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The least interesting S.O.A.P.Y. ex to date, members splintering to go on to make their own more interesting projects, "IV inflates the action to absurd heights, but it ultimately rings hollow thanks to a story that hits the same basic beat as the first three entries in the franchise."
What had been the dumb game as an escape mechanism from the claustrophobia of art's social rules, ironizing before born to birth something odd, has devolved into histrionics reserved for video games and manga done by high-school stage designers. Franz west's hammy objects exaggerated as power totems (a doubling down on their already self-annealing lumpen) set in a mis-en-scene vibrating back at us our disbelief. The opalescent Ambergris connecting it all Matthew Barney and his self-ceremonials (and video game set in the real) as a hysterically naive version, containing - like so much work today - its negation within it, a camp theater, in which it never mattered to begin with whether you believed it. Camp neuters the concept of earnestness, falsifying its question, and this is one of the cores of after-net variety, a post gen-x "authentic" invalidated, pop as a legitimate mode and teletubbies in police uniforms causes little disjunction, or even read as absurb, from those reared alongside Family Guy non-sequitur, and this ex's pastiche of a pastiche isn't as interesting as the excuse made for it, like, this could actually be fun.
"National Gallery" at Grand Century , “S.O.A.P.Y. III” at What Pipeline , Magnus Andersen at Neue Alte Brüke & Dorothy Iannone at Air de Paris