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"Every morning I open my clamshell and immediately feel the urgency of creating some sort of feedback loop with the images I see."..."The goal here is to acknowledge that we have all been programmed to respond to these kinds of scene composition through sustained exposure since birth. It’s why prestige television grips us so well. Like baby formula."It's seductive, the power of film, the strategies of advertising that is basically the solution film is now developed in. The way, remembered, a certain insurance commercial could make my mother weep and then laugh as quickly at the ridiculousness of her emotive connection to commercial effigies, fictionalized death's emotional wounding and immediately proffered palliative with horns soaring: "AARP life insurance," or some such and my mother between sobs and laughter, smiling between the bars of her tears. My first lesson in the post-modern. The strategies today's artists deploy with Brechtian malfeasance, affective deployment as assault, short circuiting their usual emotive categories: space guy steps out in awe at SCUBA* minions' crotch harvested for blood while an acapella cover of 90's pop crescendos like the now approaching wave and the minion has the color pumped from him, mosquito, needle, oil rig, and the attempt to make sense of our feelings. "Desensitization is the diminished emotional responsiveness to a stimulus after repeated exposure to it. It also occurs when an emotional response is repeatedly evoked in situations in which the action tendency that is associated with the emotion proves irrelevant or unnecessary." So we collect and collage disparate moments in Magrittean fashion in attempts at alienation, so that we can hold them in our hands at a distance, that slight remove, so when you see nostalgia's video grain warmth sharpen at its filter's removal into the digital clarity that feels so cold we recognize the fiction we prefer. It is today's form of slapstick; physical comedy is replaced with emotional spanking, our weeping no use against a master's hand, he'll give you emotional candy when it's over. Buster Keaton on the piano.
See too: Rachel Rose at High Art, Ed Atkins at Serpentine, Steve Reinke at Isabella Bortolozzi, Lynn Hershman Leeson at Vilma Gold, Jordan Wolfson at David Zwirner, Shana Moulton at Kunsthaus Glarus
*not actually a SCUBA apparatus but an early diving helmet.
*not actually a SCUBA apparatus but an early diving helmet.
