Jacob Kassay at von ammon co

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Technologic performance, installation awkwardness, actual dance etc., it's an increasing strategy to imbue art commodities with some sort of gesticulated spell called aura, symbolical capital, etc. "An action to the conjure the documentation." Which then the documentation won't document too closely.
Now if these paintings come sold with the flickering light and are only art designated "artworks" when installed with such, can't be brought from under them at the end of the exhibition, then color us wrong and this is funny. But doubtful, the installation has becomes the means of lifestyle branding, advertising.


See too: “Seven Reeds” at Overduin & Co., Quarterly: Ei Arakawa

Jacob Kassay at Fitzpatrick-Leland House

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Having been with this thread for a while,

“Seven Reeds” at Overduin & Co.
Sophie Nys at Crac Alsace
Brian Calvin at Le Consortium


It's an old advertising truism that a every consumer, even the jaded, buys the emotions associated with a product more than the product itself. The buy-in being a broad sense of any investment, monetary, social, symbolic or otherwise. When selling a chair from a glossy mail order catalog photograph it on a beach to associate a lifestyle. Imagine these objects without this backdrop.
And so is CAD a lifestyle mail order catalog? No, but Kassay sorta makes it look like one. Which is funny. Using the imbuing qualities of setting/documentation to perform its totemisms.
As always, Kassay lovely in a vague sense, of a model home.


See too: “Being Thing” at Centre International d’Arte et du Paysage & Treignac Projet

“Seven Reeds” at Overduin & Co.

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As others have extrapolated, Kassay’s silver market stardom was, in the style of ancient plated mirrors, an object of vanity for the rich, giving them back exactly what was loved most, their surroundings, their homes, their empire and visage. To prove the point the more well silvered even reached higher prices. The theory serves as a parable to distinguish the vanity of the rich from the more philosophically noble raisons of the art world, and that Kassay’s shift to monochromes, however derivative, was a welcome advancement past vain ideals.
Yet the monochrome itself is a flattery of the viewer. In its minimalist mode it highlights the theater of its surrounding, as Fried described minimalism almost half a century ago:

“theatrical because, to begin with, it is concerned with the actual circumstances in which the beholder encounters literalist work. Morris makes this explicit. Whereas in previous art ‘what is to be had from the work is located strictly within [it],’ the experience of literalist art is of an object in a situation - one that, virtually by definition, includes the beholder.”

Or to quote the infamous monochrome brand of Codax: “ another aspect of monochrome paintings is that they function somewhat like a mirror. They are essentially blanks. With little evidence of the hand that made them, it’s harder to attribute subjectivity to them than with most other art, so people are confronted with themselves a bit more.”
That monochrome or minimalist modes are themselves a vanity object, in which the viewer is flattered for all the intelligence that they can project into the blank objects. Serving to imbue their surrounding, gallery or living spaces with the auratic privilege of “art.” Lacking even Imi Knoebel’s color-content, the works drabness serves to disperse content and reinforce it as its surroundings, its space and viewer on the stage before it, like totems of whatever ideals they allow to be contained. That so much gentle painting today rather than a production of content, merely acts as directives for the flow of content and persons that come to it, trickling through it.

See too: Merlin Carpenter at Overduin & Co.