Friday, March 3, 2017

Ken Okiishi at Reena Spaulings


(link)

Untitled 2016, We're serenaded to a drive's Concerto in D (major), in prosaic's extreme, until the camera zooms onto a skeletal billboard stripped of the flesh that should sell, its meat, before the camera pans over to yet another billboard through bones showing the heavens behind it that should be eclipsed by content. The metaphor seems apt. It's nice to not have content. Blankness. For there sometimes to be nothing at all.

Then there's Okiishi's PR'd concern for his "bubbles" and "tubes" forming the "linked-together aggregations of masses of actors" sharing the angst of both Gaugin's "D'où Venons Nous / Que Sommes Nous / Où Allons Nous" and, perhaps more apropos to the bubble and tubed, the Smashing Pumpkins' hamster, trapped in a maze despite all his Je nes sais...  The better you can pronounce the issue seems only to aggravate the problem, of painters writers and musicians finding new rhymes for "cage."