Thea Djordjadze at Portikus

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We’ve invented some kind of Stockholm syndrome to the architecture we are hostage to. An art in supplication to the building's wings that embrace it. We see a vitality, a benevolence in the architecture, like a generous god's embrace. We build to it totems, in it reliquaries. The several photos of the light in the space. Art that literally reflects its light as halos. Any architecture that will host it, a gift to it.

Thea Djordjadze at South London Gallery

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In a world where so much is streamlined, everything worn smooth by productive pressure and ergonomically bent for us, an object that feels like a reject from that process feels something like comfort.


See too: Venice: Thea Djordjadze at The Arsenale, Oscar Tuazon at Le Consortium & Paradise Garage, Richard Rezac at Isabella Bortolozzi

Venice: Thea Djordjadze at The Arsenale

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Little leg syndrome, the flat and thin things from that time, the late 00's, Gedi Sibony, Ian Khaer, Dike Blair, Sosnowska, Pumhösl, Djordjadze, et al., everyone having these fragile objects carefully held on stilts and legs, over rugs, levitating things off the floor and potted plants in Broodthaer's resurging mis-en-scene faux Décors. Everyone invested in tableaus, of feng-shui industrial animism. Fried's theaters run though home decor staging's emptiness. Morphing into today's "speculative materials." Reinvesting in the material sited. Djordjadze's thin legged fragility looked, after the conquest of Ikea, libidinal. Reestablishing fragility in industrial forms we all wanted so bad. Petite arrangements of decor.

“Transatlantic Transparency” at Mathew

(“Transatlantic Transparency” at Mathew New York, Berlin)

In the intentionally bathetic ending of Lerner’s novel (quoted in the press release) the Poet, throughout stricken with self-reflexive paralysis, described by one reviewer as an “examination of just how self-conscious, miserable, and absurd one man can be” arises from the dream of his Madrid fellowship discovering his problems somehow gone the moment he leaves them.

Not that there's anything wrong with that. The exhibition's formalism is criticism only in the sense of contemporary art's allergy to the word, but of course Wilde’s “It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances...” and so. Appearances are politics, and in an age where the image replaces thought, the formalism often exists as an interesting necessary tool. So why does this exhibition feel so defeated before born? Like the press release, it itself uses its stylistic assemblage to bog itself in its own mire, only to get sad about it, defeated by its own appearances.

HE HAD ENOUGH RESPECT FOR PAINTING to quit. Enough respect for quitting to paint. Enough respect for the figure to abstract. For abstraction to hint at the breast. For the breast to ask the model to leave. But I live here, says the model. And I respect that, says the painter. But I have enough respect for respect to insist. For insistence to turn the other cheek. For the other cheek to turn the other cheek. Hence I appear to be shaking my head No.
-Ben Lerner from Angle of Yaw.