Starling’s “Metamorphology” is histories' mirroring reenactment in symbolic fashions. (i.e.: take a car whose production was off-shored, Starling then buys the imported car in its original country and returns/exports the car back to its new origin where he replaces its facade to have the car mimic the flag of its new country before hanging it on a gallery wall like a painting... Or raising a ship from the sea-floor to feed it to itself so it sinks again. Or, balancing marble chunks whose sizes are respective their price differential.) A structural/contextual tautology repeatable in an interminable number of ways, the baseline tropes of today’s neo-conceptual art deadpan.
The artworks feel logical in their ouroboric repetition but contain a tautological inability to be reasoned with. Tautologies make sense, but state nothing, equating a silence as poetry. They become koan-like emblems of the histories it condenses like cliff notes, glazing history subservient to it’s poetic reenactment.
Of course man/woman’s need for new images and storytelling, but this is total curator bait begging for a catalog essay by those who can’t wait to pour hearts out over globalization, outsourcing, imperialism, and poetry etc. etc. by globally ambiguous curators loving the relief of talking about history as opposed to art. Probably the same essay everyone is reading in all the photo documentation, over and over.
related: Jason Dodge at Franco Noero