Tuesday, December 13, 2016

Georgie Nettell at Reena Spaulings


(link)

Okay so let's be honest here: what we've got is Nettel taking cultural-cool's fetishization of politics and basically metastasizing it into garishly obvious and horribly blank versions. Like Shepard Fairey posters for today's political desensitization that feels like a personal catatonia, the semio-dissonance frustrates. Like the iconic hope poster quickly depleting its utopic optimism, now appearing ironic gravestone. Embodying the corruption of desire for political agency and replacing it with the politically negligent. The strategy of corrupting its signs, of language, ruins our ability to form political response. If you fuck up language, the rational, enough it destroys the opposition's ability to speak, to rebut. Enough of this causes the "learned helplessness in rats." Again, our political desensitization. Common assumption that art should be a positive force is mistake, sometimes it just proves how evil things can be, like leaving dirty dishes in place of discourse, we feel nothing but alienation.


See too:  Will Benedict at Overduin & Co., Gili Tal at Jenny’s, Merlin Carpenter at Overduin & Co.