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We used to see work like this all the time, the rickety Oursler, Rhoades, Dave Hullfish Bailey, Michael Smith wet cardboard kinda humor assemblage. But in an artworld that today attempts to find visual artifacts for touch and feel, we see endless sculptures instead fetishizing its own materialism with a sort of Carol Bove like cabinet of the past's material curiosities: The lumpy crusty and rough hewn, sanded and polished. Whereas the above instead sort of nihilistically hate-loves its own trashiness, self ironizes with its own crudeness. And in a world where everything is being virtualized and drywalled this ironic janky-ness feels cruel; it is the dominant situation. So today we find comfort in artists preserving little butterfly collections of the "real" that at once may have been considered "authentic." The above coagulates all the crap of the demolishing today. That this isn't fun anymore.
I think this worked in the past because we didn't actually fear it, it was titillating, and now it is real fear. Check out The Guano here.
See too: Materialphilia
