Martine Bedin at Crèvecoeur

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Art is a ludicrous object, a Rube Goldberg device for some strange cultural malignancy. But art's basic forms mask the inanity. Painting is a format that seems to tautologically explain itself, it's a painting, it's meant for walls. In this way artwork falsely naturalizes. Bedin's objects evolve structures that prevent naturalization, like peacock tails they are partly too stupid for this world, but somehow biologically necessary. Design which refuses to be necessary, importantly. 

Martine Bedin, Mai-Thu Perret at Fondation Speerstra



The pairing of these two make more than sense. Mai-Thu Perret's slurping the modernist milk shake regurgitated as placating design - the astral plane of wallpaper’s elsewhereness spiritual dispersion; and Martine Bedin’s, of the Memphis Group, reinvigoration of design as a skew, eschewed, and totally screwed modernism; into something awkward, mysterious and its own. Like a Heimo Zobernig designed by burglar clowns, Bedins’ works seem at first to make some sort of sense before falling apart in their unfunctionality. Its an old trick, the functional looking functionless object, but its rendered here just strange enough, that the way in which it falls is sometimes a surprise, mocking its expected outcome, at its best when you can never figure out why it looked functional to begin with.