Wednesday, April 25, 2018

Jay Chung & Q Takeki Maeda at House of Gaga


(link)

Artists continually forcing a reading between the lines they force distinctly apart so that the blank white space feels ominous and full, like a detective novel, figure it out, Jay Chung & Q Takeki Maeda adept at objects in aura of evidence or clues. Bits of knowledge that are brought up in the PR, starting with the failure of the cult to deliver its prophecies, its promised cataclysm falling to a gaping white nothing burger, a lot like the art's lines. Providing no auto-bloodshed or endorsement, instead a musing on the aquarium shark (and its connection to Hirst) as a symbol of contemporary art's "predicted avant-garde revolutions [that] never came to pass" and the "set of special texts, rituals, and institutions whose purpose is to manage the disparity between the prophecy and the reality of its non- appearance."  This is all uninteresting, another meditation of art's failed deliverance we've been rehashing for 20 years but now cults and sharks and texts. Except for the text accompanyment which is itself its little own hard-boiled plot that itself empties and fills like a corpse on the beach and you could attempt to use the detective's cultish tools to attempt post-mortem on the story's failure to deliver catacylsm or just think of it as "set of special texts, rituals, and institutions whose purpose is to manage the disparity between the prophecy and the reality of its non-appearance."



See too: Jay Chung and Q Takeki Maeda at Francesca Pia, Jay Chung & Q Takeki Maeda at 356 Mission