Hans Bellmer, H.R. Giger at Schinkel Pavillon

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Because our moment is so filled with tortures on the body, with stringing our puppet goo, experiments on flesh? Half of portraiture today looking like medical eviscerations (see: The violence against faces.) - our more genetically modified Picasso, not dismembering the ear/nose it but growing it there. So the lineage for these two - current figuration is medically experimental, grotesque, alien, et al - is here. But at some unconscious base is sexual violence, and the women who suffer at that. (It wasn't until Dan O'Bannon and Alien's brilliant reversal that the sexual violence threatened captains.) I like both Giger and Bellmer much, but acknowledge "the artworld [is] continuously electrified by depictions of women in societal bondage gear. Artists depicting the strictures that force women to conform to cultural mores; images of women made, if only momentarily, powerless or complicit ... that its success is simply a culture that likes seeing - culturally approved - women in bondage." 

The Giger Chair trend, Amalia Ulman at The Gallery at El Centro, Cindy Sherman too, H.R. Giger on CAWD

John Miller at Schinkel Pavillon

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"Veblen asserted that what so often passes for beauty is simply demonstrable wealth; our sense of an article’s superiority corresponds to its honorific wastefulness. Extravagance, the capacity to waste, signifies power. To the extent that waste implies a superabundance of wealth, and because power is measured in material acquisitions, the beauty of an article confirms the prepotency of its owner.
After late capital became a retardative force, the standard of beauty, according to Veblen, served to inhibit technical, social, and artistic progress by driving a wedge between the useful and the desirable: 'The principle in question is, in a certain sense, a negative rather than a positive law. It is a regulative rather than a creative principle'[...]
The hope of liberation in superior taste turned the dandy’s quest into a quixotic venture. In contrast, the post-Modern tropes of irony, quotation, and pastiche represent an attempt to reclaim beauty by negating its usual invidiousness. Yet this reclamation, like the dandy’s insolence, admits a painful gap between intentions and results, utopian longing and what ideology actually delivers. And so the promise of a better life lingers on in a highly mannered guise. Here the melancholic portents are unmistakable to anyone who cares to give them a closer look: it is the suppressed rage of those for whom beauty has been tainted forever. " - John Miller, Artforum

Amy Lien, Enzo Camacho at various locations

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Our bodily tumult like serial killer sprees in some hallowed halls, the offices of Texte Zur Kunst, Buchholz, Mathew, Lars Friedrich’s apartment - our representation fractured in the need to stash our bodies everywhere in art franchised, split spread divide and reconnect - of course we become like monsters tentacling and "suck[ing] unborn fetuses out of pregnant women" to maintain our youthful semio-capital.


See too: Amy Lien & Enzo Camacho at 47 Canal

Paul McCarthy at Schinkel Pavillon

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McCarthy the great desublimator, and of late the great literalizer. Literalization is a form of desublimation. And we watch him objectify someone, literally turn someone into an object, Elyse Poppers or himself. Unusual for McCarthy it is clean, clinical and calculated. It feels awful. This process, usually huge on billboards and bus stations showing half-naked young things, should entail all the fun of commodities, should replace the desire with an object that can be purchased, replace that desire. Instead here is cruel, useless and wasted. The world has little use for naked old man on table. Watch the procession of Poppers' body become not hers, the literal object consumable.

Philippe Parreno at Esther Schipper

(Link: Philippe Parreno at Esther Schipper, Schinkel Pavillon, Pilar Corrias)

Parreno always felt askew in the ideological containment of Relational Aesthetics. Yet Kelsey’s final cut at Relational programs as coup-de-grace description: “capitalist realist adaptation of art to the experience economy” fits particularly unfortunately well to Parreno. Parreno’s premised on a pagan-importance of experience run through the fun-house of post-modernity, a contemporary update of some of the quasi-spiritualism of minimalism’s Light and Space and Irwins phenomenological trips, forgetting the name of the thing one saw as a salve to ordering impulse of capital, rendered now (further realist ala Kelsey) with symbols and mis-en-scene, alienating the experience of today’s banalities towards the to-what-ends? of the real contention of RA. If no one has made such bold claims in the beginning we wouldn't have had the maelstorm that colors the sight of these things today and they would look like mere art, instead of politically contentious objects that fall under a name that we can't forget and thus cannot see.