(Anicka Yi at Cleveland Museum of Art, Transformer Station)
Surrealism at best estranged the world in a way that its signs were able to express something latent within it, at worst it was an attempt to make art more interesting than the world by disregarding its rules and positing the makers own. “The surrealist claims his dream world as more interesting than your dull nasty everyday one...”as Reinhardt theorized it. It was a debate between Adorno and Benjamin, whether the juxtaposition of contradictions could actually reveal something about them, or further obfuscate a world already slipping under fog. Marx’s ironic use of the fantastic, vampires and werewolves, mocked the superstitions of capital’s veil. Ranciere, “On the other hand,” thought, “the work which builds understanding and dissolves appearances kills, by so doing, the strangeness of the resistant appearance that attests to the non-necessary or intolerable character of a world.”
And today we have weights shining behind tempura-fried flowers and a press release stating that it’s “analyiz[ing] the acceptance of what it means to be human,” the acceptance seeming finally having stopped, given up, to smell roses, push up daisies, an exhibition called Death.
See too: "Flat Neighbors" at Rachel Uffner , Group Show at Bortolami