Roger Hiorns at Faena Arts Center

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I'm tired of our body mocked. Not as cruel as women compared to meat, setting men next to machines bears a similar titillation in objectification. You, a machine, a corruption of the sublime, in repetition awe becomes bullying mocking the human for its meat. Stop this. We are but flesh objects, barely cognizant stupid creatures, morons in search of hope, and nailing us to crosses of our trash seems a brave act but it is impish, pornographic, unneeded. Are we not aware enough of our mortality? Young boys who will rust as any other. You oxidize, we take antioxidants. I rust. This isn't forcing hamlet to consider his skull but forcing him to consider his waste, hulking, of his culture. A brain at room temperature, horsepower.


see too: Erwin Wurm at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Geumhyung Jeong at KLEMM’S, Venice: Anne Imhof at German Pavilion

Roger Hiorns at ELI Beamlines Center

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The burial of the machine. A proxy for our bodies we can continually imagine with earth pressed against metal. The rate of erosion is slow, it will never quite go away, for a continuous mental image of a corroding body. It's there right now, bacteria bumping against skin cold and metal, moisture leaking and permeating micro-fissures in the impervious coating. Objects buried, skeletons in closets. Hiorns concern for metal and meat, the infiltration of each other now an act of myth-making, storytelling, creating an oral history for our moral tales of art, the wall text.


See too: Roger Hiorns at Annet Gelink

Roger Hiorns at Annet Gelink

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The Jewel-crusted success of Hiorns sulfate sculptures almost eclipsed the less fabulous concoctions-as-representations for the surfaced body. Here the latex skins on polycarbonate panels - looking like congealing soup, e.g. Kristeva's abjection: breakdown between subject and object - the goo and strata of flesh and bone, and the machinic body ejaculating foam at the mouth, Hiorns wild material divergence always expressed in dualities, steel and perfume, machine and foam, boy and fire, boy and gratuitously hulking aircraft engine, the bodily soft always set against its cold hard master, rigid and pliance, occasionally providing a mild erosion of that order, a strange and insistent fetish that we all seem to enjoy.


See too: Henrik Olesen at Reena Spaulings, Erwin Wurm at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Cathy Wilkes at Kunstmuseum Linz, Valerie Snobeck at Essex Street, Andro Wekua at Sprüth Magers