Kayode Ojo at Maureen Paley

(link)

2006? Carol Bove, Martin Boyce, Patrick Hill, Michaela Meise, et al. VVork-core. "All the chatter about a 'new formalism' going on." It was our "Fuck the Bauhaus" moment. They're all in Artforum several times. Everyone was repackaging, recompositionalizing, a minimalist modernism. Presenting tableaus of a wonkified high culture past, like bent Ikea showrooms of minimalism. Now it is a micro-era, quickly forgotten. But the procedures remain fun, merchant stands for selling something back to ourselves.

See too: Every 10 years assemblage reinvigorates itself as the dumpsters picked through are modernized to the current castoffs and appear new, the waste that evolves along culture until finally an artist is able to rummage up enough LEDs, acrylic panels and Arte Povera catalogs to accumulate the update to our Rauschenberg cardboard clogging the pipes of our forward progress.

Kayode Ojo at Praz-Delavallade

(link)

Fashion/perfume advertisement setting, sedimented as sculpture. Awaiting moistened Drake to pour and offer, not just a drink but a life. They traffic in advertising's same lifestyle projection. We've forgotten this because no one opens Artforum anymore, it's sent out as hamster bedding and subscriber inflation, but a distant memory of its filler comes back in these sculptures, an air we would call nostalgic. The smallest narrative allows the biggest projection. We like chintz, and better any excuse to play it as ironic, look down upon it. How much artworld glitz comes with heavy justification, armor against actually liking it. Excused glamor are why artists were invented. The surgical/esthetician set barely register as an anomaly. Maybe the Snook Hook. A lot of Tom Burr.