Sandra Mujinga at Hamburger Bahnhof

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Horror is implication, suggestion, threat. Which makes it perfect foil for art, which must perpetuate endless affect. Horror must eventually reveal its monster, but art can go on interminably delaying its reveal. Because art only need be a throbbing box, a tell tale heart for our guilt beneath the floorboards. 

See too: James Bantone at Centre d'Art Contemporain, Pope.L; “Beyond the Black Atlantic” at Kunstverein Hannover (Sandra Mujinga), 

Jesse Stecklow at Chicken Coop Contemporary & Adrian Piper at Hamburger Bahnhof

Jesse Stecklow at Chicken Coop Contemporary
Adrian Piper at Hamburger Bahnhof

Hypertrophied conceptual art still flexing instructionals retains, at heart, an interest in poetics, the fissure in semantic conclusion, the discrepancy in language's overt clarity and concern for bureaucratic legalese and recipization standing in for that object, even the most bureaucratic language fails and is semantically open, poetic. Information is pleasurable, activating our brain's dopamine reward system, addictive, we consume it without need for it, lack of place to use it just silver information reflecting its space, "consciousness and experience can not be described in materialist terms" in Stecklow's terms. Piper's contractual better world exchanges real world ethics with paper versions, "each individual voluntarily commits to align his or her future deeds with ethical principles such as honesty and reliability. ... They form a community of people who are likely to be trustworthy in the future." Which like nuclear disarmament leaves one community at a disadvantage, obligatory trustworthiness advantageous to others lacking it, the trustworthy lose the tools maintaining MAD strategies pleasant standoff, lies at the ready, trying to replace the grey world with black and white text never quite as functional.

Harun Farocki at Hamburger Bahnhof

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Coming from Filmmaking, Farocki never reproduced the tropes of the art world that became receptive to him. Those artists in lineage since without exterior however often unable to transcend art’s established idioms and visual speech. If so much video essay today resembles Farocki’s, it is because Farocki’s art was itself a form or a framework, a vessel invented through which content could be made to speak of itself, taken up by any willing artist since. In the early 1969 video, Farocki’s lifelong documentary problem/premise is summarized directly; asking the question of how one would be able to depict politics without its producing an immediate reaction that itself can be reacted to (rejected, accepted, etc.), and instead prolonging depiction’s moment, postponing indefinitely a reaction and thus politics. This neutrality has since become the bread of a contemporary art often unwilling in risking any pronouncement, rendering itself in ambivalence. Farocki in his voice-over doesn’t address this endpoint as paralysis problem, but the difference is often that Farocki was risking politics and everything since was only risking art.

See too: Koki Tanaka at Centre d’Art Contemporain Passerelle