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Wednesday, March 15, 2017
Michael Sailstorfer at KÖNIG GALERIE
(link)
If the brutish conceptual art of today has an overt concern with nihilism, cyclical destruction, and the darkly sublime - of which Sailstorfer is exemplar with objects so frequently spinning, rutted, towards their own exhaustion and but also this exhibition here with the auto's pollution return to woodfire heat that once blackened London (or recently Greece in recession) and then also the teardrop destruction, oldtime erosion replaced with today's more efficient wrecking-ball that appears as a sort of its-all-the-same cycnicism- it may be an inherent trait of the genre, a spinoff of romantic roots and Ono's Grapefruit whose "event scores"'s main event was a kōan-like mind-wipe, an erasure of logic, forecasting the poetic as an inability for meaning to complete, (conceptual art premised on an internal logic that need not "make sense" and this logical failure having close ties to poetic nihilism) and art guys now building vast machines to prove the destruction of object and meaning as a big grand gesture of.
See too: Sean Raspet at Société, On Kawara at the Guggenheim, Jason Dodge at Franco Noero, Trevor Paglen at Metro Pictures, John Baldessari at Marian Goodman, Mungo Thomson at Contemporary Art Gallery Vancouver