Oscar Tuazon at Bergen Kunsthall

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Wasn't aware Tuazon had gone Andrea Zittel, pods and geodesics. But apparently he was born under the dome. A school for water. It is difficult watching art's procedures escape its cultural sandbox and enter into the wider world - witness "creativity" against reality. Perhaps the goals are different, in art visibility tis the highest order, where in reality it's the bare minimum against a decades long trudgery toward enaction. Art relies on Buckminster solutions: "At best giving the boring problems of our coming environmental cataclysm at least ostensibly interesting solutions... ideas are less feasible-solutions than they are acts of branding and dissemination, where excitement is itself the solution. Whether or not you feel excited is yours."

“May the Bridges I Burn Light the Way” at STANDARD (OSLO)

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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 the landscape in unstoppable yet leaky pipes, garbage moved though our veins, beginning to see trash everywhere, even the paintings on view seem about the accumulation of detritus, cultural historic or otherwise, there's just stuff everywhere, stuff here a technical term for the quasi-differentiated mass, confusing a tarp, a trash bag and a tent.


See too: Chadwick Rantanen at Essex Street, Oscar Tuazon at Le Consortium & Paradise Garage

Oscar Tuazon at Le Consortium & Paradise Garage

(Le Consortium, Paradise Garage)

ELI5.
Oscar Tuazon likes building, and buildings, and the ways things get built. See, generally these things are so boring and ubiquitous, we don't notice them. These everyday things. So Tuazon uses all the tropes, er, common ways of making things, but assembles them in different ways that our brains aren't bored with, that allows you to recognize or see what your brain would normally be too bored to see. So you notice even the boring stuff. See Tuazon has a feti-, er, intense like for the protestant, er, blue-collar, or like see he appreciates the common job, son. The vernacular, er, that's why nothing is that spectacular, er, that interesting. The muted tones. It's a moral ethic, son. Have you ever seen Bruce Nauman's "Setting a good corner?" Of course not you're five. Right. Okay you know that show you like, the one that depicts stuff getting made, or like those dog-eared books you have with cross-sections, cut-intos, of like brick houses and steamships?  See Tuazon's sculptures are like that. You get to see everything, you notice the structure, you glean a moral appreciation for hard work. For the structure, son. Yes, son, endlessly romantic. Nostalgic for the past. No, much different than Donnie Judd. That's why he tore the garage, paradise, down, son, to stop the party.


See too : Tomma Abts at David Zwirner , Oscar Tuazon and Eli Hansen at Maccarone

Oscar Tuazon and Eli Hansen at Maccarone



The brutalist bravado of Tuazon meeting the campy stoner pastiche of Hansen’s psuedo-psychedelia makes for an imprecision of tone like Prince’s appropriation of the rural’s common tire planters, hard to disentangle celebration from sarcasm, like the joke of this exhibition’s endless column of toilet water. What was brilliantly found common ground in previous co-exhibtions, containing the specificity of both’s affective attachments, as in duct taped glassware, becomes in this exhibition dulled in its conflicting auras, mixed-metaphors of irony meeting its antithesis, of the deft masculine erections mocked by its sidelined dropout equivalent, found a meeting point in the threshold of blue-collar car craft aesthetics.