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Commonwealth at The Tate modern London Uk
Reviews

From: Daisy
Category: Exhibitions
Date: 09 November 2003

Review

This is an interactive show breaking the boundaries between the spectator and the work of art. Everything's art for fuck's sake. I walk in Trafalgar Square, someone sits on the bronze Lions. I play cards or read a book, or eat a cheese sandwich. These are the activities that Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla, Thomas Hirschhorn, Carsten Höller, and Gabriel Orozco play with, as though normall people half-heartedly and self-consciously performing silly variations on reality in an art gallery is going to make any difference to anyone.

It's all fucking twee and poncey and referential to other crap art. There's no point to it. It's a waste of time.

These artists aren't doing experiments, they are doing safe and curator approved academic art works, that don't work, because they have no emotional, physical, or aesthetic effect beyond that of any other real crap you see outside of galleries.

Listen!Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla, Thomas Hirschhorn, Carsten Höller, and Gabriel Orozco. This is not political or new art. This is the same old shit we see all the time. You must do better and not condescend to the lowest level of subsumation to banality.Listen!Round ping pong tables, serendipitous photos of scooters, frisbees, and junk installations, are not going to start revolutions, and even if in your slacker self-satisfied consciousness you think that it doesn't matter because you'rejust investigating stuff. Your wrong. It does matter.

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