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In the wastelanding of the sign, the fallout of it post-Harrison-vs-Genzken nova let's say, Lieske was of the first of the cargo cults reassembling the totems of meaning in the desert of it, picking detritus. The issue was resolved not by necessarily by making objects mean again - which they couldn't, its hard to make an empty bottle mean in arid land - but by situating objects so that they looked to mean, they connoted meaning despite inscrutable blankness, hieroglyphs. What was important was exuding the affect of meaningful objects, regardless of whether there was any and it didn't matter anyway was what we were all beginning to pick up on and what the commercial world had known for decades (that you can create "meaning" at will with attitude, aura) which while Lieske pondering whether this was a problem was suddenly flooded and drown by more ephebic artists already having decided for him it wasn't and now this is the water we live in, a flooded terrain of objects imbued, over-saturated "meaning." If so much art looks like Broodthaers today, it is because Broodthaers was of the first invested in the situational arrangements of the display as a credence to meaning, institutional or otherwise.
And so see before, after Lieske's theatrical resignation from the artworld, his return came with press release of defeated reasoning, his realization of commercial exchange as the granting entity of his work's import rather than any institutional legitimization, "The decision of what constitutes a work of art is determined, in the end, by purchase transactions and not, as previously thought, by reproductions in art magazines or similar, none of which have any definitions giving powers anymore," or so the gold standard, exchange, was the actual backing of the symbolic value of his works, and thus the creator of meaning since everything was inscrutable anyways, and thus Lieske was then offering re-arrangements of his objects to try and sell, or make them "mean," once again. Something like in a flood, the empty bottle floats above.
And see too, Zak Kitnick at CLEARING & Rowhouse Project, Sophie Nys at Crac Alsace, Flat Neighbors at Rachel Uffner,
