contemporary monkey

The art industry is impressive in its extraordinary ability to write mystifying missives without saying much at all (if you can make it that far without asking for a four-ounce shot of Tobasco).  Here are some favourites:

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“Henrik Olesen uses collage, sculpture, and minimalist spatial interventions to engage with the body and questions of gender and its representation in order to interrogate structures of power relations and the construction of historiography and identities. Until 11 September 2011″

– taken from random website in order to make copy/paste easily available for anyone writing gallery guides. Simply substitute artist and date and you’ll be the proud author of something nobody will understand. Success! You’ll be employed for at least another month.

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“Bronstein uses diverse media to investigate his interest in architecture and the social relations that it constructs. He explores how architecture and sculpture intervene in personal identity, informing our movements and actions.”

– From the website of the maker of wall coverings used by artist Pablo Bronstein. When suppliers of the art industry are found to be using similar text to that of gallery writers, you know post-modernism is dead. (don’t get me wrong, every nail in the coffin is appreciated)

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“Lindsay has an incredible emotional and physical presence on screen that holds an existential vulnerability, while harnessing the power of the transcendental — the moment in transition,” Phillips says of the star of “Herbie: Fully Loaded” in a press release put out by his gallery, Gagosian, about the new film project. “She is able to connect with us past all of our memory and projection, expressing our own inner eminence.”

– says artist Richard Phillips, of co-collaborator and sometimes home prisoner but rarely talented actress, Lindsay Lohan, clearly sucked in to the Hollywood drainage system.

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“Practicing a sort of post-Pop anthropology in the neopunk costume of a quasi-educational endeavour, spiced also with a neo-Dada politics of slapstick and the carnivalesque, Slavs and Tatars…[this is about where I fell asleep]

– review by Adam Burdak in ArtReview, March 2011,  on the art group Slavs and Tatars. I don’t know if Budak is pretentiously lost in his own language, or exhibiting true sarcastic heroism. My hope is for the latter, but if so, he’s seriously on the brink of slipping into the Dark Side.

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“…depends on which cultural (transcultural) context the curator is working in, locality and temporality affect the curator’s ethos”

– random twitter where one would think text length rules word choice. Translation: “…context is everything; place and time affects curators’ thinking”. (one even has space for an LOL or happy face emoticon afterwards).

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The focus of Ultra-red’s practice is sound-based research that “takes up the acoustic mapping of contested spaces and histories” to “directly engage the organizing and analyses of political struggles.”

– an interview on rhizome.org with Ultra-red, who demand a lot from acoustic art, what with saving the world by way of mapping contested spaces.

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“Creating a vision of a generic, idealised utopia, non-specific in location but familiar nonetheless from travel guides and National Geographic imagery, we’re reflecting on notions of escapism, tourist-as-voyeur and the politics of tourism.”

– artist Edwin Pennicott, from Creative Review, June 2010, on waterfall scenery painted on a hoarding above a London pub, clearly having a laugh as if “tourism-as-voyeur” and “the politics of tourism” are subjects in need of a good discussion. Good one Pennicott, you nearly got us.

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“It [Italy] had followed an analogous trajectory in terms of artistic development, however its cultivation of a unique concept of a kind of ‘discontinuous’ modernity was characterized by a greater awareness of the specificity of the individual and the broad spectrum of differences it represented than that found, for instance, in the puritanical Minimalism of the American avant-garde.”

– Luca Cerizza, in Frieze Magazine, March 2010, attempting to make a comparison by making it impossible for the reader to remember just what the hell he was talking about in the first place.

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She [Tomma Abts] has cracked a nut that artists have been working on for eons – how to paint the inchoate. Her paintings have this ‘thing’, this feeling, this notion of the vastness of the universe and the internal…soul”

– Laura Hoptman, New Museum, New York from “Seven Days in the Art World” making a hazy attempt to define Tomma Abts as Super Artist Who Can Do It All, and Probably Not A Mimic Of Piet Mondrian, or Op Artists of the 1960s, or Those Danish Neo-Concrete Artists Of The 1940′s.  Strictly Original, Tomma.

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“Similarly, although these paintings are hugely seductive in their explosive exuberance, their sensual intensity is really just a sign of our total inability to function.”

– The Contemporary Art Book (Bonham-Carter, Hodge) describing our total inability to function while looking at one of Franz Ackermann’s works, but really describing the author’s total inability to function and hoping we feel the same way.

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“I work on projects involving research and creation centered on the construction of ‘museumness’ and archival production, with a further focus on themes of a theoretical, philosophical and sociological order: a range of strategies that deal with the mechanisms and periodicities manifested by contemporary art, always from a critical and reflexive viewpoint in relation to institutional practices.”

– taken from art.es, issue number 32. I don’t really need to comment on this do I? The thing literally speaks for itself.

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“Through the use of cheap materials and a rudimentary approach to display, Reid works against formality and the ideologies suggested by images of wealth and beauty dispersed within the work. Utilising a de-skilled aesthetic and emphasizing the act of composition rather than the final product, the artist reveals and dismantles these ideals as well as her own response.”

– Description for a work by Clunie Reid, winner of the John Jones Art on Paper Award 2008, and shown at Zoo Art Festival, London, 2009.

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“Regarded as a microcosm or theatre of the world, and a memory theatre, these collections conveyed symbolically the patron’s control of the world through its indoor, microscopic reproduction.”

– November 2009 email promotion for Exquisite Trove at The New Art Gallery Walsall.

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