(Clockwise from top left, Lutz Bacher, Susan Cianciolo, Sarah Rapson, Park Mcarthur)
Yellowing archive.
While early Conceptual Art was interested in the document (the instructional as a virtual, a program, cerebral) its second generation is a bit more lossy, interested in the fossil, more precisely the fossilization, that slow decomposition into eternality, history. Recoups its own acidification, hazing, foxing, all the condition reports it will accumulate. This "second generation" invests in the degradation of generations of bootleg tape. Fossils existing as strange evidence of a world. a pathos in the materials we find to mediate our touch to the world. ... The objects here, designed for ourselves, infer something about the bodies which they govern.
It would not take a freudian to posit why particularly women appear to be more sensitive to material conditions of the world. Like, while Kosuth was concerned for all the mysteries of "Chair," Wex and Mary Kelly were like yes, but we also get pregnant. The "cerebral" of men's white concerns was treated as the higher plane and, for all its agnostic posturing, the "conceptual" allied itself with a reverence akin the religious divinity it ostensibly exiled. Men, oblivious to their own bodies that had never been in question by culture, had the privilege to etherealize themselves above everyone's heads to some assumed universal while women's were increasingly entrenched in politic ground war.
Minimalism's infatuation for the industrial process, of say Judd et al, was, in part, premised on these industrial processes deletion of the body and its "expression" (if not a promise of subjectivity lifted entirely) in looking "pure," like objectivity, removing the human. ... Of course this was the lie of any commodity: that the clean aluminum sheets comprising boxes or laptops weren't simply wiped of their indentured sweat. Minimalism hid the body in the closet. Edward's balls coagulated these castoff bodies minimalism so desperately wanted to forget.
the body is expressed not through "figuration" but its intermediary.. Think of Cady Noland's institutional objects, learning something about the specifics of flesh under society. Of elder's walkers and handcuffs. We make objects for ourselves and so of course they express us. And eventually they exist for so long beside us, silently shape alongside us, that they begin to take on facets and express things that were latent, learning by proxy.
And today we are so acclimated to objects and commodities adapted to us that any object blurrying suggestion for the function they provide (to us) produces an uncanny effect. We say they look otherworldly, alien, simply because we don't know what good they are to us...
Knowledge is kept on rapidly acidifying papers, stored in databanks we anodize against oxidation in deep storage basements to feign permanence, our security. But the world slowly deteriorates, look into the issue of archiving, it's complex nuanced and impossible, it's baby blankets spilled on, barfed on, a biological archive cum Banker's boxes purchased by the gross. Your touch leaves a mark, sews a patch, you reproduce yourself in the objects you attend. Preciousness in warm cardboard, wearing touch, eroding to someone
which Bacher recurringly recall, cosmos xeroxed into the noise of their granular flooring, stellar scales spilled across expanses like baseballs or sprawls of sand. Mountains dissolve in grains that resemble liquids in geologic time. This recurring theme. The biblical "for dust you are and to dust you will return" is, as far as we know of entropy, scientifically accurate.
see too: Susan Cianciolo at Modern Art, Marianne Wex at Tanya Leighton, Ser Serpas at LUMA Westbau, Ghislaine Leung at Chisenhale & Essex Street, Laurie Parsons at Museum Abteiberg, Park McArthur at Chisenhale, Park McArthur at SFMOMA, Richard Rezac at Isabella Bortolozzi, Henrik Olesen at Schinkel Pavilion, Henrik Olesen at Cabinet, Henrik Olesen at Reena Spaulings, Pati Hill at Essex Street, Klara Lidén & Alicia Frankovich at Kurator, Melvin Edwards at Daniel Buchholz