0.0. Alan Alborough at Joao Ferreira
Friday, May 04, 2007
Image by Henning LudekeI'm not sure what's happening at Joao Ferreira at the mo, but non-alcoholic beer, even at a minimal-style show, is a bit beyond the pale. It gives you the hangover without the fun of being drunk. Kinda like the exhibition itself: All of the process, all of the mystery of meaning, but none of the fun. Maybe I'm too young, but this modern approach to art leaves me feeling a little bloated.
That said, however, there is a certain kind of beauty of white paper in a white space, that is goosebumpy. Albeit those goosebumps are in nice precise rows.
Labels: review
posted by Robert Sloon at 12:38 PM
2 Comments:
fucking good review. i know exactly what you mean even though I haven't seen the show. If it tells me any thing else I'll be sure to let you know
I got quite excited by the show actually, after Joao had played the shrink and encouraged me to answer my own questions about it. Even though it is in a rarified space that is hardly what you'd call a mass movement, I think it's great that there are people out there defying the pressure for art to MEAN something. It's like a tiny little crack at freedom from the dogged assumptions that drag everything down into a hellhole of banal capitalism.
What I also thought was interesting was the way he did it. If you take someone like Ed, say, who makes stuff that has no meaning, he does it in a very different way. If you were someone who was out to undermine the seriousness of Ed's work (nobody I can think of) you might use the argument that he's just having a laugh, not thinking very hard, lazy, or that when he sobers up in the morning he's as conservative as the next guy. And that might equally be applied to Christian Nerf, Barend de Wet, and a number of others.
But the brilliant thing about what Alan's done is that he has WORKED so hard to make an utterly meaningless work. The stuff is crafted and intense, not made by a human hand, but with a level of detail in all those tiny machine-drawn scribblings that spells out 'this is hard work' to any stressed Caucasian Protestant who believes that hard work and all the Northern European assumptions that go with it are going to save us. Instead of being the drunken male other who one can write off, this is the sober male work-ethic talking to his kin in their own language and simultaneously ripping the carpet out under the whole structure of their beliefs.
Post a Comment
Links to this post:
Create a Link
<< Home