EUTOPIA

Doug Aitken

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Doug Aitken
Electric Earth
Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Fort Worth, Texas [link]

Gloriously composed, the polished production of Aitken’s work is problematic. The mundane becomes transcendent, a sublimation of the common provoking a desire to romanticize the surreal playgrounds of parking lots, diners, deserts and seedy hotels. These overlooked, neglected fringes are made nostalgically beguiling. Simple, iconic phrases become alluring sculptures. Within this superficial world exists a provocation: a disproportionate ratio of seduction to content, granting the work optional profundity.

One may accept the dirt-glam fairytales of negligible morality as enchanting consumables, or optionally as subversive commentary on our pitiable desires fulfilled: another cultural megatexture mined for nostalgia and polished free of reality.

~ Ryder Richards
images courtesy of the author

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Sean P. Miller

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Sean P. Miller
Gazing Reflecting Unknown
The MAC, Dallas [link]

Miller embraces the uncertain aspects of a pitch dark space and offers three gauzy video-light sculptures as part spectacle, part funhouse in his new exhibition at the MAC. Between discovering what may or may not be the actual artworks, plenty of opportunities await to trip over building detritus that alternately lies in hidden piles or stray bits throughout the cavernous space of the old building. It is this hazard of the unknown, coupled with the dim, slinky shifts of light play in Miller’s obfuscatory pieces, that produces a threatening dimension, and subsumes the parts into a larger, more provocative gesamtkunstwerk.

~ Peter Bo Rappmund
images courtesy of the artist and The MAC

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Kathryn Andrews

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Bozo the Clown Runs for President, 1984 Photo: Larry Harmon Pictures Corporation

Kathryn Andrews
Run for President
Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas [link]

Juxtaposing objects from popular film culture with political images, Kathryn Andrew’s large-scale sculptural installations wryly examine the relationship between media culture and political power. Lethal Weapon/Oval Office features one of the actual guns from the 1987 film hidden inside a large polished steel cylinder resembling a garbage can. Peering into the “peephole” viewers encounter the barrel of a gun pointed directly at their foreheads. The sculpture reflects the viewer placing them inside the oval office. The gun is the least lethal weapon, rather the self-aggrandizing fame and ego necessary to assume political office becomes the danger with potential global repercussions.

~ Colette Copeland

photos courtesy of the author

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Buster Graybill

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Buster Graybill
Recreational Modernism
Sala Diaz, San Antonio, Texas [link]
September 9 – October 15, 2016

So many times I hear people call our art modern. This is a blind alley of common vernacular. Modernism is a wax museum of power, control, and failed utopias—turn off the air and let it melt. The grass is always greener and our memories have outlived us. Memories exist beyond reality; mnemonics scrub memories clean; nostalgia keeps them safe. Sign and signifiers are breadcrumbs to lead us back to an original point of departure. Let us pass through the present, mud flying and back aching. Let the fury of the present make a trembling target of the past.

~ Chad Dawkins

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Urs Fischer

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Urs Fischer
Standing Julian (2015)
as part of “Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection”
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York [link]

Ignoring the common candle clichés, the more contentious aspect of “Standing Julian” is premature, celebrated, public death. Schnabel’s art-star career is characterized by egoistic confabulation, often manifest as equally grandiose work. Poignantly, the aggrandized auteur is physicalized as temporary, monumental statuary for self and cultural consumption.

The portrait reflects Schnabel’s objet petit a fixation, theatrically enlivened by art’s necessary auto-cannibalism. As such the living demise of a momentary cultural genius is a sardonic tribute to culture’s accelerating consumptive desire: a forced, spectacular compaction of temporality as a pre-funereal rehearsal, a tragi-comic celebration of sublimated genius.

~ Ryder Richards
images courtesy of the author and the Whitney Museum of American Art

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Joseph Flynn

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Joseph Flynn-Fountain of Time-bJoseph Flynn
Display Method: Remixed Archælogies
Beefhaus, Dallas [link]

Something stinks. Crushed energy drink cans are strewn across the floor, their noxious contents fill Fountain of Time with invigorating formaldehyde green and the air with rude awakening. A digital bust scan of Nefertiti (Sanctioned? Illicit?) spins in Remixed Archælogy, lit by USB-powered plastic crystal. What is real? Does it matter? Donald Trump hangs out in Strange Days Indeed alongside sophistic calligraphy and cheery archival studio portraiture—distorted, meme-ready, anonymous. Flynn warps the foundation of our institutional trust, subverting the authenticity of leadership figures and their capacity for preservation among the digital swarm. The Internet swallows all.

~ Caleb Mathern

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