Thursday, August 11, 2016
Sharon Lockhart at Arts Club of Chicago & Antek Walczak at Real Fine Arts
(Sharon Lockhart, Antek Walczak)
Promotional stills standing-in for documentation in attempts to reprioritize viewership away from the digitally documentary to rechristen once again the in-person experience mostly just ends with everyone knowing the happening of an exhibition without ability to say anything about it, but we know it's there: its promotion has functioned while denying our ability to respond in a meaningful way, as advertising does, and even the well documented denies authority of commentary despite documentation's inordinate importance in today's tradeshow of art, a system catalyzing a sort of sublingual register and meme-like spread of tendencies across art absorbed in the free-flow hydrant of image feeds that still so willingly distribute them and we willingly participate and of which we can't speak formally but to which we are all incarcarated, knowing you-know-who did you-know-what at you-know-where, the takeover of information taking hostage any response.*
*In conversation with a famous architect while together painting his roof, asked if architectural criticism made prerequisite the in-person experience of the buildings they reviewed, the architect said no, but it was contentious, but that buildings were almost always reviewed by plans, images and renderings, that this was inherent to the nature of architecture whose plans projections bore oversize importance, that this was the nature of the beast, staring into silver paint in heat.