Darkened Rooms, their couches

(Top, Center, Bottom)

It's nice on these hot days, to have all these promotional images of dark rooms, to keep our brains cool. The couch becomes the main signifier. We're going to start a collection of these, send in your own finds. Which will you choose? What does your couch say about you?

Moyra Davey, Peter Hujar at Galerie Buchholz

(link)

And art often feels like a process, technology, for imprinting nostalgia. Casting banality in bronze, silver, with a halo of rose. "Nostalgia a toxic substance used to preserve our memories in formaldehyde's rose tinted veil." Photography provides "immediate packaging: that inherently elegiac medium also promises preservation of someone's sight of you." So you get to preserve your recognition like pickled pigs and call it romantic. Nostalgia's artistry becomes its own technology. I don't think this is implicit to art. Against this someone like LaToya Ruby Frazier's grayscales confuse time and conflate eras, make chronology slippery, and deny a continuum of progress, inherently anti-nostalgic.

See too: Wolfgang Tillmans at Galerie Buchholz, 

Moyra Davey at Portikus

(link)

It's alluring to attach the psychology of money to feces.

"For example, the miser’s hoarding of money can be thought of as symbolic of the child’s refusal to eliminate feces. The defiance with which the child withholds its precious feces in the face of parental demands is generalized over a period of time to the withholding of all precious possessions from a world perceived as hostile and demanding. Since it is readily apparent even to developing child that most people view money as a prized possession, the transition from feces to money is an easy step." "Feces themselves are perhaps the most valuable commodity in the child’s young life.

“Norman. O Brown observ[ed], ‘In its famous paradox, the equation of money and excrement, psychoanalysis becomes the first science to state what common sense and the poets have long known - that the essence of money is its absolute worthlessness.'"- Money Madness Goldberg & Lewis

And us tossing pennies into watery wells, everyday make a wish upon a throne with coins in stow, placing O. Browns into white repositories, a text released to the underworld.  Davey symbolically rooting around in latent feces, fingerprint stamps all over, evidence of molding it to your hand.



See too: Quintessa Matranga at Freddy, Moyra Davey at Institute of Contemporary Art

“Every Day I Make My Way” at Minerva

(link)

Photography may be comprised of the accident, but its an accident captured and cast in the glass of its image; there is nothing more horribly crystallinely concrete than a photograph, "an object which virtually produces itself." Chetrit's video shows its molten form, the slow liquid flow of "photography"'s staging, strung and malleable in its cheesy goo before cooling into its hard representation of us. Photography's glass found perfect deployment in advertising and the commodity who craved its ability to deliver a glass-like surface of perfection that even then Barthes, Benjamin and Sontag were, it's possible to believe, already reacting to then in their nostalgic interest in photography's yellowing, like now pretty much every photographer today not necessarily trying to break the glass, at least looking to place a sticker on it or find some odd way to warm its domination of us, with a filter say, the image.


See too:  Moyra Davey at Institute of Contemporary Art, Peter Piller at Capitain Petzel, Tony Conrad's Glass

“What We Know” at Roberta

(link)

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

Moyra Davey at Institute of Contemporary Art

(Moyra Davey at Institute of Contemporary Art)

Sontag pointed out photography as inherently elegiac, and Davey further expresses its moribund nature-morte with a gloss of preemptive nostalgia. Like instagram filters made to affect 70’s grain on crystalline microlenses - implanting an artificial comfort into the cold of its technologic clarity - Davey went from photographing the dust and stains that mark human touch and embody nostalgia, to pre-placing that touch on the photographs, mailing them to package the touch that preceded them. Unlike Beshty’s copper marring conceptual emblems, the touch placed onto photographs re-re-re-inscribes photography’s loss of the human in favor of the sediment of it. Like Long Life Cool Whites, brimming with the ghosts photography’s past theorists, the book was pre-yellowed with the past brought to the present to fill it like Proustian remembrance of theorists past.  It’s all incredibly affective, like Sontag’s furthering Genet’s “the only criterion of an act is its elegance” with Wilde's: “the vital element is not sincerity, but style.”