Recent piece via e-flux on "Neo-materialism," a two-parter in which the author deals with "The Commodity and the Exhibition" and "The Unreadymade." Admittedly, I found it a bit disappointing in its execution and argumentation; given what the writer had to work with, where it could've been taken. The clumsy and heavy-handed mode of "Marxian" critique unfortunately doesn't help much, either. But still, it raises a number of interesting issues.
Firstly, I was unfamiliar with Guy Ben-Nur's "Stealing Beauty" -- a 2007 video piece in which the artist and a small set of actors play out a domestic drama on the "sets" of an Ikea showroom...
The concept very much reminds me of the "Leben mit Pop" ("Living with Pop") exhibition in Düsseldorf circa 1963, in which artists Konrad Lueg, Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke and Manfred Kuttner staged their own "Capitalist Realism" exhibition in a department store, listing themselves and the showrooms' various furniture suites and appliances as contemporary sculpture...
There's a number of other articles posted at e-flux lately that connect with this overall theme, including stronger pieces by Sven Lütticken and Keti Chukhrov. All of which prompts the other thing that comes to my mind. That being: Considering that consumer object-oriented art has been an critical and curatorial trend for many years now, how long before it takes a revised and more contemporary turn with a responsive 2.0 version of arte povera? Might be high time.
No comments:
Post a Comment