Olga Balema, Geta Brătescu at Galerie Barbara Weiss

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Like Fred Sandback from hell. Not the transcendent floating, but ropes tying you to floor, your immanence: "To dwell, remain" on this bitch of an Earth. It's "important because it makes you look down, an expression of shame."

"It wasn’t that group of late Rembrandt self-portraits. It was their unrestored frames. Dull and dusty and cracked in the corners, they were the materialization of the age and poverty worn on the represented faces, of the humanity reflected in the represented eyes. The frames provided those poor, passive pictures with a haven from the inhuman grandeur of the museum’s imperial architecture, held them in their own history—not a history of masterpieces but the history of lived life. They enacted a kind of resistance that the paintings themselves couldn’t mount, being as they were so contained by that architecture and all it represented. The waitress in the café on the museum’s second floor, where I took refuge behind a massive marble column, sobbing, had obviously seen this before. She sat me down and administered Vienna’s other famous cure: a cup of hot chocolate and a piece of Sacher torte. She wouldn’t let me pay."

 Or: The yellow preventative against conceptualism. 

 

Olga Balema at Bridget Donahue

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Last time talking about the demands for artwork, like pornography, to photograph well; it must be able - in an age of everyone communicating through glass - to connote itself through image. Now, here a show that doesn't photograph well. Instead, like tires danced through by hulking men on tiptoes, your body staged in tripwires*. Connections others have made to the history of empty galleries seems to miss the fact that A, the gallery is full of things and B, empty galleries (even most full exhibitions) do not require such care where you step. (The read of "empty" seems, again, evidence of our perception now dominated by sight rather than haptic presence, proprioception, etc.) The press release even first sentence states: "100% sculpture." If anything the closest counterpart would be something like Dawn Kasper's forest of mic'd cymbals, tense to scream presence with misstep. This is another means of making the body appear, nervous, a perhaps long theme of Balema, but without resort to the "excess body", the biomorphic, lumpy, intestinal. I wonder if Kronz was thinking of Irigaray when writing the PR, writing about "absolute terms" or tautness, which sounds like history and its compartments (empty galleries), and the inability for artworlds like science to easily account for these less "rigid" categories, the "physical reality that continues to resist adequate symbolization" and "necessary to minimize certain of these features of nature, to envisage them, and it, only in light of an ideal status, so as to keep it/them from jamming the works of the theoretical machine." Irigaray.

*Perhaps the connection to minimalism is Michael Fried's objecthood "stage presence" made prickly.


See too: Dawn Kasper at David Lewis, Tony Conrad's Glass, "But so much humanity isn't iron."
Olga Balema at High Art (2), Olga Balema at High Art (1), Olga Balema at Croy Nielsen

Olga Balema at High Art

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In other words - images, unable to be tactile, an inability to make sensuality palpable irrupts strange fetishes: pornography must materialize its sensitivities by finding visual equivalents for touch. Textures which express similar reactions in viewers. You see it in taut inflated anime breasts, shiny PVC covered genitals, leather, sheers, frill, an entire wikipedia article about "breast physics." The ornate knots of bondage are totems to the practice. Art too in attempts to manifest materiality in what that cannot be touched must adopt hyperbolic visual equivalents. Bodies that photograph well.


See too: Olga Balema at High Art

Olga Balema at High Art

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Like grubs mating, the touch of moist plastic, people with fetish for balloons rubbing: there's a materiality present in the touch of latex forms, of stuff touching. Rub the vinyl, feel the taut leather naked and plastic man. Our touch, now more than ever, comes from sight, comes from packages of it in the high definition of images and advertising, we feel through sight, like pornography learning new sensuousness through seeing it commodified as objects, sexy.


See too: Olga Balema at Croy Nielsen

Olga Balema at Croy Nielsen

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Materially this work is weird, interesting, the taught over-inflated carcass of rotting whale PVC fetishists, dead fish washed ashore and sexually lurid, the hyperreal of the package holding the bodily abject, but the installation of it exemplifies today’s occult handling of spatial composition, the feng shui arrangements that bespeak an other, or a spiritual warmth, weirding, and there exists an interesting conversation between Gedi Sibony (arguable harbinger of current compositional resurgence, possibly even of the curtain meme) and Kai Althoff in which the former kinda sorta admits the latter. These compositional strategies become a signal, attempting through odd/unusual placement to valorize objects, in the same way higher powers once commanded painters into corners, sculpture today arranges on a logic established/predicated on an otherness. To quote Carpenter yesterday, “non- allegorically allegorical “displays” I seek to confound these products into a hieroglyph.”
But the work is desirable, expect to see more of it. Buy now as it were.


See too: Olga Balema, Anne de Vries at Michael Thibault , Michael E Smith at Susanne Hilberry, Merlin Carpenter at MD72, David Douard at Johan Berggren,  Sophie Nys at Crac Alsace, “Puddle, pothole, portal” at Sculpture Center

Olga Balema, Anne de Vries at Michael Thibault

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Bourgeois to Hesse, and here now again updated with the changes our bodies' experienced, reflected in today's mirror no longer inanimate lumps but vibrant in neo-materialism's adolescence, budding bulbous digital puddles which visage our cracked mugs as seen in reality's new digital expansion pack, our rocks vibrato.


See too : "Puddle, pothole, portal" at Sculpture Center , Cathy Wilkes at Tramway , Alicja Kwade at Kunstmuseum St. Gallen