Sean Raspet at Various Small Fires

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The cultural image of genetic mutation, a shared fear: three eyed fish, double headed calves, glowing cats, turtle ninjas, C.H.U.D.s. Or its potential, Golden Rice, AquAdvantage® Salmon, a cataclysm resistant earth.  Accurate or not, the point is a shared etherous cultural fear/potential, a readymade collective unconscious understanding, and these are artworks reaching in to press the button on this anxiety. They gesticulate a potential, a possibility that is aestheticized, juiced on techno-minimalism, to create a Rorschach test reflecting all the cultural baggage they can muster. They need not, nor shouldn't, produce any function of their possibility, because in good conceptual art fashion they neuter any aesthetic to be replaced with its potential. They are inkblots.

There are already artworks with GMOs, people paint with proteins modified for fluorescence, but they don't do thing we demand of contemporary art, clip the image and provide a space for projection.  (See too: Trevor Paglen) The potential monster in the closet is scarier than the monster that appears; an unfortunate fact for our cinematic universe is that most IRL apocalypse/advancement turns out looking pretty banal, but the fear/potential is pretty spectacular.

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

Sean Raspet at Société

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For all conceptual art’s fetish for bureaucratic language and dry instructions Raspet presents a shutout on their game by introducing a linguistic specificity from which art - whose amorphous problems produce vague words - could never compete. Less a Carey Young legalese, than a Weinerian instructional awkwardness, (“Matter caused to cease as it had”) producing, in its specific jargon, a scientific “great doubt” at the edge of understanding between phenomenology and experimental vs speculative understanding, of asking the sound of chiral cleaning chemicals clapping.
It could seem derivative aside from its deployment of a hyperbolic language within its pre-given forms of poetics if the questions asked weren't so stupidly designed to be answered. We can answer now the kōan, “What does the coke in a mirror taste like?” I, unfortunately, would like to know. The answer would require at least 3 papers expressing its at least 3 answers, and where are they Sean? I'm sure it is expensive, but surely someone would like to buy the world a synthesized enantiomerically opposite Coke.

See too : Goutam Ghosh at Standard Oslo , Sean Raspet at Jessica Silverman

Sean Raspet at Jessica Silverman

(Sean Raspet at Jessica Silverman)

Peter Eleey's exhibition The Quick and the Dead was an expose on the Conceptual art’s hinging of itself on the poetics of its functionlessness, even the driest conceptualizations of dead art scrolls were in lineage with a Caspar David Friedrich existentialism, positioning art within a cerebral vastness and nothingness, conceptual art latently filled with men standing before crashing waves of their romantic ideals. The go-to form of conceptual art now is a mannerist product version of it, sited within minimalist tendencies of theater, ascribing precepts to objects which evoke an endless myriad of poetic feels. The recipe for this process is well understood, the problem lies in making its concoction more concentrate, more acidic, a better product, and once Raspet finally rid himself of the hairgel cubes to present the near nothingness of his thesis show in which the concentration reached peak, and here the ouroboros of its olfactory conceit in which everything and nothing happens in inevitable returns, the vast nothingness spreads before us and the conceptual cymbals crash.

See too : Jason Dodge at Franco Nero