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In the smoke of Matias Faldbakken's rocketship ascendancy the artworld was left blind scrambling to adhere a politic for it, to make a critical foundation for the artworld's hot new power iconography, unable to accept that how it looked, rather than any little content it contained, was its appeal.*
But so Maeda and Chung deliver today’s dealings with the legacy of conceptual art’s poetics, i.e. a look that connotes a critical intelligibility (meaning) at the same moment appearing elusive, a withholdingess prevails. It produces the look of an enigma, and with it the attendant lure, reading between the lines of evidence evinced. An imbuing of its images/objects with potentialized meaningfulness, making a dissonance that ramps up the aura of even rubber lain on a floor, of cheap bookshelves and its remnant objects, of a decade of art dealing reduced to its minutes, a text that like Warhol’s diary finds initial interest in the search for rumor and gossip but eventually finds humanity in the piecing together of human lives lived.
*(Who in that moment didn’t want have to their big fuck-all paintings and sell it too. The ironic self-awareness of Faldbakken’s sculpture, like Fontaine, made its recycling of an already co-opted language acceptable, the viewer being smarter than the sculpture a sales value added.)
See too : Nina Beier at David Roberts Art Foundation , Mathew Cerletty at Office Baroque