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| Ahoi de angst,
1998 |
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And here we are
again, it seems. As many aspects of 1990s art
have come to resemble tricked-out revisions of
1970s art, it is hardly surprising that, since
the beginning of this decade, art predicated on
elements of chaos, and particularly
scatter-and-disorder installation, has reared its
head again - only generally with a bastardized,
global-dustbin twist. 'Slacker Art' (when it was
mentionable in public) conjured up the
fictionalized look of smart, sulky teenagers
refusing to tidy their bedrooms. Karen Kilimnik's
disorganized installations - thrown together in a
short space of time and featuring anything from
fake blood to scattered leaves to photocopied
photographs of members of The Avengers - narrated
a media-fixated adolescent's fantasies with a
certain amount of art-historical nous (she has
since switched, mostly, to faux-naive paintings
of herself as various celebrities).
Filling constructed spaces with pop-cultural junk
and photographs of himself, Jonathan Meese
currently works in similar territory, but he
utilises an aesthetic of glut whereas Kilimnik,
typically, was spacey (in both senses). His
large, disco-light-illuminated box Ahoi de
angst, 1998, contains video monitors playing Warhol films and is plastered with counterculture icons. In recent works Meese has laboured to cram as much second-hand material and as many allusions into one space as possible.
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Jonathan Meese in front of the house of
Piero Manzoni - Milano - March 2000
Where once art edged with disorder was coolly open, even refined, the preferred effect now is seen-it-before suffocation; claustrophobia.
In such works, the randomness is a reflection of
mental processes, a smorgasbord of psychic
jetsam. But it is also a space of accessibility,
a way of presenting the fabric of the world as it
is, in an analogue of a living space. Moving
through one of Meese's or Kilimnik's
installations, the viewer is thrown into a
clunky, fictive boudoir and pressed into close
relation with these familiar images, these
democratic reference points. In one sense, this
is yet another twist on the uniting of art and
life, an attempt to get as close to transparency
as possible before the ground crumbles. In
another, it is a hyper-distanced dissection of
cultural processes. The edge of improvisatory
disorder in the work allows it to reflect, to
theatricalise, cultural effects, while the
institutional setting allows it to step back from
them.
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