Olga Balema, Geta Brătescu at Galerie Barbara Weiss

(link)

Like Fred Sandback from hell. Not the transcendent floating, but ropes tying you to floor, your immanence: "To dwell, remain" on this bitch of an Earth. It's "important because it makes you look down, an expression of shame."

"It wasn’t that group of late Rembrandt self-portraits. It was their unrestored frames. Dull and dusty and cracked in the corners, they were the materialization of the age and poverty worn on the represented faces, of the humanity reflected in the represented eyes. The frames provided those poor, passive pictures with a haven from the inhuman grandeur of the museum’s imperial architecture, held them in their own history—not a history of masterpieces but the history of lived life. They enacted a kind of resistance that the paintings themselves couldn’t mount, being as they were so contained by that architecture and all it represented. The waitress in the café on the museum’s second floor, where I took refuge behind a massive marble column, sobbing, had obviously seen this before. She sat me down and administered Vienna’s other famous cure: a cup of hot chocolate and a piece of Sacher torte. She wouldn’t let me pay."

 Or: The yellow preventative against conceptualism.