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Andrea Rottman in describing Pumhösl's arena: "To use art historian Hal Foster’s formulation, the once-solid canon of modern art has become 'less a barricade to storm than a ruin to pick through.'" And Pumhösl like a salesman with the brilliant idea of smashing sculpture to create more fragments to sell, detachery of every appendage he can snap. Rottman says as much and Diederichsen states this amplified piece-mealing as a hyperbolic retooling of modernism, repeating the same stripping (laconicness) on that already stripped language of modernism taken to the cusp of oblivion: "but reduction in this case represents an attempt to formulate a problem: What is the minimum condition for a sign?" At what point will we finally turn our heads away?
