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Thursday, February 20, 2020
Alan Ruiz at Bad Reputation
(link)
More art as the cargo cult, the displayed droppings of dominant culture, broken into artifacts, and presented it in our white altars to press heads against it. We used to draw aurochs on cave walls; we relocate the world into art, to make it manipulable in our realm, sandbox, aesthetics. To stand in for control. Aesthetics becomes the religion of fictionalized understanding. It substitutes its little problem for the one big problem. And therefore claims knowledge, and thus domain.
If the dominance of mass culture includes threat to diminish art, [a diminishing] that we could call castration, then art's transmuting that culture into fetish item is classic Freud: it is "a token of triumph over the threat of castration and a protection against it." i.e. You can't cut off what I own of yours.
Do the Gods know we exist?
Cargo cults: Sylvie Fleury at Karma, Yngve Holen at Kunsthalle Basel, Yngve Holen at Modern Art, Yngve Holen at Modern Art (2), David Lieske at MUMOK, Yngve Holen at Fine Arts, Sydney, Rachel Harrison at Whitney Museum, Sean Raspet at Jessica Silverman