Lena Henke at Marta Herford

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Stardate january 1st 2024. The new year. An unexplained cubical object blocked our vessel's path. A large mass of rubber tires. The cubes have been awarded the Marta Award by the Wemhöner Foundation. On the bridge, Mr. Spock immediately ordered general alert. My location – sickbay. Computer analysis: "This interplay of kitchen furnishings, sculpture, and display becomes an ambiguous object in the museum space." 

Further analysis:

The fallout of the semiotic manicism/collapse/supernova, of the 00’s assemblage (Harrison, Genzken, Pernice et al) and the exploding of Unmonumental’ detritus, left the next generation picking cultural rubble. Artists became post-semio-apocalyptic cargo-cult, artists, still wanting to believe, began to reassemble totems of cultural meaning. Staedelschulites rehashing a form of ready-made-marxist-surrealism, societie's tchotchkies made to “speak” the tongues of the Invisible Hand's gods who must be crazy. Post-Lieske - the real rabble rearranging/collaging/juxtaposing the signs of capital as some sort of anti-altar to them - the whole "arrangements" phenomenon, tableaus of cultural artifacts, seen again and again and again on the rugs of art fairs everywhere - finally hitting bedrock in the strip-mine of Darren Bader just arranging capital’s objects on the floor.

Art is the cargo-cult to a mass culture whose droppings they rearrange as totems to stand in for understanding. In cave paintings the mystical prey were made many times larger than the people. The ancient people were thought to trek to the rooms to be extolled by the PR about the significance of. 

Star maps reveal no indication of habitable planets nearby. Origin and purpose of the cube still unknown. We've been here, held motionless, for 18 hours. 

Captain's Log, Stardate 1514.0. The cube has been destroyed. Ship's damage, minor. But my next decision, major – probe on ahead or turn back.

Danny McDonald at House of Gaga

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This is the interpretation box of art. (see: yesterday) A object we can't see "inside," so place its empty vessel to skull, ask for clues. From the debris of culture. Making this cargo-cult art. The compostionalized altars of cultural refuse. We are welcome to interpret the reassembly of it. Assemblage meaning. Composition as a device we associate with art, and art with meaning. Therefore these edible arrangement of content makes "art" - which is meaningful, tautologically. Ostensibly. 

See too: Danny McDonald, Cargo Cult

Group Show at Galerie Clages

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A sort of encapsulation of current art. Cargo cult totems that we perform our art rituals upon. It might as well be magic what today's press releases claim. Incant. And wryly Werner's contraptions are the Rube Goldberg machines of art function, like Rachel Harrison and Jason Rhodes finally shaking hands - the factory, meaning disassembles and reassembles, semantically fractured, as content/aura. Art's ostensible value. The sign is material, the art is the machine for compositionizing them, meaning's byzantine Mouse Trap. 

See too: Antligature Rooms p.43, Cargo Cult

Alan Ruiz at Bad Reputation

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More art as the cargo cult, the displayed droppings of dominant culture, broken into artifacts, and presented it in our white altars to press heads against it. We used to draw aurochs on cave walls; we relocate the world into art, to make it manipulable in our realm, sandbox, aesthetics. To stand in for control. Aesthetics becomes the religion of fictionalized understanding. It substitutes its little problem for the one big problem. And therefore claims knowledge, and thus domain.
If the dominance of mass culture includes threat to diminish art, [a diminishing] that we could call castration, then art's transmuting that culture into fetish item is classic Freud: it is "a token of triumph over the threat of castration and a protection against it." i.e. You can't cut off what I own of yours.
Do the Gods know we exist?


Cargo cults: Sylvie Fleury at Karma, Yngve Holen at Kunsthalle Basel, Yngve Holen at Modern Art, Yngve Holen at Modern Art (2), David Lieske at MUMOK, Yngve Holen at Fine Arts, Sydney,  Rachel Harrison at Whitney Museum, Sean Raspet at Jessica Silverman

Yngve Holen at Fine Arts, Sydney

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Looking for the ghost in the machine we instead find the designer. We treat objects as if they are magic, acting like a cargo cult, arranging the droppings of the industrial gods like paganists worshipping more technically advanced nations. We place their refuse in our altars. A hole we are to be fed into in trash can colors absorbing into the urban landscape. Objects are designed to affect us, strangely adept at it, advertising like a massive psychologic program and objects are the sediment of it to deploy its energies. But despite every attempt to make technical medical objects sympathetic to us, they are unfortunately cold and this is difficult for us.



See too: Yngve Holen at Kunsthalle Basel, Yngve Holen at Modern Art, David Lieske at MUMOK

Michael Rakowitz at Rhona Hoffman Gallery

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Totemizing the debris of culture. Art as church for contemplation. We come to see the cultural oracle.

[Art] always look like you blew up a shopping mall, like its reassembly after catastrophe, like hangers categorizing airline wreckage. Trying to make sense in debris. Us, a cargo cult. Us, a primitive culture, drawing aurochs on our white cave walls. With the debris of culture. Our Mystic auto-anthropology. "

"art treats culture as a system of artifacts to be interrogated by its own white light certification process, a factory for meaning production." 

At least here the politics are clear. A giant trashbag in the other room inflates and deflates, turning a political act into performance. Press "on" to repeat history for audience. The PR asks a telling question about an artist who sculpted monuments to both Confederate and Union generals: "What does it mean that the same pair of hands made these two works?" But the obvious answer is telling. In cultural war artists are mercenaries. 

Bradley Kronz at Friart

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Craftsperson of the wasteland would seem a timely moniker as the gallery becomes the cargo-cult reliquary of our cultural wasteland. i.e. Place the coke bottle in the gallery, watch it attract aura type-of-art. (See too: Why do group shows always looks like you blew up a shopping mall?) But Kronz missed the memo on letting the whitecube do the work - instead putting all this sweat into his own personal orgone accumulators, all hands toward wasteland contraptions for... framing? Big question mark there. But frames were the original aura accumulators and I think Kronz is all about trying to build a frame from the standpoint of someone who has never seen but had read about them before the endtimes. 

See too: Bradley Kronz at Lars Friedrich, “Breathing Through Skin” at Antenna Space

Maryam Jafri at Kai Matsumiya

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The schizo of culture is well stated; advertising diamonds next to atrocities is news. But rather than documents of raw schizophrenia, Jafri's ability to wrest visual homology in paradox makes the point both elegant and clear. Culture subjectification is a catch-22, no exit, mirror chamber. Jafri lays out a funhouse of our ourselves, cartoon reflections in warped media. Fun!

While this could be confused with cargo-cult droppings, with the compositionalized detritus of "interpretation box theory of art"- its important to note the distinction. The composition is not intended to hay-wire content. It isn't jumbled wreckage on altars, but clear and concisely packaged for its cataloging. Arguable. 

Richard Sides at Schiefe Zähne

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The inability to structure information under a rubric, to organize, like CAWD writ previous: "the new drug of conceptual art is the complete meltdown of sense."  This has been true for a while, e.g. Berger's diamond ads next to war atrocities. And Wolfson weaponized incoherence into a final boss, irony. But the version here is more kin Carissa Rodriguez, Darren Bader, Morag Keil. Maybe Keith Farquhar. It's less attack than a slow trip, an inability to find hard ground, the more one looks, the more information, the more the world liquifies, almost psychedelically incoherent, the world begins to fall apart. Psychosemiotnaut?

The fallout of [this] semiotic manicism/collapse/supernova, of the 00’s assemblage (Harrison, Genzken, Pernice et al) and the exploding of Unmonumental’s detritus, left the next generation picking cultural rubble. Artists became post-apocalyptic cargo-cult, artists, still wanting to believe, began to reassemble totems of cultural meaning. Staedelschulites rehashing a form of ready-made-marxist-surrealism, societie's tchotchkies made to “speak” the tongues of the Invisible Hand, worship of gods who must be crazy. Post-Lieske - the real rabble of Neue Alte Brucke, Pro-Choice, etc. - Ceccaldi, Yngve Holen and everyone else - rearranging/collaging/juxtaposing the signs of capital as some sort of anti-altar to them - the whole "arrangements" phenomenon, tableaus of cultural artifacts, seen again and again and again on the rugs of art fairs everywhere - finally hitting bedrock in the strip-mine of Darren Bader just arranging capital’s objects on the floor.

see too: Carissa Rodriguez at Wattis, Rachel Harrison at Whitney Museum, Morag Keil at Real Fine Arts

“Flat Neighbors” at Rachel Uffner



Assemblage surrealism 2.0
The fallout of semiotic manicism/collapse/supernova* of the 00’s assemblage, Harrison, Genzken, Pernice et al, the exploding of Unmonumental’s detritus, left the next generation picking cultural rubble. A post-apocalyptic cargo-cult, artists, still wanting to believe, began to reassemble totems of cultural meaning. Staedelschulites rehashing a form of ready-made-marxist-surrealism, societie's tchotchkies made to “speak” the tongues of the Invisible Hand, worship of gods who must be crazy. Post-Lieske - the real rabble of Neue Alte Brucke, Pro-Choice, etc. - Ceccaldi, Yngve Holen and everyone else - rearranging/collaging/juxtaposing the signs of capital as some sort of anti-altar to them - the whole mandala phenomenon, tableaus of cultural artifacts, seen again and again and again on the rugs of art fairs everywhere - finally hitting bedrock in the strip-mine of Darren Bader just arranging capital’s objects on the floor.

But so look see, at Rachel Uffner, as the next generation assembles, re-erect, no longer a strange spiritualism in letting the markets speak their hallucinations, but primordial constructions in its own. Still highly surrealist in its mashing of lobster- biology with tele-electronics in the continuously re-imagined sphere of bio-tech. Future's frogs in glass housing shan't live alone. The Bivalve shell rises, the new theory of design, Rough and smooth, coarse and erotic. The oyster like a hand made to hold the Apple product, what a perfect symbol for our biomechanical cybernetics. The limits of the hard body turning over into soft. Look at us evolve to our newfound worlds underwater. Do we really think a PowerRanger would own Elad Lassry?.

*so caught up in this chaos of signs and surface effects, it's
precisely because it's so serious about space: In a time when space
and image lose their distinction, and the old, ideal distance
between viewer and object is always already filled up and
occupied by a thousand communications, sculpture, too, finds
ways of making itself multi-surfaced and schizo-temporal. In
order to re-occupy our contemporary no-space, it trades in its
timeless pose for a temporary one, or for a manic series of
apearances. - Kelsey on Harrison’s semio-manicism.

Past: Yngve Holen

"We treat objects as if they are magic, we acting like a cargo cult, arranging the droppings of the industrial gods like paganists worshipping more technically advanced nations. We place their refuse in our altars. Objects are designed to affect us, strangely adept at it, advertising like a massive psychologic program and objects are the sediment of its energies. But despite every attempt to make technical objects sympathetic to us, they are unfortunately cold and this is difficult for us."

"That terrible emptiness of objects, an indifference that hurts, and in Holen and other's objects we begin to see boogeymen that we assume must be there to fill the cold object with anything but a desolation. We exceed at inventing gods where there are none. What is behind it is only us. It is obvious at this point that objects we design are reflections of us, this is how the field of anthropology operates. We are designers of our world, of our water coolers cut in half in attempts to find its ghost. There is only us standing around it attempting the small talk of art writing."

"These insectile eyes we recognize is an anthropomorphism softening the blow of cold dead indifference."


Read full: Yngve Holen at Fine Arts, Sydney, Yngve Holen at Kunsthalle Basel, Yngve Holen at Modern Art, David Lieske at MUMOK, Yngve Holen at Modern Art

“A Love Letter to a Nightmare” at Petzel

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Group shows always look like you blew up a shopping mall, like its reassembly after catastrophe, like hangers categorizing airline wreckage. Trying to make sense in debris. Us, a cargo cult. Us, a primitive culture, drawing aurochs on our white cave walls. With the debris of culture. Our Mystic auto-anthropology. Sexy legs made in wheat aren't surreal but reality when a world sells children cereal with fat assed bee, then sells adults figurines of that bee. This is reality, a sexy hotdog is practically a readymade. Merely exploded.

Sylvie Fleury at Karma

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Art is the cargo-cult to a mass culture whose droppings they rearrange as totems to stand in for understanding. In cave paintings the mystical prey were made many times larger than the people. The ancient people were thought to trek to the rooms to be extolled by the PR about the significance of.


See also: Sylvie Fleury at Karma International

Kim Jones at Bridget Donahue

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We, cargo cult, attempt to reassemble meaning in the wasteland, our culture. The artists become shamans, build totems, we look to them to create something that we could relate. Finding some lovely in the filth over here. Jones is proof that these inclinations are not recent trends, the muck has been around a long time, and the senselessness we attempt to coalesce otherwise in. Was going to say Jones is the missing link in lineage from Keinholz or Bruce Connor to the psychic mire of Rachel Harrison (the above was made somewhere between 1973-1999) - and then today's David Lieske and the Berlin ontologists - but you start to worry that artists are proleptic, that this is some time continuum goof, because while Jones is obviously working out some trauma of his time in Vietnam, unfortunately, trauma is intergenerational, actually encodes itself in DNA, at least in rodents, which Jones has a uncomfortable history with. So it tends to reappear. And you worry it will in the future. Heading towards mud.

Elza Sīle at Embajada

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Our detritus starts to congeal again a painting. Rachel Harrison blew up the mall, the cargo cult aftermath of 00's and 10's left the Lieskian ontologists with totemic yard sales grasping at rubble's meaning, and now in the ruin and filth.. new life? Protozoa animism? Shrines to the stuf accumulating in our veins. 

See too: Yuji Agematsu at Lulu

Carolyn Lazard at Trautwein Herleth

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Cargo cult archaeologists pretending our white walls auto-study the cultural wreckage placed into it. Cady Noland one of the first of these artist-archeologists. All the invisible crud of culture, handcuffed to its highest showroom. It was mean, and sad, because it was so impotent. This pre-inscribed failure is also when Lazard's own cultural scissoring is best. When the object fails. When a sky illuminates with only replacement sunshine. (Note, art could also be described as replacement sunshine.) When there is tension in the large distinction between hospitality and a hospital - between care and its functionalization - between a band-aid and a mother's compress. This failure is sympathetic because it's the same failure as art to provide any real illumination, only the comfort of its facsimile. 

Past: Rachel Harrison

"The hipster too was a semio-naut; whose careful balance of fashion’s signs were an additive and appropriative construction of appearance and identity, a careful facade of references, and so the concurrent rise of Rachel Harrison [with the hipster] makes symptomatic sense for its ability to thematize semio-collapse and short-circuits in a way that was jokey, pranksterish and light relief against undeconstructable-tuber confusion of “the real” having really ascended into code that both Harrison and Hipsters were obviously responding.

Condensing the mall into the diamonds of its peak 2006-08 moment we have to admit it was a pretty neat trick, the things just felt like collapse within singular objects.

The fallout of [this] semiotic manicism/collapse/supernova, of the 00’s assemblage (Harrison, Genzken, Pernice et al) and the exploding of Unmonumental’s detritus, left the next generation picking cultural rubble. Artists became post-apocalyptic cargo-cult, artists, still wanting to believe, began to reassemble totems of cultural meaning. Staedelschulites rehashing a form of ready-made-marxist-surrealism, societie's tchotchkies made to “speak” the tongues of the Invisible Hand, worship of gods who must be crazy. Post-Lieske - the real rabble of Neue Alte Brucke, Pro-Choice, etc. - Ceccaldi, Yngve Holen and everyone else - rearranging/collaging/juxtaposing the signs of capital as some sort of anti-altar to them - the whole "arrangements" phenomenon, tableaus of cultural artifacts, seen again and again and again on the rugs of art fairs everywhere - finally hitting bedrock in the strip-mine of Darren Bader just arranging capital’s objects on the floor."

Rachel Harrison at Whitney Museum, Rachel Harrison at Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler

David Douard at Serralves

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The trash pile of culture looks different every 20 years. Certain shapes just didn't exist 30 yers ago. Metal logos metastasized and "Every 10 years the art's assemblage reinvents 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. At least sticks are still in vogue as symbols of the foraging, our original human toil, production."

This "looks like you blew up a shopping mall, like its reassembly after catastrophe, like hangers categorizing airline wreckage. Trying to make sense in debris. Us, a cargo cult. Us, a primitive culture, [these are the] aurochs on our white cave walls. With the debris of culture. Our Mystic auto-anthropology."

"art treats culture as a system of artifacts to be interrogated by its own white light certification process, a factory for meaning production." 

Art becomes cultural waste, the gallery swallows, and you the viewer digest its tract. and "We eat its excitement."

Eventually the malls will look again like this, maybe they already do. 

Georgina Treviño at Embajada

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Both Rachel Harrison and the 00's hipster were responding to the shopping mall, which had exploded, semiotically, into chaos of sign systems. A tweety bird tee, Louis Vuitton boots, and a struggle mustache - and everyone was confounded. It was the aughts, you were intended to adhere to the rules that kept meaning rigid, in place. We all performed the ritual of dress to keep meaning ordered. Until someone didn't. The horse girl and the whale tail merged. Post this semio-apocalypse everyone was left scrambling in the detritus to assemble totems, and we had a lot of cargo cult art in the 2010s. Now we've sifted the rubble and collected enough signs we've agreed have sentiment that the shopping mall is consecrated as jewelry of itself - cast in remembrance, the chaos of surface, symbol, nostalgia embedded within a silver relic. The benediction of sign systems. The highest order these relics can obtain is that they get put on Beyonce, as a Christmas tree of our sign systems, collective wreckage, past. The highest order of totems, shown back to us like a lighthouse reorganizing meaning.

Past: Danny McDonald

"- demolition of meaning - and the cargo-cult pickings arranged as totems: toys now bespeak a Pop-freudian analysis, a culture as its artifacts. the subconscious of culture - a C-3PO with robot tits, an Alien brain tumor, Schwarzenegger slurping a pink dick, the monster made to hold a mirror to itself..."

"semio-space is more and more dominated by cultural IP whose worlds are tightly closed by labyrinthian legal frameworks. What you can and can't do with Barbie on an advertisement is governed by at least 10 pages of legal, and 40 pages of 'best practices.' The mass majority of children learn of good/evil from summer blockbusters more than any Sunday doldrum. This is our culture's totems, gods, rearrange them on poles... converting to hieroglyphics a culture like we weren't already scratching our heads at it. The inkblot was deemed to have little psychologic validity. Yet here we are."

Click: Danny McDonald at House of Gaga, Danny McDonald at Bortolozzi