Nancy Lupo & Monique Mouton at Veda

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Both whose object's loss are one breath away. At the cusp of entropic dissolve. Lupo's stuf and Mouton's airs. Waste, exhalation, as much accumulated or captured as made. They even kind of look like "strange attractors." Or "Cantor dust" - just remove the center square - extract her mouth, it will still stand in for her - the ever fractilization of things into the dust they shall return.

Nancy Lupo at Antenna Space

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Encased in Soylent - that complete nutritional replacement, everything the body needs, body powder, and of course us all knowing its green version is people - we couldn't help but see their pale applied flesh as bodies themselves and representations of the increasing plastics inside our own and correspondent sudden and mass fear of endocrine distribution as estrogenic seepage turning a world's men into castrati and a world's water into one giant liquid castration complex; plastics became the Freudian fear, of lost phallus now aerosolized into everything and manufacturing changed overnight in order to allow our cheap crap to come with a new sticker: BPA free. We had to protect masculinity. We had to protect the body described as "fastened to a dying animal," in a poem from time when body/mind distinctions were thought clear and imagined a possibility of being able to slough your flesh and emerge fresh to be pounded shaped into gold and set upon branches to sing like Yeats if our passages weren't so congested with stuff.

See too: “May the Bridges I Burn Light the Way” at STANDARD (OSLO), Nancy Lupo at Kristina Kite & Yuji Agematsu at Miguel Abreu, Nancy Lupo at Swiss Institute, Nancy Lupo at 1857, Yuji Agematsu at Real Fine Arts, Yuji Agematsu at Artspeak, 

AR: Nancy Lupo at Kristina Kite

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Originally Posted: March 31st, 2017

Note: This entry is part of August Review, our annual look back at this season’s key exhibitions. For more information, see the announcement here.

Nancy Lupo at Kristina Kite & Yuji Agematsu at Miguel Abreu

(Nancy Lupo at Kristina Kite, Yuji Agematsu at Miguel Abreu)

"Our growing attraction to garbage makes a psychologic sense as we become hostages to the trauma of dealing with it, the deranged images of garbage spewing, animals asphyxiated, learning of its intravenous networks sprawling across unstoppable leaky pipes, garbage moved though our landscape sprawling veins..."

Continuing our interest in making Stuff as a technical word. Stuff is the eye goo of objects. Like eye goo, stuff's service is its waste, a continual sloughing, so we can remain fresh, clean. Stuff accumulates, piles, is shed. Stuff is quasi things, is transient, transactional. A disposable fork is, like, quintessential stuff. Stuff depletes, frequently, though not always, disposable. Stuff is like object-food, a storage of energy for consumption, use. Stuff differentiates itself from things because everyone is putting energy toward it not being a thing: Companies/consumers press for stuff's cheapness, the user wants it only for what it can do, then to get rid it of it as soon as possible after, a pressure for stuff to be biodegradable. Stuff's thingness is a problem.

If there is something abject, itchy, about the Lupo's installation it is because stuff is being forced to become thing, stitched like rafts, like the The Great Garbage Patch, which too is stuff becoming thing, object, and anxious.
If Agemtasu's trash is comforting, lovable, it is because the stuff has been already digested to waste, paradoxically less anxious than stuff because it doesn't have the anxiety of stuff's thingness, just waste, and repackaged in the safety of cellophane to return it once again to product, we find comfort in products.



See too: “May the Bridges I Burn Light the Way” at STANDARD (OSLO), Nancy Lupo at Swiss Institute, Nancy Lupo at 1857, Yuji Agematsu at Real Fine Arts,  Yuji Agematsu at Artspeak

Nancy Lupo at Swiss Institute

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Set up like a jaw. Gnathic. Run your tongue over your teeth. Most adults have 32. It is warm, nutrient-rich, continuously bathed with saliva; a pH of between 6.75 and 7.25. Ivory towers protruding from wet mass of human gum that had been intended to be scrubbed polished and sanitized. We believed in the pure autonomous body. Distinct from the the onslaught of bacterial-other we believed continually threatening its entrance into us. But the mouth is warm. It is, according to the USDA, center in temperature at which not to place food. The "Danger Zone." Harbors a diverse, abundant and complex microbial community. And different species thrive on the front of our teeth than on the reverse. Plaque is resultant the corruption of the mouth’s homeostasis. When your teeth feel furry. More than 600 bacterial species comprise the plaque microflora that exists on surfaces within the oral cavity and, like belly button's lint, bacterially so diverse it is more unique than fingerprints. Teeth are more like timbers green in the ocean. In November 2014 headlines declare, "A ten second kiss transfers 80 million bacteria." A journalist discovers his belly-button contains bacteria not found outside the soil of Japan. The man has never been to Japan. And Japanese sake is poured by researchers down lab rat's noses to introduce lactobacillus into their artificially bacterially amok sinuses. The social practice of kissing derives from parental feeding through mouth-to-mouth regurgitation between mother and child, which like the vaginal birth's bacterial transference, populate the infant’s sterile gastrointestinal tract, aiding in a diverse gut flora and against colonization by large numbers of E. coli and streptococci found in most feces. Fixed appliances like orthodontic hardware cemented to teeth increases the habitat for bacteria, and after eating an Oreo smiling revealed teeth covered in chewed black goo. There are “good bacteria” and “bad bacteria.” Complete your own at-home fecal transplant with a Youtube instructional. Make sure you lay down a trash bag or tarp. The rats insufflating sake did clear their sinusitis. That we are not ourselves. No object is itself. But collections of sedimented energies, desires, biomes, utilities and images. Rubbermaid Brutes were shaped by a human with desires that are latent in the curve of its lip. The last centuries' want for objects maintaining autonomy and austerity caused problems in the long run attempting their clean self. The definition of clean is going to be entirely different in 20 years. Traditional native methods of burying rotting fish in the dirt to ferment has much lower chance of causing food sickness than doing the same in sterile plastic buckets. Food Grade plastic which is not impermeable and food-safe such the LLDPE of Rubbermaid Brute TM creates anaerobic conditions favorable to botulism. Looks like a teether. The exhibition title: quasi-homonymic and homologous parent and parrot, social reproduction and each becoming the other. Lupo's sculptures are like these things.

See too: Nancy Lupo at 1857

Nancy Lupo at 1857

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Rubbermaid's BRUTE® UTILITY containers are pervasive. And the containers at first seem, ominously, to lack any qualities whatsoever, but Lupo, different from Bill Bollinger's formalized mass materials, draws out the latent, systematically mocking its soft qualities, the infantilizing soft curvature, the flesh of it. Objects humans draw for ourselves are getting bodily, begin to resemble ourselves, as erotics and curvature seep into everything, and these look not much different from baby toys, from chew toys.

Nancy Lupo at Wallspace

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The biographic trifecta Cooper, Yale, Skowhegan, the art heavily fortified, Soylent formulas, "understand that it is the body that controls the mind, the invisible world within the visible."
This "thing power" of objects. As the flower adapting with the bee, the pepper to the bird's digestion, the plump cherry to human tastes, object/products live and die on their adaptations to manipulate the consumer. Our environments manipulating and manipulated. Capitalist ecology presents a survival of the seductivest, reproduction as commodification, as generations and generations of objects live, thrive, die and evolve in the natural selection for products. Without sentience orchid petals become fleshy. The evolution towards sensual ergonomics, Lupo's objects flaunt their lure, fleshy chairs coated in smooth nutrition, nutrition as flesh, the seat for children, dazzled with food stuffs - plastic flesh of Ray's "Family Romance,"- flesh of the uncanny abject, the bodied object plating their sushi desire. Uncannily neither sexy nor comedic. Objects designed for the human. Not Hesse, but Gober's vessels for psychology, they become primordial life, objects exerting influence and reacting to us, unblinking.

See too : Olga Balema and Anne de Vries at Michael Thibault, "Flat Neighbors" at Rachel Uffner, Michael E. Smith at Lulu, Anicka Yi at Cleveland Museum of Art, Pamela Rosenkranz at Karma International