Ghislaine Leung at Künstleraus Stuttgart

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(continued)

So the point intended,

1. The continual retelling (1 novel, 2 films, 3 made-for-tv movies) of The Stepford Wives is evidence of the films resonance, to a common cultural fear: suspense/horror story of human subjectivity molded to robotic subservience.

2. This fear, plotted during a time of accelerating convenience of "modern miracle" kitchens, is predicated on a subconscious understanding that we are in some way socially reproduced by the objects around us. As our kitchens become increasingly convenient so too we will need to become convenient: the level of pleasance required around our tyrannical-husbands we intuit is in direct correlation to the level of convenience of everything surrounding us. As the world become more convenient, as kitchens threaten to replace cooks, as what we provide is continually warned to be replaceable, we must increasingly match the ease of the others/objects who threaten to replace us, and we adopt an unnatural pleasantness. This is implicit fear of the film.

3. Commodities by nature limit individual expression, and we are molded to their voice. We become subservient to what the commodity can allow us. So you join in choir with all the others who purchased their employer/partner a mug singing "THE BOSS." The commodity turns the world into a cartoon, slapstick, as everything becomes exchangeable, the backgrounds getting more repetitive in a drive towards efficiency. The cartoon, slapstick, rendered in the real is gore.

4. Leung's Hugo Boss sterility is a suburban horror movie. 

(past: Ghislaine Leung at Chisenhale & Essex Street)

Dorota Jurczak at Kunstlerhaus Stuttgart

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The reproducibility of artwork to fit not necessarily CAD's but all documentation framing as an object denoting and connoting its own meaning among an order of objects, it's ability to stand as icon for what it represents, iconic, gives it worth. Some exhibitions don't wear CAD well. The ability to spread through social mechanisms now more relevant ever, a pressure on art that increasingly resembles survival of those most fittest to reproduce.


see too: And so Quarterly has finally come to pass., Brian Calvin at Le Consortium, CAD

Rachel Reupke at Kunstlerhaus Stuttgart

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Against all odds the video's excruciating slowness is somehow enjoyable. Watching a woman or man hold a syrupy Guinness aloft becomes achingly charged with the physical strain of holding aloft the drink still. It's physically uncomfortable to watch, and unnerving how much we have come to expect these stock images to deliver a certain thing, a closure, and when that thing is denied how unbelievably irritating it is. In Ten Seconds or Greater the cinematographer drunk precession away from even the very lame action of chopping vegetables - aggravated by the generic characters doing so without looking at their precarious fingers - is almost nauseatingly annoying, and this endless denial our expectations from what should be recognizable is sort of embarrassingly enjoyable. Why am I enjoying being denied pleasure, this masochistic viewing experience, entering into a sort of bondage contract with the viewing experience, where at any moment one can utter the safe word, look away, and be done with it, but doesn't. And why are stock images pleasure.