AR: Black Cherokee at ROOM EAST

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Originally Posted: February 28th, 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.

Black Cherokee at ROOM EAST

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Choosing the outside artist on FDR drive at 125th street for 20 years right in sight emblematic of NY's short purview, it's experience fortified as singular by all the capital of NY's cultural megaphone. Luckily Black Cherokee is good, the serial collages over long periods of collecting cultural detritus accumulating all the juxtapositional irrationality of the time's moments and the surrealists these challenge for political ambiguity. Looking like google image searches missing the operative terms that organize, they feel automatic, the patterns emerging through the grate of images available for cutting. One common theme repeated: of people resting their cheek in their in their palm, looking off, and whether is this a cultural meme or an artistic one.

“The Crack-Up” at Room East

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Wurtz's very unspecific objects exist in a generalized zone of middling indeterminancy that bordered, but never hit, humor. Concertos of flat notes. But whereas Wurtz transcended the genre of mediocrity with an overly fastidious attention to his dumpy objects belying the sort of deranged care attended to them - the fastenings and threads so fussy as to feel slightly troubled - the Wurtz sensibility is not a champion of slacker lethargy, Wurtz becoming the flagship for a brand of wonky-abstractionist tendencies en vogue in the background noise of group show art that it never seemed intended to, far too buttoned up.

Marte Eknæs, Sean Raspet at Room East

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Fincher turned the Calculation of Negligence into nihilistic mantra for millions of angst ridden boys, finding solace for their jade in a new schizo-sado-masculinity, solace in a brutality ending in terrorist fantasies of high-rises burning. It felt like relief. The main character's lavish condo exploding from a gas leak was ostensibly the best thing that ever happened to him. The non-accident we later learn is a symptom stemming from the very repressive bourgeois lifestyle it destroys. That the terrorist act was itself an expression of late-capitalist detachment, the same thing that Baudrillard would later claim in his "The Spirit of Terrorism" that capitalism expressed a sort of auto-terrorism, boredom itself bringing the towers down. The Pop success of both at least clarifies the latent cultural desire we have for the fantasy of watching the world burn so long as they are sublimated (make us able to believe we would never actually desire to see them enacted) through the filters of acceptable and neutering forms, pop-film or philosophy, and here art.

Anyway Eknaes and Raspet set the gallery on pins and needles, priming it for any disaster always unknown, anything because everything looks pretty spooky.

But we desire it.


See too: Sean Raspet at Société and Sean Raspet at Jessica Silverman