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Tuesday, September 30, 2014

Peter Fend at Essex Street

Peter Fend at Essex Street

In its art impotence we need not obey or believe, and instead pick at the minutia of its rhetoric, sampling it in the political limpness of a poem, like Holzer’s Truisms, tweets flashing on courier’s white aluminum. Poster removed from action, placed in the gallery, looking good but not quite working. From a decade when Chris Wool was screaming unheard in silent graphics, to today as Fend yells in varying green hues, some red; it’s less call to action but instead gloss in the cybernetic reach of slogan marketing, maps of cerebral gaming. Winning the hearts and minds. The way its breath enters you, like Jonathan Horowitz’s pedestalled tofu, slowly getting slimy. Bruce Nauman in his skyplane writing on the blue Pasadena sky, “Leave the land alone.” The invocation of James Bond feels spot on in its admittance of our land of fiction:

HOW CAN THE CIA CONTROL
SUCH A NEW WAY TO WRITE
FINALLY JAMES BOND MUST
RELENT, GIVING WAY TO A
FORCE OF COMMON THOUGHT
BY A CITIZEN NAMED FEND