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Friday, March 29, 2024

Petra Cortright at Société

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Cortright of the internet. Of the self in the matrix, trying to express through the grate of industrial filters. It was all too ahead of its time. It is simply now the world we live. "The Naumanian axiom of, as an artist whatever I do in the studio is art [is] updated as: whatever an internet artist does on the internet must be art. The difference is that, today, everyone has this studio, and privileging the play of those who call themselves artists as somehow more self-aware or capable is a crumbling distinction."

So a return to painting, to flowers, to the categorically undeniable marker of art. In the action movie, the matrix conjures guns, lots of them. In art, we conjure our own tropes. In genre, the delivering of expectation doesn't kill satisfaction. No, in fact getting what is expected is what people pay money to see. Guns and flowers. You just want more of it. Because then shooting can begin. You line the henchman with squibs, oh god it will be good, so much plate glass, but here they never go off. We just get flowers, memento without mori. Painting's goon, praying to be released from his hell, his existence, trope.


See too: "Post-internet art" as become the Kinko's avant garde - Petra Cortright at Team Gallery, IncPetra Cortright at Société

Thursday, March 28, 2024

Dora Budor at Nottingham Contemporary

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The less things are sci-fi, the more they get drab. Sci-fi, even at its most dystopian, portends a certain hope: there is a future we can think. But as things turn, they become more minimal, more mud, you become more present, grounded, which is dull. Surely this is point of experience. To be here, interminably. 

This cardboard thing reflects piss onto your shoes, your thought onto your shoes, your blood pounding in your ears, your tinnitus at 11. The world becomes so beige that your functional biology becomes of interest. Boredom is when you most feel alive. Again, again, again, the artist shows, the world turns, heart beats. The press release redirects thought like piss towards the 19th century, pissing on your shoes for you. I feel alive being peed on. This is life, but let's do science fiction as dystopian: imagine you can pee on the gallery. See, hope. Territory marked with thought, piss.

"...which is what we love those big sci-fi budgets for, the vast quantity of ash." Dora Budor at Kunsthalle Basel

Thursday, March 14, 2024

Life in Hell

Explaining the artworld to your therapist.

"...an oscilloscope of various pitches of language: the high speech of disinterest against the low grovel of complaint. A comedy between the press release and what is said at the bar after. Therapy. Of art. And its interpretation. Of critique Vs complaint. Of trying to explain the artworld to your therapist, or mum..."