Jay Chung & Q Takeki Maeda at Essex Street

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CAWD, previously: 

Artists continually forcing a reading between the lines they force distinctly apart. So that the blank white space feels ominous and full, like a detective novel, figure it out, Jay Chung & Q Takeki Maeda adept at objects in aura of evidence or clues. In dark forests we imagine predators, in confusion invent gods, or artists.

And this exhibition showing why "reading between the lines" is so precarious, from the preface:

 "Bad Driver is a work of post-truth conceived in this post-truth era. It is a collection of historical writings that constructs a generalized picture of “Asians,” following an outline made up of a constellation of fixed racial stereotypes. ... The authors have “done the research”—as conspiracy theorists say—and uncovered factual evidence that support these preconceived notions. ... a portrait of “Asians” that rely on the reader’s presumptions and internalized prejudices far more than the materials cited within." "...the fact’s factual quality was dependent on the surrounding details of its original context. Once severed, the fact immediately lost its verisimilitude as a fact."

Making interpretation a matter of delicacy. I want to say I feel vindicated for previously not wanting to enter into JC&QTM's game - this artifactization for anyone's interpretation clue boards - i.e. not become the detective - but there is something enjoyable in reading these, in playing this one's game. You feel the process of your brain latching onto fact - "connecting the dots" -  despite being forewarned how worthless these contextless facts are. It still works. Chapter 4 for instance we are shown the questions on a Chinese driving test with their obvious dogwhistle possibility, but JC&QTM casual bypassing of the correct answer suddenly allows all the answers their possibility, reaffirm the racist cliche. This would be stupid if you didn't feel how incredibly effective it is in building an insidious implication. It is like a cliche in reverse, watch it be structured, maintained. The wellspring of implication, aura, that functions no matter how many times we say it's just Disney magic. This has obvious parallels (and critique) for any art that apparels itself with the "serious look" - the ominous monolith - the blankness for projection - allows unconscious thoughts to fester - the actor that claims innocence. 

See too: Heji Shin at Reena Spaulings 

Jay Chung & Q Takeki Maeda at Koelnischer Kunstverein

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It's important to note the artists' strategies in mise-en-scene. These photos tell you nothing, give you no information but they connote an affect, one of literal and metaphorical velvet ropes. What, after all, is this photograph of? Of the air, in the impressionist sense. That emptiness they love. Cold like sharks. It'd be something if the artists didn't have at least some hand in the documentation. Or maybe there is just that much air. Like John Knight, the strategies of withholding generate power. In forests we imagine predators, in confusion invent gods, or artists.


See too: John Knight at Greene Naftali, Yngve Holen at Kunsthalle Basel

Jay Chung & Q Takeki Maeda at House of Gaga

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Artists continually forcing a reading between the lines they force distinctly apart so that the blank white space feels ominous and full, like a detective novel, figure it out, Jay Chung & Q Takeki Maeda adept at objects in aura of evidence or clues. Bits of knowledge that are brought up in the PR, starting with the failure of the cult to deliver its prophecies, its promised cataclysm falling to a gaping white nothing burger, a lot like the art's lines. Providing no auto-bloodshed or endorsement, instead a musing on the aquarium shark (and its connection to Hirst) as a symbol of contemporary art's "predicted avant-garde revolutions [that] never came to pass" and the "set of special texts, rituals, and institutions whose purpose is to manage the disparity between the prophecy and the reality of its non- appearance."  This is all uninteresting, another meditation of art's failed deliverance we've been rehashing for 20 years but now cults and sharks and texts. Except for the text accompanyment which is itself its little own hard-boiled plot that itself empties and fills like a corpse on the beach and you could attempt to use the detective's cultish tools to attempt post-mortem on the story's failure to deliver catacylsm or just think of it as "set of special texts, rituals, and institutions whose purpose is to manage the disparity between the prophecy and the reality of its non-appearance."



See too: Jay Chung and Q Takeki Maeda at Francesca Pia, Jay Chung & Q Takeki Maeda at 356 Mission

Jay Chung and Q Takeki Maeda at Francesca Pia

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It's becoming a problem that our daily consumption of media is predicated on exhibitions depicted in blankness, which as CAD becomes a more powerful form of reproduction and knowledge that, as Sanchez might be right in proclaiming, visibility replaces and trumps thought legitimization, we need be aware that this "visibility" isn't actually all that transparent, since most of this exhibition cannot be seen, this documentation barely exhibits, that the infinite visibility of inter-webbed artscenes has an acute case of glaucoma for those on the sidelines witnessing its transactions while precluding it from critique. And why should we be given that right anway? Is CAD mere Curriculum Vitae promotion. Issues of interest for Jay Chung and Q Takeki Maeda, artists for whom the excising of all but a few remnants generated a enormous look of power.

See too: Willem de Rooij at Le Consortium, Jay Chung & Q Takeki Maeda at 356 Mission, John Skoog at MUMOK, And so Quarterly has finally come to pass.

Jay Chung & Q Takeki Maeda at 356 Mission

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In the smoke of Matias Faldbakken's rocketship ascendancy the artworld was left blind scrambling to adhere a politic for it, to make a critical foundation for the artworld's hot new power iconography, unable to accept that how it looked, rather than any little content it contained, was its appeal.*

But so Maeda and Chung deliver today’s dealings with the legacy of conceptual art’s poetics, i.e. a look that connotes a critical intelligibility (meaning) at the same moment appearing elusive, a withholdingess prevails. It produces the look of an enigma, and with it the attendant lure, reading between the lines of evidence evinced. An imbuing of its images/objects with potentialized meaningfulness, making a dissonance that ramps up the aura of even rubber lain on a floor, of cheap bookshelves and its remnant objects, of a decade of art dealing reduced to its minutes, a text that like Warhol’s diary finds initial interest in the search for rumor and gossip but eventually finds humanity in the piecing together of human lives lived.


*(Who in that moment didn’t want have to their big fuck-all paintings and sell it too. The ironic self-awareness of Faldbakken’s sculpture, like Fontaine, made its recycling of an already co-opted language acceptable, the viewer being smarter than the sculpture a sales value added.)

See too : Nina Beier at David Roberts Art Foundation , Mathew Cerletty at Office Baroque