Monday, May 4, 2015

“The Violet Crab” at DRAF

Installation view of Backstage at The Violet Crab at DRAF, 2015. 
Photo: Matthew Booth
(link)

This exhibition is a proposition. That art should be more like cabaret, a category optimistically defined as a risque entertainment that absorbs and harbors the fringes of culture, an ideal art that would dissolve lip-service to post-modernity still aggressively holding on to the autonomous work. It's like championing spaghetti to replace diamonds.  We would have to give up the authorial subject for the carnival. A radical happening transferring art to artifacts of a scene, and the entrepreneur as author. Maybe.
Satirizing the rules of production in the present isn't that difficult, even the mildest flatulence breaks gallery decorum. Turning the house topsy-turvy, the curatorial address of throwing it all in and letting god sort 'em out with song and dance.