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Thursday, October 6, 2016
Cooper Jacoby at Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden
(link)
The Microbial Home, on which these are based, is a fantasy fetishizing design as control, and already, hubristically, forecasting this control onto the Nature it assumes will yeild to it. It's a pretty fucked up proposal, surely. Bees are lovely, but not lovely enough. They must be sold, and thus must be packaged. Jacoby's recasting the bee houses as foreclosed slums would seem to be a critique predicting the ends of these best intentions as in the production Detroit hive like a colony experiencing its own collapse, the ends of production utopias, if the art weren't so sexy too. Like Timur Si-Qin or any of the other techno-fabulists, critique of power often comes with the fetishization and deployment of it, with all the sex that sells in a sort of post-apocalyptic gloss we all seem to have some type subconscious drive toward, this death.
See too: Timur Si-Qin at Carl Kostyál, Simon Denny at MoMA PS1, Ben Schumacher at Musee d’art contemporain de Lyon