Peter Fend at Museo Nivola

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Art has been co-opted for worse things than environmental boostering. Fend's utopic aspects seem nice if not necessarily utilitarian, but since when has art been confronted with actualities. Art is a space without expectations of internal success, of even internal logic. Fend is capable of a grin, the plan involves "collecting hydroelectric energy with [...] waterwheels suspended from Duchamp-model bicycle-wheel forks." At best giving the boring problems of our coming environmental cataclysm at least ostensibly interesting solutions. Like Buckminster Fuller, and perhaps Obrist, ideas are less the feasible-solutions-for-actualization than they are acts of branding and dissemination, where being excited-for is itself the solution. Whether or not you feel excited is yours.


See too: Peter Fend at Embajada, Peter Fend's World Beach Party (Arts Magazine)

Peter Fend at Embajada

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Protest art is hot right now, museum footage turned over to it with populist ease. Who doesn't want to take down Elon Musk, the cartoon villain extraordinaire who painted himself green to hide the robotic machination of his hyper-capitalism, neoliberal as savior. Musk is dolt. It feels good to curse him. It feels good to send out the rhetorical curses of the protest sign's curtness. The retort of his loyal followers, "what have you done to compete?" always coming with the implicit understanding that one wants to do something, and further that one wants to do something that panders to markets deeming it marketable. How can one invest in getting Musk to stop? To take a break. How could we invest in shutting off the wheels for a day, and we could all go outside. The internet shuttered. The lights dimmed, the rare earths would stop being mined, iPhones depleting their charges, and the capital would be stored in whatever vaults they now use for dust. The fossils we burn as fuel could be temporarily cooled. We could stand blinkered at the sun we haven't seen. For a while, we could erect giant balloons, for the firefighters to watch the world be set afire. It feels good to take down, to erect fingers.

“History Made By Artists” at Clearing

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These artists create history one by crafting an atemporal artifact, another evincing sedimented layers of waste as time markers, and another by writing a poem for the possibility of. But really they create it through the exhibition's reverence towards it. History only exists when it is cared for, or else it just disappears, and so artists treat it with a tender weightiness, with a disproportionate amount of veneration, a wide berth.

Juha Pekka Matias Laakkonen at Corvi-Mora

Peter Fend at Essex Street



In its art impotence we need not obey or believe, and instead pick at the minutia of its rhetoric, sampling it in the political limpness of a poem, like Holzer’s Truisms, tweets flashing on courier’s white aluminum. Poster removed from action, placed in the gallery, looking good but not quite working. From a decade when Chris Wool was screaming unheard in silent graphics, to today as Fend yells in varying green hues, some red; it’s less call to action but instead gloss in the cybernetic reach of slogan marketing, maps of cerebral gaming. Winning the hearts and minds. The way its breath enters you, like Jonathan Horowitz’s pedestalled tofu, slowly getting slimy. Bruce Nauman in his skyplane writing on the blue Pasadena sky, “Leave the land alone.” The invocation of James Bond feels spot on in its admittance of our land of fiction:

HOW CAN THE CIA CONTROL
SUCH A NEW WAY TO WRITE

FINALLY JAMES BOND MUST
RELENT, GIVING WAY TO A
FORCE OF COMMON THOUGHT

BY A CITIZEN NAMED FEND