AR: DAS INSTITUT at Serpentine Gallery

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Originally Posted: May 17th, 2016

Note: This entry is part of August Review, our annual look back at this season’s key exhibitions. For more information, see the announcement here.

DAS INSTITÜT at Serpentine Gallery

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2009, 7 years ago, 2 years after the founding of DAS INSTITÜT, already, then:

"However, the joke is actually on the curator, as many artists have learned to feed this desire with work made quickly, but with enough conceptual acrobatics to make them acceptable as part of a canon of their own oeuvre—or that of a supposed canon on the critique of modernity. And here, the artist has found a way not only to maximize the circulation of his/her work, but also to reduce the budget in terms of both time and materials—the original shady business of “skimming”, although one that is justifiable considering the low rate of artist fee’s. Within this particular loop, a potential critique of excess is ensnared as another symptom of that very excess. And it is with this dual farce of today’s production and related branding activities, namely the desire for the curator to collect and justify an artistic industry of prefab and ready-at-hand esoterics, that one should enjoy DAS INSTITUT’s irreverent something for everybody with a little for everyone approach.

“DI Why?” treats referents like refreshments at a party, from appropriation, to the politics of representation, to subculture fetishism, to pop, and even Relational Aesthetics—there was an opening event with an “exotic” food import: Currywurst and Berliner Weisse mit Schuss. What is truly unique about this show is that all of these devices are derived from completely blank and empty signifiers..."  -Adam Kleinman TZK

What started as a mock "import/export" business in 2007 became so quickly real, its sham background mattering little in art so long as it looked like it, and the network "featuring non-competing points of attraction at various scales and orientations" and franchise friendibitions and its hard to deny a room full of so much something.

See too: KAYA at Deborah Schamoni, Isa Genzken at David Zwirner,  Ann Craven at Confort Moderne

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye at Serpentine Gallery

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Historically, you could say, oil painting has had trouble representing people of color. So, seeing black skin sit comfortably in the modernism of Manet, Cezanne, etc. reminds one of the entirety of a historical lineage of failed attempts at it by white painters getting it stubbornly, wincingly, wrong, from orientalism to the particularly inept Dutch to Eric Fischl  and the spectacular failure of Elizabeth Peyton's initial foray into it, the painting's halting failure among so many luminous whites highlighting the lacking portrayal. Peyton has since gotten better. But Yiadom-Boakye's easy naturalism, without an issue of it in a historical vernacular, stands out for it, evincing the casual omission of this natural representation from historical painters who, untrained in such matters by an academy, lacked an ability to literally represent this other flesh not of their own palette, racism underlying tones and pigments, issues of representation abound. Something for which the lived in easiness of Yiadom-Boakye provides relief.

Ed Atkins at Serpentine Gallery



Let’s call them the render-stentialists: Atkins, Wolfson, Stark, Helen Martens. They're all good.
Wolfson and Marten’s hipster symbol-shorting mire; Stark & Atkins detached digital-self-subject Nausea-ics; funnily all producing souvenir posters, awash in juxtaposition branding, amazing how similar the tchotchke-trophies made for big game collectors. Wolfson’s got the upper hand on his posters laden with teenboy bedroom mythos, self-annealing; though one would have to admit Stark’s collages are a bit more “real."
No possible acceptable comment on the fact that opposing Atkins' empty surrogate self will be a “durational” exhibition by Marina Abramovic. We’ll all just give each other the eyes over that one.
But so, Atkins videos initial tapping-on-the-glass grating solipsism generally softens over the course of viewing time, ceding an actual emotive plea opposing Wolfson’s building manipulative inflammation, and so one would wish here for more than two minutes of viewing time. Wolfon’s black face actually achieves more nuance here in Atkins directness, called out in its explicitly written on “his” face: troll.