable, we must increasingly match the ease of the others/objects who threaten to replace us, and we adopt an unnatural pleasantness. This is implicit fear of the film.

3. Commodities by nature limit individual expression, and we are molded to their voice. We become subservient to what the commodity can allow us. So you join in choir with all the others who purchased their employer/partner a mug singing "THE BOSS." The commodity turns the world into a cartoon, slapstick, as everything becomes exchangeable, the backgrounds getting more repetitive in a drive towards efficiency. The cartoon, slapstick, rendered in the real is gore.

4. Leung's Hugo Boss sterility is a suburban horror movie. 

(past: Ghislaine Leung at Chisenhale & Essex Street)

Ghislaine Leung at Chisenhale & Essex Street

(Essex, Chisenhale)

(Right before The Stepford Wives he wrote Rosemary's Baby, a guy with obvious anxieties over the maternal.) The Stepford Wives, a novel about "frighteningly submissive housewives in [a] new idyllic Connecticut neighborhood," the housewives feared to, but unknown whether, have been replaced with robots. The novel's continuous adaption into varyingly successful television and film striking some type of cultural consciousness chord. Having been written in an era (1970s) of increasing modern "miracle" conveniences and the then latest "smart objects" is hard not to read as a fear of these conveniences, submissiveness, actually infiltrating us, our subjects, robots, of convenience and object submission until we became, if not kitchen appliances ourselves, at least frighteningly subservient molded to kitchen surrounding us. The fear of our kitchen as a mold. Molded on a production line, molding ourselves to its convenience. Such that options for expression become limited by the cultural detritus available in stores. Which shouldn't be read as a fear of loss of individualism (a reactionary fear spawning Hippies dressing Ayn Rand in flowers calling it a movement awaking twenty years later in corporate board rooms doing to the earth what they did to that field in upstate New York) but some sort of fear of virtuality and the world rendered in some sort of Reichstagian cartoon, an imperial diet of commodity, perfection we all see ourselves attempting to reflect, scary cultural ideas of blonde heads beaming in striking black suits. These lights are untethered. You join in union, with a multitude, a choir, signing "THE BOSS." Whether or not highlighting these cultural walls with a gloss is helpful, it does make for good scary. We fear that one guy who is so painfully nice, not because we fear him snapping, but because we fear his so perfect reflection of cultural ideal turning into himself a commodity, one that we might have to reflect.

See too: Ghislaine Leung at Reading International

Ghislaine Leung at Reading International

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"For [Chris] Burden the question of, “How did our world end up like this?” is posited as the product of thousands of megalomaniac children grown never learning their childhood fantasies of the world need not be enforced upon it. That the train barons and real estate developers creating the world may have less to do with money and more with the latent remains of childhood fevers." - Chris Burden Metropolis II at LACMA

That we learn in childhood to act as gods. We are given realms. Build castles to smash, bricks to heights, dolls to have our way with. The megalomaniacism of childhood is rewarded endlessly with no wonder why later we are left with it blooming all over our world.

"Increasing prevalence of the diorama, the miniature, their vessels staging us as onlookers to worlds as sandboxes. A dissonance between our interior worlds that of course we find increasingly virtual and beholden to our godlike control of drag/drop materiality conjuring our desires that the outer world increasingly doesn't reflect, the world steamrolled at the whim of other's control. So our turning to dolls and miniatures and virtuality makes symptomatic sense, fulfilling our need for control over a world we increasingly seem to not have much over makes psychologic sense. The world providing ever further customizable habitats to busy ourselves with while remaining deaf to our desires, a lot like playing with dolls."- “Sylvanian Families Biennial 2017” at XYZ collective

See too: Mathis Altmann at Freedman Fitzpatrick