Ahmet Öğüt and Goshka Macuga at Witte de With

(ep. 1, ep. 2)

Disimages humor wasn't so much in its mockery of stock photography - they swore they weren't - but in making fun of artists: Dis, with an early understanding the growing need for artists to function as their own producers of stock-like images in an increasing pressure for artist's to make a striking singular image, mocked the artistic anxiety for image production that could handle anonymized displacement in the network, speak for itself images sturdy enough for dissemination in image aggregators like CAD, VVork and all those other tumblrs exploding. Both stock images and the artistic contain similar relationship of specificity and anonymousness, like promotional stills they allow a viewer to infer a few specific traits ("multicultural office", "Gallery sculpture") at the same time broad, blank enough to accommodate a viewer's own interpretations. Both stock images and many art images are as plain as they are inscrutable. An image like a handshake of the artist.


see too: Sherrie Levine at David Zwirner

Goshka Macuga at Rüdiger Schöttle



The hipster too was a semionaut; whose careful balance of fashion’s signs were an additive and appropriative construction of appearance and identity, a careful facade of references, and so the concurrent rise of Rachel Harrison makes symptomatic sense for its ability to thematize semio-collapse short-circuits in a way that was jokey, pranksterish and light relief against undeconstructable-tuber confusion of “the real” having really ascended into code that both Harrison and Hipsters were obviously responding. But artists now live it, take for granted the serial construction of references fashioning artistic identity whose appropriations need make little sense, that juxtaposition is enough capable of producing all the double-binds, oxymorons, and paradoxes that the artworld prefers in a the-more-the-merrier type campaign, creating perfect mires filled with loads of interpretive juice whose glossy surface reflected the world well.