George Rippon at Wiels

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"Now you are one of a group, invested in the belief that it has elected the company it keeps, and that by this act can set itself aside both from those whose acts of power require of them a strict adherence to a state of ignorance, and the desperate rabble always seeking whatever it can get, sapped of intention – one of those whose lives miraculously prove to reproduce the ideal of that fantasy of being apart from the crowd and its automation – popping around the globe to the tune of champagne flutes and flight announcements, while at the same time adhering to and enjoying all the conventional accouterments and assurances of self-esteem and respectability – of mobility – aspired to by that very same normalizing mass one shuns, but whose effort of desire as a multitude creates the conditions under which that ideal can project itself as the fabricated lifestyle you assume, and which consumes you." -Roger van Voorhees

Which was a press release for Rippon's last, and while absorption of critique - or simply acting as the enemy -  is one way to attempt to neuter it, it occasionally just rings.

“What We Know” at Roberta

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Nostalgia is powerful. Invoking a sentimentality for the past to manipulate present mood. Self-awareness of transience, ephemeral, and pre-accepted as coping mechanism, substituting the present as the past behind pink glass. It grows more and more to be tool of marketing, using feelings for what once was to purchase its salve in the present. Replacing the moribund today with a hind-sighted "golden-age." Pre-yellowed to remove the jagged sharpness of the new. Nostalgia is a terrifying hole, hard to discern from a trap, and this show is like full of it.

See too:  Moyra Davey at Institute of Contemporary Art, Daniel Dewar and Grégory Gicquel at Micheline Szwajcer, Group Show at Neue Alte Brücke

Group Show at Neue Alte Brücke

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Artists: Magnus Andersen, George Rippon, Anna Zacharoff, Julien Nguyen
Exhibition Title: Late European Decadence

Neue Alte Brücke set the trend that come full circle to be greet with their own franchise deemed International Style, and so if this doesn't look “fresh” it at least looks current, hegemonically so; possibly the most important thing today is that art look fine, just fine, without an excess of presence and an irony to cut its own heel, a bridge to the new old decadence.


See too : Transatlantic Transparency at Mathew