Keith Farquhar at High Art

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Content you apply as a paint, or collect like a grime.  Kin Henrik Olesen's stuffing filth into crevasses (and hair adhesived among else) art's usual conceptual pyrotechnics are given abject gloss that prevents our usual cerebral distance, a sterility requiring less iMac than latex gloves. The humor is less punning than sexual, painting in need of laundromats, content viral, wash basins, outlets smeared with paint. The fear of the Kristevan abject is less the fear of repulsiveness than the fear of it becoming-you, nearing you-ness, we fear getting it on us because we fear its indistinguishability between us, and Farquhar's continual covering of everything with everything else spreads the fear that we could get some painting on us.


see too: Keith Farquhar at Cabinet, Henrik Olesen at Cabinet, Henrik Olesen at Reena Spaulings

Keith Farquhar at Cabinet

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It's about the latent. Like the trojan horse hiding in men's bicycle shorts armed to possibly hurt you from darkness. Looking like an IKEA catalog of art seems the point, cause crappiness is kind of the point.. "They dramatise an existential threat to notions of artistic sovereignty." Creep is "the tendency of a solid material to slowly move or deform permanently under the influence of stresses." But creep is also a man with his penis out under bike shorts. Things become embedded with connotation like a gym locker room is embedded with naked men. Conceptual austerity becomes filthy-with. Like content that can be applied, sticky. Clung to Chris Wool, like you peeled it off it. How children are sticky, their plastic like grime accumulators. Wood to absorb ass sweat. Symbols filled with things to gag you with. Cardboard like a sloughed flesh for transit. Thing "used," or going to be used. Things creep, and there is prevailing undercurrent of sex, perhaps "buggery," that runs under the work, like a goo spread.