Group Show at House of Gaga

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Recognizing art is different from seeing it. We experience registry rather than sight. It's not a camel, it's a Heji Shin. It's never more noticeable than in group shows of a certain age(?).  Becoming recognizable as an artist is a certain type of death. Which many experience as unfortunate success. This is important recognition. 

Josef Strau at Francesca Pia

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These are much uglier, which is an improvement I suppose. And Straus's text begins with an almost apology for the exhibition, which reminds how endeared we all were to artists failing ten years ago. The "I prefer not to." or Manfred Pernice's ongoing struggle to get erect. or The performed hesitance in every painting made. Remember that time? But then Strau's text turns it around.  Attempts to incant and imbue some earnestness into the enterprise. Calls it Sutering, or the process of invoking something earnest, Vivian Suter, meaning, into the paintings. Remember the wacky wild inflatable arm men who danced in front of their paintings to imbue some some [criticality] into bland abstractions?  This is like that, hunched over its making and saying a prayer.

A hail mary pass to capture, touch down, on some meaning.


See too: Josef Strau at House of Gaga (2), Josef Strau at House of Gaga

Josef Strau at House of Gaga

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Well, they're pretty in a crushed can on the street sorta way, or a butterflies broken in the gutter, angels compressed into glitz souvenirs. Pretty in that any sorta silver sort of way, like shiny things be. Pretty in a "why?" sort of way. The way butterflies seem garish and unnecessary to a world and inspire our wrath so children crush them and artists crush them against canvas, looking for ways to bejewel our production, steel it against the unpleasant taste of mouths eating coin. They're fine in that way of pleasantness, pinnacle of subservience that is the crux of high dollar abstraction, submission to their surroundings by letting it walk all over them.


see too: Josef Strau at House of Gaga

Josef Strau at House of Gaga

(link)

Strau’s concurrent rise with the hegemony of art's image (say, CAD) makes a sense. Text attached to image delaying consumption of object as image, of the dumpy intentionally inconsequential sculpture (lamps), couldn’t be more important. Everyone was talking about painting beside itself while the image was being consumed in ever accelerating means, and Strau attaching text to image, delaying reception by anachronistically giving word to its reception at the moment it made it consumable without giving it away. This was huge. Like Harrison’s semiotic diaspora it delayed finality of its consumption even as it was made immediate.

Single Moms at Vilma Gold



According to the statement issued, the origin story was: Single Moms feeling, if not “disabled,” at least having “problems getting by” and so with a few phone calls got the band together making “plans to produce and possibly trade certain self manufactured commodities.” Set against stories of princes who choose to live as paupers, it takes on a altruistic hint of mission from god to raise enough money to save their orphan souls from eviction.
Interesting because it premises everything that came before as not commodities, that these new works under the group’s name were “beautiful home goods,” whereas whatever came before, under their individual selves, were neither. These plucky entrepreneurs, saw opportunity by entering, only now, into free markets as freeing them, meaning their not-commodity-objects could continue being so because these were for sale instead. That they weren’t selling out. Or, that they were selling out so as not to have to sell out.
An interesting trick to free yourself from the demands of cultural production for those of market production, reminiscent of S.O.A.P.Y.’s magick trick. Though an interestingly impossible distinction between luxury goods and art.  See too, Ooga Booga and Paradise Garage's Sweatshop among countless others.
Interesting because they look less like “beautiful home goods” and more like piles of contemporary art tropes. Interestingly even less so than the worded lamps, singing paintings, among other objects for which these artists are known. Interestingly being shown in a gallery setting. Interesting because like so much art today attaching little doodads to retail display systems it is hard to distinguish between desire for commodity and the desire for art.

See too : “S.O.A.P.Y. III” at What Pipeline