Yngve Holen at Spazio Maiocchi

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No one really knows how the algorithm works, what happens inside the box is beyond attempts of research. We are told the machine is a conglomerate larger than any one person is capable of understanding. In it appears a larger entity. We are incapable to understand the monolith. Technology replaces the dark forest we once feared. This isn't a particularly modern feeling. The sublime is now stupid ungovernable boxes, those that dictate our lives. And we stand before them, cut in half, to expose that there is no ghost. Just an indifference that hurts, needs our thought as comfort blanket to wrap its vacuum chill. we hold object-like-skulls to our own crania, ask painting for meaning. Holen's techno-voids are merely translations of art's own interpretation-box attitude. This is art, altars. An interpretable fount, an empty skull that against all known understanding still feels to give back stupidly chills. 

Yngve Holen at Modern Art

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Commodities made permanent. Are we to put some social science program toward this? some anthropology towards bronzed culture. The PR seems to think so: "one of the questions posed [...] is, what kind of concepts are introduced to the developing brains of children, and in what way does this guide their understanding of the world around them?" Art becomes (has become) a process for turning culture into artifacts of that culture, sediments of it, wiped across paintings and assemblaged in sculpture, like flypaper art collecting the carcass of. Preloaded with content for walltexts or children's television. Collectible too.
If the dominance of mass culture includes threat to diminish art that we could call castration, then art's turning that culture into a fetish item is classic Freud: "a token of triumph over the threat of castration and a protection against it." You can't cut off what I own of yours.


See too: Yngve Holen at Fine Arts, Sydney, Yngve Holen at Kunsthalle Basel, Yngve Holen at Modern Art, David Lieske at MUMOK,

Yngve Holen at Fine Arts, Sydney

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Looking for the ghost in the machine we instead find the designer. We treat objects as if they are magic, acting like a cargo cult, arranging the droppings of the industrial gods like paganists worshipping more technically advanced nations. We place their refuse in our altars. A hole we are to be fed into in trash can colors absorbing into the urban landscape. Objects are designed to affect us, strangely adept at it, advertising like a massive psychologic program and objects are the sediment of it to deploy its energies. But despite every attempt to make technical medical objects sympathetic to us, they are unfortunately cold and this is difficult for us.



See too: Yngve Holen at Kunsthalle Basel, Yngve Holen at Modern Art, David Lieske at MUMOK

Yngve Holen at Kunsthalle Basel

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The terrible emptiness of objects, an indifference that hurts, and in Holen and other's objects we begin to see boogeymen that we assume must be there filling the cold object with anything but an emptiness. We exceed at inventing gods where there are none. What is behind it is only us. It is obvious at this point that objects we design are reflections of us, this is how the field of anthropology operates. We are designers or our world, of our water coolers cut in half in attempts to find its ghost where there is only us standing around it attempting the small talk of art writing. Artists' recent turn towards this mystic auto-anthropology would perhaps be better suited to more rigorous dissertations of objects affectual torture of us that Holen and other's more symbolic moments seem primed to leech out of all-too-ready curators, but it is true that our objects haunt us.


See too: “Being Thing” at Centre International d’Arte et du Paysage & Treignac Projet, Yngve Holen at Modern Art, Mark Leckey at Haus Der Kunst + Kunsthalle Basel, Darren Bader at Andrew Kreps, Klara Lidén, Alicia Frankovich at Kurator, Park McArthur at Chisenhale, Sam Lewitt at Kunsthalle Basel

Yngve Holen at Modern Art

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Even objects designed for us, to make us like them feel nothing reciprocal, a universe is dead to us, difficult to accept them as absolute cold material completely aloof towards our existence. These insectile eyes we recognize is an anthropomorphism softening the blow of cold dead indifference.