(link)
Both Rachel Harrison and the 00's hipster were responding to the shopping mall, which had exploded, semiotically, into chaos of sign systems. A tweety bird tee, Louis Vuitton boots, and a struggle mustache - and everyone was confounded. It was the aughts, you were intended to adhere to the rules that kept meaning rigid, in place. We all performed the ritual of dress to keep meaning ordered. Until someone didn't. The horse girl and the whale tail merged. Post this semio-apocalypse everyone was left scrambling in the detritus to assemble totems, and we had a lot of cargo cult art in the 2010s. Now we've sifted the rubble and collected enough signs we've agreed have sentiment that the shopping mall is conscerated as jewelry of itself - cast in remembrance, the chaos of surface, symbol, nostalgia embedded within a silver relic. The benediction of sign systems. The highest order these relics can obtain is that they get put on Beyonce, as a Christmas tree of our sign systems, collective wreckage, past. The highest order of totems, shown back to us like a lighthouse reorganizing meaning.
