Monday, December 4, 2017

Jessica Vaughn at Martos


(link)

It is a, perhaps acknowledged, strange way to document the object in such a way as no one will ever view it. These lay flat on the floor, mutating into parallelograms in perspective from your walk around them, yet the camera adopts god's eye view.  Exchanging full information to replace the object's actual experience. This is what you put out into the world to describe the object, not documenting the experience but a diagram for the object. As though with enough information we can we can reassemble the experience at home. This is a trend in art documentation, for brighter shadowless lighting, for total documentation, which like the pornographic adopts total visibility to replace the experience of flesh. Cannot be overstated enough as it is analogous to a shift in our culture itself: abstractions can be used to stand in for experience, decisions made entirely on abstractions, on data. We talk of enumerations of populations with statistical variances, we talk of clouds of points that cannot be individuate but inferred. Like your phone predicting your location, with enough information we can reconstitute experience. So when documentation makes a choice to present images which choose maximum-information (gods eye, not yours) over the camera as stand in for your head, it’s a choice that seems the sediment culture's thirst for raw information.


But then they also speak of our growing preponderance for trash: Chadwick Rantanen at SecessionKahlil Robert Irving at Callicoon Fine ArtsMelvin Edwards at Daniel Buchholz,  “May the Bridges I Burn Light the Way” at STANDARD (OSLO)Nancy Lupo at Kristina Kite & Yuji Agematsu at Miguel AbreuDylan Spaysky at Clifton Benevento,