Friday, April 17, 2020

“HOOKS & CLAWS” at Gregor Staiger - Bruno Gironcoli


(link)

Ask and any Austrian artist will roll their eyes at how famed Gironcoli is and everyone outside of Austria wonders who the fuck you are talking about. Seems to be the general vibe. Gironcoli has been dead ten years but you could confuse them for a Jordan Wolfson, Marguerite Humeau, Helen Marten or whatever. Just enough for the surrealist soup'dujour.* They are modernist sculptures that abscess with the wrong thing: what is supposed to be the clean lines and  modern ergonomics of say Henry Moore or di Suvero tinges a little too dumb, fecal, stupid, wet. Like Mike Kelley paintings made into sculpture, the abject mess of high/low. The way Children's toys always seem one vibration button away from sex toy. Every one of them somehow far more uncomfortable than a Paul McCarthy buttplug on your plaza.


*As how H.R. Giger was in the past considered campy at best for his blend of Machino-sexual organisms, Gironcoli's blending of hulking pop-sculpture with tinges of Actionist entrails was similarly a bit too on the nose. Similarly having mild resurgence.