Venice 2019, Belgium Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys Mondo Cane

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Against Venetian statuary, against marble gods with triforks, JdGHT's is wantonly provincial, the unsophisticate, the stupid it is. Turns out, despite centuries of looking up at them, we don't actually resemble Greek Gods. Instead these sullen mannequins far more accurate to the people encircling it. Tourists or art-polloi are made electric by this awful mirror. We are the botched paintings of Christ. It is a cruel realization that more than the marble, we unfortunately echo these, you Chuck-E-Cheese animatronic. Turns out people are ugly. A Golden Lion to mockery as corrective.
Welcome to Belgium.


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Read: Jos de Gruyter and Harald Thys at Kunsthal Aarhus, Jos De Gruyter and Harald Thys at Gavin Brown, Jos de Gruyter and Harald Thys at Wattis, Jos De Gruyter and Harald Thys at MoMA PS1

Jos De Gruyter and Harald Thys at Gavin Brown

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Painful, de Gruyter and Thys' developmentally delayed style, filled with speech impediments, slow progress, and language drifting into nonsense, is, like von Trier's early film, an idiocy against social decorum, our socially vulnerable conversations, socially conscious movies, replayed by the slow and impaired, mocking our banal conversations we've had, transmute conversation into madness. Comedy edges total breakdown of sense, turning to a horror that seems to endlessly please dG&T. This banal horror of too-much, of waste, of, in spite of such, cruelly, maniacally plain smiles.


See too: Jos de Gruyter and Harald Thys at Wattis, Jos De Gruyter and Harald Thys at MoMA PS1

Jos de Gruyter and Harald Thys at Wattis

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Taking up where Fischli + Weiss left off, Jos de Gruyter and Harald Thys continue the unchecked carefree edging comedic nihlism; already systematized into the production line it was always already fit into. "The sensation of boredom and nausea that the programs cause in me are experiential proof that I am not completely programmed," as the PR quotes.  The so slight tangent they provide to the moor of modern life - afternoons spent drawing trollies - meant as an acerbic aloofness, an "abuse of time," could be soothing to nervous bones, but also has already accepted the defeat expected, a Naumanian irony extended to the long view, a symptom soothing, anesthetic, numbing fun.

See too: David Weiss at Swiss Institute , Fischli and Weiss at Sprüth Mages