Hans Bellmer, H.R. Giger at Schinkel Pavillon

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Because our moment is so filled with tortures on the body, with stringing our puppet goo, experiments on flesh? Half of portraiture today looking like medical eviscerations (see: The violence against faces.) - our more genetically modified Picasso, not dismembering the ear/nose it but growing it there. So the lineage for these two - current figuration is medically experimental, grotesque, alien, et al - is here. But at some unconscious base is sexual violence, and the women who suffer at that. (It wasn't until Dan O'Bannon and Alien's brilliant reversal that the sexual violence threatened captains.) I like both Giger and Bellmer much, but acknowledge "the artworld [is] continuously electrified by depictions of women in societal bondage gear. Artists depicting the strictures that force women to conform to cultural mores; images of women made, if only momentarily, powerless or complicit ... that its success is simply a culture that likes seeing - culturally approved - women in bondage." 

The Giger Chair trend, Amalia Ulman at The Gallery at El Centro, Cindy Sherman too, H.R. Giger on CAWD

“Sitting Bone” at MAVRA

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Hasn't this been like the third Giger chair we've seen in the past year? He's been mentioned in at least 2 press releases (Caroline Mesquita at T293 and Anna Uddenberg at Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler) and there was for sure another chair at Lomex in their EAT CODE AND DIE. But the last Giger chair on CAD appears to be the Swiss Institute's exhibition of chairs, Fin de Siècle, in 2015.  Gigerian chairs simply feel present in the winds of art with its trends for examining bodies through the technologies that are built around them (Lupo, Reaves, Uddenberg, et al), so the skeleton melded  architecture fit for more cushioned parts feels apt.  Chairs are an innuendo for body, an allusive or oblique remark or hint towards the meat that you don't want to be forced say aloud as the gas bag of "human" so you politely place a chair, like those placed in the corners of hotels/lobbies not to be sat in but to politely declare the room capable of relieving your meat baggage, place a surface whose softness designates the degree of welcome to your reception, like you don't want to say butt so you say Sitting Bone.


See too: Caroline Mesquita at T293, Anna Uddenberg at Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Jessi Reaves at Bridget Donahue

“Fin de Siècle” at Swiss Institute



Sometimes it's nice to just look at some chairs. The theatrical staging neuters the aura of their historical import, instead placed in a stage as characters among themselves. A Studio 54 crime scene whose acerbic mocking of cultural fashions erodes solemnity, able to see them as objects again, mostly as the awkward objects they are. Sometimes it's nice to just look at some chairs.