Daniel Dewar & Grégory Gicquel at Antenna Space

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Can't help but think of the memento mori of Fischli and Weiss hand-carving trash. It was about "abusing time," the waste of labor, the clock. Here labor is venerated, monuments slow carved to it. Seating whittled with a snails pace. Again, the trend for stitching. Knitting that is engraved, like, do you get it? The look of craft, of labor, of farming. Concepts so alienated to us that they return as aura, as art. Nostalgia for a time that never existed. Now labor is a fun haycation. A thing for people who don't do it to experience as a novel other. 

"...it was a concealment: the aluminum clamshell of your laptop being seen as economic product of capital innovation itself, rather than the hand-sweat of laborers distanced beneath gloves. A price tag for a face. Almost nothing is this world is actually automated - everything you touch is hand-made by workers. This separation of our social relations we've so completely assimilated that labor itself returns as a literal fetishism, stitches mark this labor, look compelling, can be brought out onto white walls, as aura, as artwork. Every cheap objects is an equal tapestry. The stitches in time are smoother, hidden. Hold up your child's plastic toy and feel another at its end..."

See too: Stitching Labor, Daniel Dewar and Grégory Gicquel at Portikus, Daniel Dewar and Grégory Gicquel at Micheline Szwajcer, Peter Fischli and David Weiss at Sprüth Magers

Daniel Dewar and Grégory Gicquel at Portikus

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Totems hewn of old-timey techniques, preloading new content with the time travel of the ancients. It works, the objects and their symbols feel pulled from primeval wells, they affect - despite their modern gastrointestinal - the look of something deep rooted. When Hirst applies gilt to goat horns or barnacles to statues it appears as chintz patinas; DD&GC's abraded by the time's digestion by building techniques pulled through with it.  In 2017, we desire wood, representations of the natural, a connection to a time when we touched things with our hands and our stores name themselves after objects of such lost: Iron Oak Spade Copper Rooster mad lib titling. Wishing our objects to connect us with a mythic past when we weren't cognitively fritzed socially gamified cyborgs, even if it isn't true the affect is there to make us feel better.


See too: Daniel Dewar and Grégory Gicquel at Micheline Szwajcer

Daniel Dewar and Grégory Gicquel at Micheline Szwajcer



Pottery Barn and Eddie Bauer catalogs function in their emotive repackaging of idyllic mythos into the objects it sells, the same packaging of Boutoux’s PR here, imbuing wool thick with nostalgic ideals of romantic farm visions, warmth’s magic armor against the coldness of capital.  Describing this doubling-nostalgia as Amanda Ross-Ho in a Pottery Barn suit would fail to acknowledge Robert Gober’s influence on all three and the remaking itself an affective trope. But whereas Ross-Ho’s scaling produces a sort of hippie signage as terror, or Gober’s cat litter as a story unto itself, the sweaters, toilet basins, and foot-jugs never best the nostalgia of craft that suffuses it.