Aria Dean at The Renaissance Society

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   Note: the PR contains the password to view the film. 

Slaughterhouse are marked by efficiency in death, a tenet of modernism. So if everything comes to resemble a slaughterhouse... that's true too. Modernism is a slaughterhouse, the utopian impulse was turned against us as efficiency to extrapolate realty capital, turn cities into glass, into "luxury" rent harvest machines. The slaughterhouse curves a Richard Serra - so the bovine experiences a merry temple grand in relaxation of its muscle before getting its captive bolt steel. We all know what happens in slaughterhouses. People say if people only knew what happened they wouldn't eat meat. But people know. People know of world's injustice. They know the the unfairness. The darkness in cobalt mines. That's not the problem. We humans are too adept at compartmentalization. We train everyday on trains full of animals to remove ourselves from the problem of identification with others. Beating hearts in the floorboards of every human on your commute.  But I think we're alone now, where there is nothing scarier than the monster in the closet of your mind, guilt.

Kyung-Me at Bureau & Silke Otto-Knapp at The Renaissance Society

(KM, SOK)

One has its own internal world; one uses your internal world. You look into Kyung-Me's, awaiting you is a little snow globe of a world inside it. But the other reflects you, displays vessels for your pour over. Its why Otto-Knapp's feel like memories, they're projection screens for home films of your - like Koether - cultural baggage.


See too: Silke Otto-Knapp at greengrassi, Silke Otto-Knapp at Taylor Macklin, Jutta Koether at Bortolami, Jutta Koether at Museum Brandhorst

Richard Rezac at The Renaissance Society

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but different from minimalism in their contaminating themselves in faint veils of cultural signifiers. These look purposed. Look like other things vaguely. As their power.  "the elusive mechanisms of interpretation," They appear designed but without a purpose we can ascertain. We are so accustomed to objects bent to our service that appearing without purpose we call alien. The power of the uncanny is to teach us what we expect from certain forms by removing the parts that would cause recognition replaced with mystery, instead all the doohickies and flimflams and us wondering why we expected it to begin with. The flux capacitor must only look like the expectations a public has for such an object.


See too: Alicja Kwade at Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, Richard Rezac at Isabella Bortolozzi

Robert Grosvenor at The Renaissance Society

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Amongst the sterility of minimalist forms Grosvenor's like the subtle bulge in the zubaz of propriety it reminds us of. Grosnevor's doesn't feel naturalized, but constructed, affected, conjuring the sweat of effort and work that minimalism tried to avoid through industrial process and design. Grosvenor's minimalism reminds us of work and sweat and bodies, of the designer, the sun baked engineer. Grosvenor's minimalism reconsiders the earthliness that minimalism tried to disavow, work.

Robert Grosvenor at Karma