Wednesday, April 24, 2019

Diedrick Brackens at Various Small Fires


(link)

A stitch correlates to time, it is a labor visible in increments. While brushstrokes may have been the impressionist equivalent, modernism seemed, somewhat, goal orientated toward removing the more intensive marks of labor (first for a performative "expressive," the work was not labor but expression) before culminating in Minimalism and Conceptual art, two legacies infatuated with things ostensibly springing from ether. (The instructions being the art, not the 40 museum interns drawing it.) I'm not sure what this meant for them, their desiring to be capitalists, desiring to wipe the sweat from their aluminum, but it's still a desire today, no wants want to imagine previous fingerprints on their new iPhone. So the workers hands are latexed. Work, labor, sweat is the parcel of something we denigrate to the great purity of "good design," that cerebral craft we revere, which should be clean, elegant, and without a trace of sweat.


see too: “Tierra. Sangre. Oro.” at Ballroom Marfa, Ajay Kurian at White Flag Projects, Brendan Fowler at Mathew