Yuji Agematsu, On Kawara at LA MAISON DE RENDEZ-VOUS

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What is contained in a day, what does a date contain, etc. If you pressed anyone on these questions they would admit the hairiness of the situation. But that isn't how we act, when we write press releases the questions themselves are preventatives against answers. This because "raising questions" is, we are told, the power of art. Which makes actually answering its questions a loser's affair - the questions must be kept on life support; Art, for its shareholders, must be eternal. (And thus why thousands of artists continue redeploying On Kawara's essential question. It becomes a mannered tool for evoking, but not answering, a question.) This is one of the worst aberrations of art. There is no critique if that critique never cancels. "Our fingerprints are ours, but we cannot be created from them."


See too: Kirsten Pieroth at Mathew, Sam Falls at 303 Gallery, Alan Ruiz at Bad Reputation, Trevor Paglen at Metro Pictures, Sarah Ortmeyer at Chicago Manual of Style, On Kawara at the Guggenheim,

Yuji Agematsu at Lulu

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Expelled from cultural bowels onto streets and corners, and hook it to the intellect, placing the ass into the head, its virtual cubes, its broadcast mechanism, its hermetic boxes, proffering it, holding it in hands up, saying look at this shit. The new ecologies of waste. In old Germania the toilets were backwards and you would poop onto a shelf so you could face your fear. Look at what you had done. The ropes of your making on stark white planes. It had some medical diagnostic purpose, to know what you had expelled, reading tea leaves in shallow pools, to determine how our cultural digestion was going.


See too: Ser Serpas at LUMA Westbau, Dylan Spaysky at Good Weather, Dylan Spaysky at Clifton Benevento, Melvin Edwards at Daniel Buchholz, Henrik Olesen at Schinkel Pavilion,  Henrik Olesen at Cabinet, Henrik Olesen at Reena Spaulings, Nancy Lupo at Kristina Kite & Yuji Agematsu at Miguel Abreu, Martin Soto Climent at Michael Benevento & Yuji Agematsu at The Power Station, Yuji Agematsu at Real Fine Arts, Yuji Agematsu at Artspeak, “May the Bridges I Burn Light the Way” at STANDARD (OSLO)

Martin Soto Climent at Michael Benevento & Yuji Agematsu at The Power Station

(link: Martin Soto Climent, Yuji Agematsu)

The enrapture of sensitivities, enwrapment, a container allowing movement, transaction. The Amazon box that allows its sales; cardboard a larger problem than the items it contains. The packaging that makes up the mass majority of waste.  Shouldn't we be speaking more of wrapper than "content", the mass majority of garbage that we have become hostages who love their captors to, enshrine odes to our hurt.

Nancy Lupo at Kristina Kite & Yuji Agematsu at Miguel Abreu, Yuji Agematsu at Real Fine Arts,  Yuji Agematsu at Artspeak, “May the Bridges I Burn Light the Way” at STANDARD (OSLO, Martín Soto Climent at Proyectos Monclova, Martín Soto Climent at DREI, Martin Soto Climent at Atlantis

AR: Yuji Agematsu at Miguel Abreu

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Originally Posted: April 1st, 2017

Note: This entry is part of August Review, our annual look back at this season’s key exhibitions. For more information, see the announcement here.

Nancy Lupo at Kristina Kite & Yuji Agematsu at Miguel Abreu

(Nancy Lupo at Kristina Kite, Yuji Agematsu at Miguel Abreu)

"Our growing attraction to garbage makes a psychologic sense as we become hostages to the trauma of dealing with it, the deranged images of garbage spewing, animals asphyxiated, learning of its intravenous networks sprawling across unstoppable leaky pipes, garbage moved though our landscape sprawling veins..."

Continuing our interest in making Stuff as a technical word. Stuff is the eye goo of objects. Like eye goo, stuff's service is its waste, a continual sloughing, so we can remain fresh, clean. Stuff accumulates, piles, is shed. Stuff is quasi things, is transient, transactional. A disposable fork is, like, quintessential stuff. Stuff depletes, frequently, though not always, disposable. Stuff is like object-food, a storage of energy for consumption, use. Stuff differentiates itself from things because everyone is putting energy toward it not being a thing: Companies/consumers press for stuff's cheapness, the user wants it only for what it can do, then to get rid it of it as soon as possible after, a pressure for stuff to be biodegradable. Stuff's thingness is a problem.

If there is something abject, itchy, about the Lupo's installation it is because stuff is being forced to become thing, stitched like rafts, like the The Great Garbage Patch, which too is stuff becoming thing, object, and anxious.
If Agemtasu's trash is comforting, lovable, it is because the stuff has been already digested to waste, paradoxically less anxious than stuff because it doesn't have the anxiety of stuff's thingness, just waste, and repackaged in the safety of cellophane to return it once again to product, we find comfort in products.



See too: “May the Bridges I Burn Light the Way” at STANDARD (OSLO), Nancy Lupo at Swiss Institute, Nancy Lupo at 1857, Yuji Agematsu at Real Fine Arts,  Yuji Agematsu at Artspeak

Yuji Agematsu at Real Fine Arts

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Like Tetsumi Kudo's radioactive ecology, or Thek's plexi-flesh, Agematsu's warm materials of human cast-offs are reanimated by the frames surrounding them. Agematsu's delicate compositions as ecosystems, precious, a sentimental morality resituating the natural to include microplastics dissolved into heavy saturation islands in the great pacific beverage, and the bacteria wrought. Like Duord embodying the filth of packaging, in a Roth like repetition of the abject, ironically returning it to the cellophane, packaged clean self. The package which holds desire, holding the excrement of it, bears witness to the beauty of Butterfly collections of petri dish human waste, packaged.


See too : Yuji Agematsu at Artspeak, Michael E. Smith at Lulu , David Douard at Johan Berggren

Yuji Agematsu at Artspeak



The vital-materialism that undergirds this work is premised on a quasi-spiritual belief of an essential warmth of used materials, as if waste and trash contained some quality that shrink-wrapped plungers from Walmart don’t, which is sort of true but also the great lie of Capitalism, as if these objects spontaneously-manifested on store shelves, as if Apple laptops weren't assembled by sweating hands of low wage workers from materials of rare earth, mined in darkness by slaves paid even less. Laptops don’t look dirty, but they are the waste of the same system that installs factory suicide nets.