Samara Golden at Night Gallery

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If you placed a Daniel Spoerri in a Kusama Infinity Room does it beco- whatever. I can't believe these things haven't exploded as the hot new lobby bait. Museums need a product to fill their atria, search for reflective, and thus inclusive, possibility. Wasn't the artist present also just a mirror? Occasionally leaking goo, guts. Golden is good at mirrors, there's no doubt about that. But maybe the thing about Golden mirrors is they never reflect us, we become vampires before the lobby of art, which is too apt a metaphor for museums.

See too: Attempts to reach out

Samara Golden at MoMA P.S.1

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Unlike Escher, which these staircases has often been compared, Golden's space, after its initial disorientation, does resolve itself, perhaps its saving grace, quiet, cavernous, amping the qualities inherent to that most peculiar of PS1 spaces, a vastness that Golden doubles but leaves uncluttered of the overstuffed visual mania characterizing previous work. Its one of the most visually silent Golden has made, exactly what saves it from the spectacle that it seemed destined to be by the museum would desire it so. The world beneath the mirror, seeming more ordered than real it reflects, is tinged with a pathos, unreachable and still, sunk under the surface of the water. A perfect stage set waiting for its film, a spectacle besting even recent Hollywood blockbusters, or any image in what could been the surrealist joyride of Inception.

Group Show at le-1

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Graw surmised returns of sculpture’s figure as inalienable from its subject as commodity, particularly Harrison/Genzken's:

THESE SURROGATES thus reveal the embattled subjectivity at the heart of what Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello have famously called the "new spirit of capitalism," which demands the exploitation not only of labor but of personality, emotions, social relations, and other noneconomic aspects of our individual lives. Since this new regime works on and within subjectivity itself, even absorbing it into capital's own flows, Harrison's and Genzken's recent sculptures could be seen as delivering what is currently most in demand: subjectivity as a product. It is hard to decide, in fact, whether these works merely satisfy the current desire for staged subjectivity, or whether they exaggerate it in order to point to its problems.

4 years later human invasiveness find artists still struggling to refoot it in view, depicting it not in the commodified space of the real but in virtual space of video/painting where desire is the limit to treat it like a grotesque punching bag, finding glee in its horror.

See too : Andro Wekua at Sprüth Magers