Wednesday, October 22, 2014

Yuji Agematsu at Artspeak

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.