Saturday, June 13, 2020

Dane Mitchell at Mossman


(link)

Poeticization a problem. It is the latent remains of conceptual art put on a carousel to come around forever on whatever new plastic horse. Not that "knowing" is all it's cracked up to be, but poetics is the forced lapse in reasoning, an artificial unknowing. Like holding your breath to find a profound experience. Conceptual art's interest in semantic rupture has metastasized into a set of materials, tools, into a genre itself. The forms of which are literal enough at this point to be made into a machine. Signs, signifiers don't inherently mean. We are so adept at pareidolia insight that any object stripped of context we endlessly backfill for. When it doesn't work, the loss affects profundity, that great gulf of something uninterpretable, getting smacked in the back of the head someone saying, "look, a 6 foot hole."


See too: John Baldessari at Sprüth Magers, On Kawara at the GuggenheimSarah Ortmeyer at Chicago Manual of StyleSimon Starling at Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Kirsten Pieroth at Mathew, Sam Falls at 303 Gallery, Alan Ruiz at Bad Reputation, Trevor Paglen at Metro Pictures, Sean Raspet at Jessica Silverman, Jason Dodge at Franco Nero