Michael Rakowitz at Rhona Hoffman Gallery

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Totemizing the debris of culture. Art as church for contemplation. We come to see the cultural oracle.

[Art] always look like you blew up a shopping mall, like its reassembly after catastrophe, like hangers categorizing airline wreckage. Trying to make sense in debris. Us, a cargo cult. Us, a primitive culture, drawing aurochs on our white cave walls. With the debris of culture. Our Mystic auto-anthropology. "

"art treats culture as a system of artifacts to be interrogated by its own white light certification process, a factory for meaning production." 

At least here the politics are clear. A giant trashbag in the other room inflates and deflates, turning a political act into performance. Press "on" to repeat history for audience. The PR asks a telling question about an artist who sculpted monuments to both Confederate and Union generals: "What does it mean that the same pair of hands made these two works?" But the obvious answer is telling. In cultural war artists are mercenaries. 

Nancy Rubins at Rhona Hoffman Gallery

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Nancy Lupo noted in a PR that MOCA's Nancy Rubins sculpture, located in the plaza, had become a bird hotel. The cleaning fees likely astronomical. Lupo's proposed plaza sculpture, a bench to feed the pigeons, was rejected by the museum, sadly. But all I can think of is Rubins being bird houses. Machines to amass pigeon shit. Beautiful nests for sky rats. It's hard to return from the thought. There's a long history of artists deterritorializing the previous generation, like David Hammons' pissing on Serra. Tom Burr's cruising spot Serra. Or the kids you find using Serra as hideouts to smoke pot. Punctures the artistic bloat. Return the public sculpture to the ecosystem of the urban, wasp and orchid. A sort of embrace as ruin. Alter myth.