Nairy Baghramian at Secession

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"In the last few years the status of a work of art has risen beyond that of mere autonomous existence, to the point where works are sometimes treated like quasi-subjects capable of their own autonomous thinking. ...

One sometimes gets the impression that a work of art can speak, live, and even outlive the artist and hence also artistic discourse. I believe that this work-turned-subject is a kind of monster. Curators, art historians, and critics sometimes nurse this monster ...

The tendency of the art work to be turned into a subject is further promoted by the growing silence of the artist–subject, who thereby threatens to turn him or herself into a self-mystifying object. ..." Nairy Baghramian - "Le Mépris" TzK

 

Nairy Baghramian at Walker Art Center?

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So CAD's photos are almost certainly from S.M.A.K.'s dark wood floors - where the exhibition was originally presented - and not the Walker Art Center named here, a fun bit of transpositional virtuality, a rose by any other name would smell something different in it, a theme of Baghramian's work. You look in the clouds in the background and see a fist crushing a fire, whereas we see two tapeworms' coitus, a mold for an object we cannot see but envision, the negative space we are left to fill with our own hot air, you the blimp to travel to different institutions in new names, what would it matter if the floors change.


see too: Nairy Baghramian at Museo Tamayo, Nairy Baghramian at Marian Goodman

Nairy Baghramian at Marian Goodman

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Dental anatomy, some of our first experiences of being medically manipulated and on a regular basis while awake a man drilling holes into your skull's open mouth and drooling. A pump and vacuum system to suck the spit so it doesn't fall down your throat and choke you. While most medical instruments are at pains to round themselves into soft contours reminiscent of the bodies they attend the dental is stainless medieval, which like horror films preoccupation with the torture reminding us of our corporeal selves. Torture is eased by the promise of death, the dental gives no such respite. Duchamp himself hired a dental mechanic in creating Étant donnés, using dental plastic to invoke the body in one of four "erotic sculptures." All which were negatives of the body, and none too specific, but overwhelmingly sexual. The biomorphic ambiguity invokes the body better than any specific image, the ambiguous evokes feelings which we relate to corporeality rather a concrete image we would relate to as information. It's why what is unseen has such stronger potential in torture scenes, ears cropped or arms chainsawed. We don't actually get to see our teeth be worked, but we feel the drill, the needle prick, the picking, scraping and pressure of tools near our soft sensitive gums, our bodies' manipulator, our strong associations with the dental.




See too: Nancy Lupo at Swiss Institute, Nairy Baghramian at Museo Tamayo , Klara Lidén Alicia Frankovich at Kurator. Martin Wong at P.P.O.W, K.r.m. Mooney at Pied-á-terre, Henrik Olesen at Reena Spaulings, Erwin Wurm at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Michael E. Smith at Zero

Nairy Baghramian at Museo Tamayo

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Double entendre of objects looking like innuendo, like bodily stones complicating the minimalist mantra that what you see is what you see, because what you see is sometimes sexually confusing, leather seats in car beginning to look like the lap of a heavily tanned, taught, and naked man. The cigar that just not might be, or rocks that just might, a “bodily” different from its post-minimalist reassertion; entendre produces a psychoactive uncertainty in polite company, and Baghramian has spoken at length of the object-turned-subject monster for which the art-world prescribes all talking cures those object orientated fetishists, like yellow socks with sandals, perverse.

See too: "Being Thing” at Centre International d’Arte et du Paysage & Treignac Projet, Katja Novitskova at Kunsthalle Lissabon, Nancy Lupo at 1857,  Torbjørn Rødland at Kunsthall Stavanger, Martín Soto Climent at Proyectos Monclova