Alex Katz at Sant'Andrea de Scaphis

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It is so nice to be effortless. To be a breeze. To be warm winds. God could you imagine trying hard. No one wants to watch someone pedal a bicycle. They want motorcycles leaping chasms. Speed. And not wearing a helmet, or seatbelt, for danger allows you to fuck up the face. Look cool with a broken nose. Do not stop. Guns like brushes blazing. Saying, This / broken nose / makes me look cooler / than the guy / in a helmet of perfection / right? God can you imagine slowing down, to correct a mistake, pedestrian.

Terminal velocity, production itself becomes the product: Brätsch, KAYA, Genzken, Craven, Guyton, Smith, the zombies, the current, etc.

Alighiero e Boetti at Sant'Andrea de Scaphis

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1993 was a very strange year for figurative sculpture. You've got the above (which "must have come as a surprise.") But then, same year, you have Paul McCarthy's Spaghetti Man (guess where the spaghetti is), Charles Ray's Family Romance, Janine Antoni's Lick and Lather as well as Mike Kelley's seminal survey exhibition (alongside the Boetti at Sonsbeek) The Uncanny. Kelley's "experiment took its cue from the rise of 'mannequin art,' a term he coined to describe artists like Charles Ray, Kiki Smith, and Jonathan Borofsky, whose life-size sculptures—not, in fact, all mannequins—evoked anxieties about the role of the human body in a time wrought by the AIDS epidemic, the growth of plastic surgery procedures, and advances in biotechnology. In addition to artworks, however, Kelley gathered religious statues, inflatable sex dolls, ventriloquist dummies, wax figures, and medical anatomical models into crowded clusters to eerie effect." 1993 being today. 

Ed Atkins at Sant'Andrea de Scaphis

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"...We continued to live through a distancing world held increasingly close, more finely detailed, not so much nuanced as mictorized: microscopically huge, a memory that was infinite, thoughts reappeared haunting you from underground server vaults, friends since ghosted returned with body supplements. Viral punishment: forever indoors. Forever asked to participate in the rooms where you could be viewed, thumbed, generally commented on. Like suddenly everyone is an artist inviting anonymous critics. A person we liked less you than her. Every teenager learned numbers/statistics by an emotional battery. The bodies got online, got ever more perfect and you got ever more, well, [blistery]."

CAWD wrote the exhibition texts, you can find them here, hosted by CAD.

see too: Ed Atkins

Arthur Jafa at Sant’Andrea de Scaphis

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You only get to watch ten seconds of this but you still get feels its promotion. That advertisement creates a lack that can only be fulfilled through consumption it does not allow.

You can watch one whole minute of it here: “Elements of Vogue” at CA2M Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo

Karl Holmqvist at Sant’Andrea de Scaphis

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On Holmqvist at GBE: "It's punk plagiarism, sucking out the affective lyricism of the pop ecosystem to flatten out all those very-much-felt feelings into a poetry of surfaces - and tedium."
  - Andrew Durbin TzK

We like words, we trust words, our whole society practically predicted on words, everywhere, ubiquitous, magnificent and fragile. So the Holmqvistic hammering of words into tin for his cymbal tapping repetition could feel either charmingly disruptive or cruel.  Holmqvist has expressed less affinity for jazz than for noise, words become the sensation of objects felt with a numb hand, the cacophony of nerves deprived. A rose is a rose is a rose, there is a long history of this use of semantic satiation: the repeated arousal of a specific neural pattern causing "a reduction in the intensity of the activity with each repetition" - effectively numbs like our hands our ability to perceive them with any force but some wide flat plainness, deprived of structure to give its words lifeblood like sucking nitrous from balloons until the world dissolves into a stupefied vertigo, and we feel the noise, the static of our brains deprived.

Ella Kruglyanskaya at Sant’Andrea de Scaphis

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Now, and having been trending, the world's craving directness, the assertive image qualifying nothing and instead saturates itself in plainness, a matter-of-factness. Straight-talk has, in-fact, steamrolled several countries. The painter caroms off the directness of the sign-painter, of the slogan maker, of the one with such clear thoughts they can can be said in 140 characters or less. It's all there already perfectly plain everything to see, a still life.


See too: Etel Adnan at Sfeir-Semler