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From: WhiteCube WhiteCubed : www.societyofcontrol.com/WhiteCube J.J.
Jasmin 13 March 2001 22:54:54
Category: Exhibitions
Date: 31 March 2001
<font color="#000000"> The gallery that stole the idea of the WhiteCube from modern art and turned it into a fin de siecle emporium.
People who live on islands or in remote areas need spectacle. Sensation, which is a provincial idea, brought us sensation, sensation, senstion, senstion, sensation, sensation, sensation, sensation, senation, sensation, sensation, sensation, sesation, sensation, sensaton, sensation, sensatin, sensation, sensation, sensation, sensation... And paralysed are the times, numbed are feelings to the bone, dulled are the brightest brains, obscured is the view. Incorporated is everything that promised image value. The big greed created a vociferous business. With gluttonous sucking tentacles, scratching and sniffing the rich and the dust, it has installed itself on every level: - As an ‘alternative’ space to ‘comb the scene’ in a weekly cycle. As a ‘White Cube’ to circulate the established trade month by month. As a gallery, it's the decorator of the great indoors, as an agency, it's the furnisher of the great outdoors... and closely linked to the millennium book makers... and closely linked to the millennium money makers in advertising and the stock market. A closely knitted network for world wide distribution. If it were not counter-productive to exclusive business, they would brand a White Cube Chain store. Of what? The show by Hohirorososhohi Sosugogimomototo is called portraits, put together with Gallery Koyanagi. The room is quite full with large black and white photos, portraits of the Queen of England, next to Lenin, next to Churchill. The room itself is rectangular, not square, not squared. The portraits show half of the figure, in front of a black background. There are more famous people: Pope Paul II, Oscar Wilde, Rembrandt... They look as if the artist had taken „look-a-like’models and costumes. The press release tells us that the artist is a conceptual artist who had studied in LA. The fotos are taken in wax-figure cabinets, here some more: Arafat, Dali, Napoleon, Charles I, Duke of Wellington, Shakespeare. In the back a large ‘Last Supper’, the typical Leonardo da Vinci-setting that everyone uses to make fun of. Now I realise that Mona Lisa is missing... and... „Oh, my goodness, what a funny show!’ Is that what the exhibition is after? Or is it after the uneducated few who ask „Why should photos of waxworks be art?" That would be sad...oh how sad, ....how sadly sad! „Why should it not?’answers the artist, snickering, „Are they not great, those figuresBut is that statement enough, is that entertaining enough? Does it reflect image industry or is it image industry? </font> Look, our old friend Cindy Sherman, after she was out of ideas came back to art history and started dressing up like some old tart in a well known painting. How funny! How FUNNILY F U N N Y! And here comes Sosugogimomototo and tops the wit. Tableaux vivantes were once a social activity in the salons of the 19th century. Other then erasing a de Kooning drawing or putting a moustache on Mona Lisa, these paraphrases are not critical comments or reflections about art, they are merely illustrations and Sosugogimomototo is the illustration of the illustration. More about the doubling later... Ok, over to the ‘real thing’, White Cube. As we know, it is a really small room. The show is by Kokarorenon Dodavoviesos, and it is called ‘Interior Ghosts’: There are two paintings only, hung opposite to each other. One painted in warm tones, red, orange, yellow and green. The other one is colder: blue green yellow. They are about 2.50 x 1.70, bigger than I thought (when I see them on the web or elsewhere in print). The paintings are abstract psychedelic waves, quite equally painted. I think of the White Cube posters, just horizontal coloured stripes, but now as if seen through a fun-mirror and warped as if glimpsed through a LSD trip. Plain, simple bullshit Pop. The good thing is the size of the painting and the easiness with which it is painted, I thought. But after I left the gallery I was thinking it over again, and no, the opposite! How much better would the painting have been if it hadn’t been that easy retro Pop, if it hadn’t had that art museum size. Imagine some old inmate of a Prinzhorn clinic would be painting that painting over and over, over and over again, on a napkin. Away with the third generation of Pop! Into the dustbin those easy solutions! An easy criticism as well, I agree, but now, read that press release! Have you ever seen so much pretentious xxxxx on one pile? </font>‘...stripes that bulged to create the presence of covered pregnant or swollen form beneath...’ ‘...explore the meaning of the ‘irrepressible’ referring more to the internal part of the body...’ ‘...drawings made with no specific end in mind...found...through this psychologically revealing process...’ ‘...work... evokes a kind of corporeal abstraction... references... highly gestural... Pollock, de Kooning...’ </i> (...of course... la..la..la) The multilayering of... the dramatisation of... the adding of meaning... to meaning: how many meaningful layers we have! This pompous ornateness, this distortion of thinking is not mannerism (I wish it were) but it is sad cleverness, sad, because it is a desperate attempt to create meaning by compiling empty references... The more the better. Is that what taste is about? Knowledge? Those White Cube people are sitting in front of their brain as they watch it twist and turn. They misunderstand ‘exhibition’ as exhibitionism. So we get the exhibitionism of a twisted tortured brain that has given up caring for analysis and criticism, or, something simple, search for the truth. But they continue to add art to art, multiply it with itself, square it with art, square White Cube with WhiteCube, gain art about artart, twisted art, warped art, twined warped twisted... the death throes Mathematical problems... additions (one is not enough), multiplications (plural is not enough) and exponential function (multiplication is not enough)... result in dull bombast, sultry pompousness, over-ornateness of sentimental affectation. Or, in the best case fractals, random patterns made of ambiguities. The question to be posed is not „Is it art?" or „Could it be art?" The question is „What kind of thinking should be generated by this?"I put the press release back on the desk. They have the ‘Beck’s’ logo is on their stationery. Are they poor? < I leave WhiteCube2 at exactly at 13:33 and I ask myself, ‘Does White Cube know what time it is?’ I imagine thats why they installed a clock above the door... But... do they know what year it is? I guess they go with the TATE: ‘The last century was amazing, don’t miss it!’ A spectacle from yesteryear. (c) 2001 J.J. Jasmin // Jasmin@oopling.co.uk
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