Lena Henke at Marta Herford

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Stardate january 1st 2024. The new year. An unexplained cubical object blocked our vessel's path. A large mass of rubber tires. The cubes have been awarded the Marta Award by the Wemhöner Foundation. On the bridge, Mr. Spock immediately ordered general alert. My location – sickbay. Computer analysis: "This interplay of kitchen furnishings, sculpture, and display becomes an ambiguous object in the museum space." 

Further analysis:

The fallout of the semiotic manicism/collapse/supernova, of the 00’s assemblage (Harrison, Genzken, Pernice et al) and the exploding of Unmonumental’ detritus, left the next generation picking cultural rubble. Artists became post-semio-apocalyptic cargo-cult, artists, still wanting to believe, began to reassemble totems of cultural meaning. Staedelschulites rehashing a form of ready-made-marxist-surrealism, societie's tchotchkies made to “speak” the tongues of the Invisible Hand's gods who must be crazy. Post-Lieske - the real rabble rearranging/collaging/juxtaposing the signs of capital as some sort of anti-altar to them - the whole "arrangements" phenomenon, tableaus of cultural artifacts, seen again and again and again on the rugs of art fairs everywhere - finally hitting bedrock in the strip-mine of Darren Bader just arranging capital’s objects on the floor.

Art is the cargo-cult to a mass culture whose droppings they rearrange as totems to stand in for understanding. In cave paintings the mystical prey were made many times larger than the people. The ancient people were thought to trek to the rooms to be extolled by the PR about the significance of. 

Star maps reveal no indication of habitable planets nearby. Origin and purpose of the cube still unknown. We've been here, held motionless, for 18 hours. 

Captain's Log, Stardate 1514.0. The cube has been destroyed. Ship's damage, minor. But my next decision, major – probe on ahead or turn back.

Lena Henke at Bortolami

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The pig got transformed into a literal low polygon mesh, a chainmail frozen ghost, as a print that misrecalls its form, like a misremembering of its german history (that the PR attempts reanimation of). Ambiguousness as the sort of vague myths that float through history, echoing as subliminal ghosts. Attach words to the things the PR says: "tray-sized vulvic rose petals"
Ambiguousness as a means for the simultaneity of surrealism. A tree sort of looks like a horse so we can put them together; a cloud can look like anything, much like a turd, some will see interest.


See too: Nina Beier at Metro Pictures, Ron Nagle at Modern Art,

Lena Henke at Kunstverein Braunschweig & Louise Bourgeois at Cheim and Read

(Louise Bourgeois , Lena Henke)

Bourgeois never gave up the latent content of physical depiction, sculpture, its materiality, even the virtual, the way so many, say minimalists, wished they could and instead drew out what those Greeks left implicit in the linea alba, their white soft marble line, of men, and these latent expressions in physicality crop up in her progeny, apparent in those like Henke for whom physical things act as moments of duplicity, locus for multiple apparencies, big black table eyes. There is too many things to say about these things, looking like too much, their genericsm becomes strength. A low poly mesh provides metaphorical possibility in its low resolution. The harder it is to define things the larger their aqueous potential, and physical material experience (of which CAD is no real good at imparting) is a real wet thing.