Karl Holmqvist at Sant’Andrea de Scaphis

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On Holmqvist at GBE: "It's punk plagiarism, sucking out the affective lyricism of the pop ecosystem to flatten out all those very-much-felt feelings into a poetry of surfaces - and tedium."
  - Andrew Durbin TzK

We like words, we trust words, our whole society practically predicted on words, everywhere, ubiquitous, magnificent and fragile. So the Holmqvistic hammering of words into tin for his cymbal tapping repetition could feel either charmingly disruptive or cruel.  Holmqvist has expressed less affinity for jazz than for noise, words become the sensation of objects felt with a numb hand, the cacophony of nerves deprived. A rose is a rose is a rose, there is a long history of this use of semantic satiation: the repeated arousal of a specific neural pattern causing "a reduction in the intensity of the activity with each repetition" - effectively numbs like our hands our ability to perceive them with any force but some wide flat plainness, deprived of structure to give its words lifeblood like sucking nitrous from balloons until the world dissolves into a stupefied vertigo, and we feel the noise, the static of our brains deprived.

Klara Liden and Karl Holmqvist at Kunstverein Braunschweig

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Charming post-Naumanian displacers of content, the work's emptiness as interest (fun or dark?™) maybe finds relevance to current political situations in that one must find interest elsewhere: the contents of speaking is beside itself - nonexistent - and we must look around corners, to the edges of whited out posters, build our own shoddy unstable platforms, find the non-content of its rhetoric and ham-handed demagoguery as a new type of poetry we can't ignore it has steamrolled itself into our vision, just like our political leaders.  "In the video work Nhite Woise (2015), Klara Liden and Karl Holmqvist connect in a charming yet dilettante dance performance."



See too: Klara Lidén, Alicia Frankovich at Kurator, Karl Holmqvist and Ei Arakawa at Overduin & Co.

Karl Holmqvist and Ei Arakawa at Overduin & Co.

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At his Bard MFA Arakawa created and ran a bar in the concrete center of the summer program already known for parties, a means of reifying the all important social relations of schools and friends to its site of exchange, and in the several hundred exhibitions since Arakawa’s Friendibitions have become a means of rapidly dispersing the self into a ballyhooed network, burying the author for the friends he can raise. Holmqvists interest in redundancy and quasi-childlike carefree fit almost too well with with Arakawa’s quasi-spirituality and redundant-idealism exposing the bedrock of its child-like unstoppability, that like equating Bucky-balls (the most art over-referenced object of all time) to a Childhood playgrounds as well the mountainous Dolly Parton Nuclear Plant, its less about the objects themselves and more about just getting it filled with everyone linked in.


See too : Ben Shumacher at Bortolami , Stefan Tcherepnin at Freedman Fitzpatrick.html , Will Benedict at Bergen Kunsthalle