Philipp Timischl at Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade

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"the rearranged parts of the cultural casino, cut from and placed into its altars, deranged artifacts. "

Our world's sign systems are chaos. And, artistically, we're still in our post-Harrison supernova fallout: artists picking up the world's detritus and assembling it on art's altars for your consideration: "culture, what could it mean?" Culture, meanwhile, doesn't give a fuck about coherence, meaning. (Incoherence instills lack, creates desires, instigates sales.) The most successful artists of recent simply give in to this surface, incoherence and irony, and turn it into big stupid jewels/carnivals of it, say Jordan Wolfson or Anne Imhof. Maybe Koons. But putting a lovely frame around it works just as well. Go out into the world with your scissors and excise what is interesting. Print it on our cave walls. We travel to the caves to see this ritual performed. 

See too: Philipp Timischl at Neue Alte Brücke, Philipp Timischl at LAYR Coburgbastei, “A Love Letter to a Nightmare” at Petzel

Philipp Timischl at LAYR Coburgbastei, Vienna

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Blinky light art, the rearranged parts of the cultural casino, cut from and placed into its altars, deranged artifacts. The PR says as much: "ratifies a pop modernism celebrating the a priori unnatural marriage between the culture of entertainment and that, sacerdotal, of modernism. Our Clement Greenberg in TMZ sauce, restages the epic formalist quest for flatness, infused with pop calibrated for iPhones."

The culturally accredited mall.

See too: Philipp Timischl at Neue Alte Brücke

Philipp Timischl at Neue Alte Brücke

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Timishcl's sculpturification of photography is on one hand full of cheeky little moments of puncture - the objectification, fetish, and bejeweling of hyper-beefed men who unwittingly take part - as well as the need to sediment the more transitory elements of photo and video in an object original. Louisa Gagliardi's pierced and vajazzled painting comes to mind. But then thinking of 2004 when Bjarne Melgaard and his lover shot up anabolic steroids and fucked each other and the resultant photographs were shown as I'm sure we've all heard Kelsey tell it. About the level of risk involved and who bears it in what situations. And how Kelley Walker was recently and finally taken to task for not really being able to answer questions about his appropriation of particular cultures, like pushing on the sliver he wanted to finally drew his blood. How it was no longer this cold cerebral thing, and art's problematization actually was problem, our carefree objectification.