Sergei Tcherepnin at Company

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Blinky lightbulb art.
We like paintings that "do things," we conflate a critical function with any function, and so when paintings sing or beam its a short cut or short-circuting this need for "function." Tcherepnin's were always sort of tasteful reserved forms of this "functioning painting" positing a perhaps real interest in their sounding that just happened to be packaged as paintings. The move into Brätsch INSTITÜT for mass-production lines of "content" - built off the Genzkenian insight that production is art, is always content, producible at any speed - seems to renege on Tcherepnin's more sound interests, into full blow collage-electronics school of the last 5 years that apparently has not completely burned its lightbulbs out. Somewhere a joke about how long these bright ideas, bulbs, last.

"Every 10 years assemblage reinvigorates itself as the dumpsters picked through are modernized to the current castoffs and appear new, the waste that evolves along culture until finally an artist is able to rummage up enough LEDs, acrylic panels and Arte Povera catalogs to accumulate the update to our Rauschenberg cardboard clogging the pipes of our forward progress."


See too:
“Lemurenheim” at Meyer Kainer, Ei Arakawa at Kunstverein Dusseldorf, Kerstin Brätsch at Gio Marconi, DAS INSTITÜT at Serpentine Gallery, KAYA at Deborah Schamoni, Kerstin Brätsch at Gavin Brown, Amy Lien and Enzo Camacho at CCS Bard, Amy Lien and Enzo Camacho at 47 Canal (2), Amy Lien, Enzo Camacho at various locations, Amy Lien & Enzo Camacho at 47 Canal (1), Ei Arakawa at Taka Ishii & Peter Halley at Modern Art

“Room & Board & Crate & Barrel & Mother Vertical” at Midway Contemporary Art

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Delivered with the PR's concepts as talking points, Arakawa's content delivery system continually refreshes itself through chameleon adoption of the background artists and cultures upcycled into its staging system under the spotlight of Contemporary Art, a system in which the production of artistic meaning is itself made clear as a series of gestures and movements that encode work with whatever aura is distinct to contemporary art separate from the objects subsumed. Anyone could play along at home. Arakawa may or may not have instigated the current trend for dancing in front of paintings as a means to accredit them, but he was the one to make it the focal point, and while everyone wants to go back to Gutai, Arakawa didn't need the paint as sediment of the action still mechanistically marking the authorial hand, the semio-social spirit would embed itself without touch.


See too: Karl Holmqvist and Ei Arakawa at Overduin & Co., And so Quarterly has finally come to pass.