Thursday, April 19, 2018

Ghislaine Leung at Reading International


(link)

"For [Chris] Burden the question of, “How did our world end up like this?” is posited as the product of thousands of megalomaniac children grown never learning their childhood fantasies of the world need not be enforced upon it. That the train barons and real estate developers creating the world may have less to do with money and more with the latent remains of childhood fevers." - Chris Burden Metropolis II at LACMA

That we learn in childhood to act as gods. We are given realms. Build castles to smash, bricks to heights, dolls to have our way with. The megalomaniacism of childhood is rewarded endlessly with no wonder why later we are left with it blooming all over our world.

"Increasing prevalence of the diorama, the miniature, their vessels staging us as onlookers to worlds as sandboxes. A dissonance between our interior worlds that of course we find increasingly virtual and beholden to our godlike control of drag/drop materiality conjuring our desires that the outer world increasingly doesn't reflect, the world steamrolled at the whim of other's control. So our turning to dolls and miniatures and virtuality makes symptomatic sense, fulfilling our need for control over a world we increasingly seem to not have much over makes psychologic sense. The world providing ever further customizable habitats to busy ourselves with while remaining deaf to our desires, a lot like playing with dolls."- “Sylvanian Families Biennial 2017” at XYZ collective

See too: Mathis Altmann at Freedman Fitzpatrick