Nora Turato at Sprüth Magers

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Scream! Yell! Weeee! Bang, bang, bang the pots of language! Feel the emptiness. Feel hollow in indiscriminate wailing. A child in a grocery store deprived, is, yes, this is the sound of our world, adverts, attention, corporation. You have described our terror, armed the artist with these weapons of mass language... now what? This is the point where I turn, I'm not interested in being made numb anymore, in this classic form of desensitization. It was fun for a little while. Now it just gets bigger? The arms race was already won, we have demilitarization programs in place. The artist need not a bigger billboard to prove large emptiness. 

See too: Desensitization, Modern Gothic, Nora Turato

Nora Turato at Sprüth Magers

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What Nauman did for neon, Turato does for motivational posters, bus adverts. The contemporary illuminate manuscript to nonsensical ... sadness? - that empty pang after finding yourself having read the billboard before even knowing you were reading the billboard. Your brain wants to "make sense" of its surroundings, and you read it for clues, end up reading the billboard that has commandeered your evolutionary wiring to sell you a half naked woman in socks. It's not your fault you read it, not your fault it barely makes sense. You were not intended for spaces like these. Nothing is rational in art or advertising, for both there is only that same distending space that creates a void, a meaning that must be filled, consumerist or otherwise. 

Perhaps this is part of our Modern Gothic.


See too: Matt Keegan, Kay Rosen at Grazer Kunstverein, Hanne Lippard & Nora Turato at Metro Pictures, Gene Beery at Shoot the Lobster, Karl Holmqvist at Sant’Andrea de Scaphis, John Giorno at Almine Rech, Nora Turato at LA MAISON DE RENDEZ-VOUS, Nora Turato at Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein

Nora Turato at LA MAISON DE RENDEZ-VOUS

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Language adrift from meaning. There's always more meaning. Like crap to chewed gum, something will stick to it,  Our active pink lump that attracts and minds the dirt, clings to any interpretable speck of concrete information. And hold it for contemplation. Both advertising and poetry leverage our interpretable bits to their advantage, opening us like a can - I'm not sure if we are meant to enjoy these or feel once again dispirited by their abuse of our good nature - our tender top, berated.


See too: Hanne Lippard, Nora Turato at Metro Pictures, Nora Turato at Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein

Nora Turato at Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein

The objects blank but the walls screaming. Language is terror, a horror, means of authority.

The infectious insertion of a stranger's speech into yours: when I write "lake" the word appears in you, my voice for yours. Reading is like relinquishing control of thought to an author's temporary marionetting of yours. How odd that my words are a voice in your head. Reading is such an automatic mechanism. It is a base human disposition to "read" our environment, to make sense of our surroundings, and advertising takes advantage of this: a byline appears and before you can stop yourself you have read it, allowed it briefly to control you and its message has been passed, its transaction has been complete, and its sign depleted lifeless garbage. Artists soften this verbose assault by clipping meaning, leaving it to never complete a logic but hover incomplete and

Language: Hanne Lippard, Nora Turato at Metro Pictures, Tony Cokes at Greene Naftali, Matt Keegan, Kay Rosen at Grazer, Jessica Diamond at Team (bungalow)

Hanne Lippard, Nora Turato at Metro Pictures

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Lots of artists like to put phrases on signs, do it in a similar way. A particularly satisfying gesture: language, propelled with advertorial oomph, instead deadpans with its empty cymbal crash; be understanding the words but, devoid of context feel a little haunted, disembodied, ghosts of something far. Like Lippard's audio work, we glean through archaeology of their words the character. But Turato's texts and her own performances gleefully amplify a schizophenic fracture through estrangement and affectual register shifts. Disallowing complete connection, we instead begin to feel its loss through ears numbed by corruption. The garbage of the "infosphere." In an era when everyone spends their time off creating protest signs against politicians having clipped the sound bite down to two word phrases, the fun of creating your own haunting version, headlines like haikus, is fun. Cut the ends off a sentence and be left with a poem.


words on walls: Matt Keegan, Kay Rosen at Grazer Kunstverein, Gene Beery at Shoot the Lobster, Karl Holmqvist at Sant’Andrea de Scaphis, Sue Tompkins at Lisa Cooley, Jenny Holzer at Blenheim Palace, Barbara Kruger at Sprüth Magers Peter Fend at Essex Street, CAWD on Fetish