Henrik Olesen at Schinkel Pavilion

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Dirt collects where there are no eyes, this is surely a saying somewhere. Culture has its own rheum. It accumulates in street corners, behind hedges, in dark clubs. Opened to the light society finds these areas repulsive, "Social phobias that reinforce the pathologies of abnormality." And so control must expose everything to light. Social reproduction is premised on this exposure, the normative society you are judged against, must assimilate to. For instance Chickens peck any limping young to death by using words like fag or sodomy laws. This way the cast-off internalizes the panopticon as an ever carried guilt. So the newspapers in alleys will know they are out of place. We prefer clean streets, our families nuclear. The overt reference to Thek here fits as an artist frustrated with minimalist cleanliness, the art of power desiring the removal of fingerprints, subjectivity and labor for grand notions of autonomy that only function when you can function in the light. Which now of course Olesen standing occupying the garde position of Art's Schinkel panopticon.



See too: Melvin Edwards at Daniel Buchholz, Henrik Olesen at Cabinet, Henrik Olesen at Reena Spaulings, Gerry Bibby, Henrik Olesen at Sismógrafo

Henrik Olesen at Cabinet

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Take for instance the coroplast sheets these are on, corrugated plastic, sheets of industrial quantity and cheapness that is less thing than stuff, a temporal substrate, a material capitalistically expendable, what we call "disposable" despite stuffing landfills for eons, denting and scuffing with ease to become "waste" while remaining stuff, flakes like your dead skin collecting under beds with dirt as dust, the cells that Olesen keeps adhering like wet toilet paper to everything, and the hangnails sticking out from walls, an imitation game of filth, waste failing to crystallize packagability, use, the matter of bodies that meaninglessly accumulate, failing representation.  "Polypropylene has been reported to degrade while in human body as implantable mesh devices. The surface's degraded material forms a tree bark-like layer." a skin cell, sloughed.


See too: Nancy Lupo at Kristina Kite & Yuji Agematsu at Miguel Abreu, Henrik Olesen at Reena Spaulings

AR: Henrik Olesen at Reena Spaulings

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Originally Posted: February 21st, 2016

Note: This entry is part of August Review, our annual look back at this season’s key exhibitions. For more information, see the announcement here.

Gerry Bibby, Henrik Olesen at Sismógrafo

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The semiotic distress of Bibby is possibly a place to hide the body lint of Olesen. Puns, in material and language, open up space for innuendo, for the filthy human Olesen has, for a while now, been hiding in crevasses. A crosswalk becomes a Halley abstraction becomes our semiotic Jail, both the crosswalk and painting-referent limit what had once been free space. Insect is misheard as incest and we all call you out for it because that is a freudian slip and you are mentally sick.


see too: Henrik Olesen at Reena Spaulings

Henrik Olesen at Reena Spaulings

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I don't know if anyone remembers Garbriel Kuri risen to prominence by interjecting globalist pluralism into modernist austerity, tin cans into rectangles, but Olesen asserts the filthy body into the sexless/bodyless vernacular of conceptualism, all those conceptual gestures of cutting gallery walls, photocopied images, and philosophical referentials, are with Olesen given to an unclean version. Meat and Christian martyrs are two things one shouldn't mention when playing with the neat rationality of conceptual art. It's "dirty." And the screws should be neatly gridded, they shouldn't resemble deformity. Like Alan Turing, paragon of rationality and computer logic - that clean efficient purity - until he wasn't in the eyes of society so bent on binary, was stripped of everything and given breasts as if that would somehow be better to have a breasted man without libido, is its own minimalism, a bent version of society's high ideals, this conceptual art so clean.