EUTOPIA

Takashi Murakami

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Takashi Murakami
The Octopus Eats Its Own Leg
Jun 10, 2018 – Sep 16, 2018
The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth [link]

Utilizing the “dumb” vocabulary of pop to socially critique the toxic issues of empty cuteness and diversion, early Murakami’s sardonic hook was unfortunately on point. The sticky, sweet rebellious critique fed a cynical Postmodernism the soft intellectual candy it wanted, complete with a shell of self-deprecating irony. Swallowed whole by the ever-morphing capitalist monster, Murakami’s weightless, smiling monsters allowed gleefully vacuity over introspection as consumable, self-referential jokes.

The older Murakami atones by aligning with historical reverence to produce beautiful, legacy-centric work. Swaddled in capitalist tentacles the new work is huge and benign, amputated of criticality as production swells.

~ Ryder Richards
images courtesy of the author’s phone, and “Tan Tan Bo Puking” courtesy of The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth

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Chim↑Pom

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photo courtesy of Dallas Contemporary, by Kevin Todora

Chim↑Pom
Non-Burnable
as part of INVISIBLE CITIES: Moving Images from Asia
Dallas Contemporary, Dallas [link]
Sept. 29 – Dec. 17, 2017

The prayers of well-wishing citizens are sent to Hiroshima in the form of thousands of pounds of colorful origami cranes. In a transmutation from cultural meme to sacred rubbish the totems are classified as “non-burnable” trash. This semantic redefinition of folded paper formalizes a social contract wherein sympathetic gestures eclipse the value of environmental or infrastructure concerns, converting social consideration into a societal burden: an ever-expanding archive of care. Maintained by the state, the trash-chive converts morally beneficent acts into sanctioned eco-terrorism, conflating objecthood with fulfillment of a sympathetic ritual.

~ Ryder Richards
images courtesy of the Dallas Contemporary, by Kevin Todorra and the author  

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Aphrodite Désirée Navab

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Aphrodite Désirée Navab
“THE HOMELING”
Johannes Vogt Gallery, New York, NY [link]
January 11th-February 17th, 2018
Curated by: Roxana Fabius

It is only afterwards- with the realization that these saturated Piranesi-esque inscriptions on paper are indexical marks of the artist’s body– that the encoded thing is decoded to an uprooted buoyant identity leaving its trace in sporadic leaps on paper, then into the subconscious of the viewer where the notions of gender and ethnicity take form and are torn asunder. This is followed in the casually hung drawings where suffused delineations of nuances marked by paper’s absorption recall Meret Oppenheim’s furry teacup, invoking both a fetishistic assault on the Freudian phallus and a partial vestige of the body on paper.

~ Ali Soltani
Photographs courtesy Johannes Vogt Gallery

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Numen/For Use

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Numen/For Use "Tape Tokyo 02" @ 2121 Design Sight, 2017_ photo by Ryder Richards

Numen/For Use “Tape Tokyo 02” @ 21_21 Design Sight, 2017_ photo by Ryder Richards

Numen/For Use
Tape Tokyo 02
Grand Projects—How Far Will You Go?
21_21 Design Sight,
→
GRAND PROJECTS: HOW FAR WILL YOU GO?
21_21 DESIGN SIGHT
by Exhibition Director, Naoko Aono
Tokyo, Japan [link]

Tethered and taught, 21,120 meters of tape stretch into a translucent organ, squeaking and groaning as squirming, curious museum goers crawl through its aortal expanses. Choosing populist excess –cheap tape and labor instead of high-end fabrication— allows patrons near familiarity, prompting magical wonder at the common’s transformative ability. Inside the womb, externalities of sight and sound muted, the individual is left to entertain the alien familiarity of an organic space, or retreat from such existentialism to our digital umbilicus as experiential intermediary. Externally, the blurred shadow’s peristaltic migration is regarded, jealously, as the latest morsel consuming a novelty.

~ Ryder Richards
all images by the author

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Tom Sachs

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Tom Sachs
Tea Ceremony
Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas [link]

Sachs’ new focus, in coopting and hyperventilating the “religion” of the Japanese tea ceremony, manifests as highly American provisional approximations. Embodying the reductive apparatus of utilitarianism whereby traditional systems or concepts can become lightweight, cheap and nomadic embraces Eco’s “Travels in Hyperreality” or Venturi/Brown’s “Learning from Las Vegas” sign-as-system culture. Taken to insane levels of excess, one can track the adept’s passionate re-valuation through selective interpretation: a whisk becomes motorized = shortcut, while only one in one-hundred handmade bowls is acceptable.
This conversion to American systemic foibles dialogizes contradictory knowledge through subjective insight, allowing the possibility for rich, discursive reappraisal.

~ Ryder Richards
images courtesy of the Nasher Sculpture Center

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DPMT7

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DPMT7, Weston Art Gallery (by Tony Walsh)

 

DPMT7
Un Teatro del Nuovo
Weston Art Gallery, Cincinnatti, OH [link]

Elevating the ubiquitous structures of urban construction, the semi-temporary systems of renewal become the allegorical model for a new norm. An opera of the common displaced within the institution inverts and dissolves the typical, reversing context of exterior (mundane) to interior (sacred) and allowing the secular elevation to the epiphanistic.
With an elevated singing platform, 360-degree video montage, and craggy lumber stelae the intent unfolds as a more delicate archeology where one engages ghosts of primal ritualization: a brief poetic, insane glorification of the nomadic, ever-present ignored… the laborious modern religious sacrifice performed for the city.

~ Ryder Richards
photos courtesy of the Weston Art Gallery (by Tony Walsh) and the author

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