Saturday, February 10, 2018

Marianne Wex at Tanya Leighton


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We should know who Wex is for returning conceptual art's borrowing of information systems - for its own poetic haywiring - back to a visualization of terrene issues, i.e. no longer rooting around in linguistic abstraction but instead its empirical evidence returned to the scientific foundations of material conditions. Like, while Kosuth was concerned for all the mysteries of "Chair," Wex and Mary Kelly were like yes, but we also get pregnant. The "cerebral" of men's white concerns was treated as the higher plane and, for all its agnostic posturing, the "conceptual" allied itself with a reverence akin the religious divinity it ostensibly exiled. Men, oblivious to their own bodies that had never been in question by culture, had the privilege to etherealize themselves above everyone's heads to some assumed universal while women's were increasingly entrenched in politic ground war.  The men atop, the women below. The production of gender that Wex visualized has today become further entrenched as it has become microtized, with the amount of content produced today we are able to produce micro-genres of gendered images that are the laughingstocks of today: "Women alone laughing at salad" its most viral.  With this mass dispersal, normativity dissolves into vaguer forms of power structures, but at the same time, and more hopeful ulterior forms of identity seem to flourish, but this is the bifurcation to today's stems.