Art Review - March Issue - (Page 141)
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/mnt/data/www.nxtbook.com/fx/config_1.3/global.php on line 10 REVIEWS
BOUVY/GILLIS ET AL As conceived by Gilles Deleuze an abiding presence for
the two collaborative pairs in this show , the baroque is a
‘light-mirror-point of view-interior decoration system’, an involution
of space and time that collapses both to a single point: the universe in a
monad. Its substance is reflection: the mirror, the crystal, the fold;
but the raw materials of a baroque aesthetics can also sound like the
makings of a rather ravishing night out – the exquisite, brief
confecting of decor, chemistry, fashion and flesh. Thus, perhaps, the
conceit of Bouvy/ Gillis’s title, Another drenched night at the Pagano
Club: the club as imaginary community, arcane sorority, perverse or
utopian conclave. Hence too Burrows & O’Sullivan’s privileging, in
their lurid pastiche of post-Deleuzian rhetoric, the plastic as pure
potential. Bouv y/Gillis’s etiolated figures, made of plastic, leather
and metal, conjure a baroque that has been compacted to diamondlike
hardness, its complexity arrested in fetish form. Sporting gleaming steel
or shiny black genitals, encased in leather, splayed in pornographic poses
or towering like totems, they suggest a shortcircuit between an
anthropology of the most ancient tribal artefacts and a collective dream
of the post-human future. Faces composed of gleaming fragments of
jewellery cut from advertisements and fashion photos – Arcimboldo via Ti
any’s – suggest a future in which animal, vegetal and mineral have
somehow fused, with humanity exiled to a crystal land. In the gallery’s
project space garish totems and shrines announce the presence of a
futuristic band of guerrillas dedicated to the production of new ways of
being, new kinds of joy. In We Are Plastique Fantastique, Staabucks Fukkee
is your enemy, Burrows & O’Sullivan suborn all manner of precursors to
this fictional cause. Leigh Bowery, Sun Ra and Baruch Spinoza appear in
the comic book in which the pair artist and philosopher, respectively
picture their mythical cabal. Here, feathers, mirrors, fake stones and
straw make up shrines to ‘a people yet-to-come’. Absurdly, the dream
of a posthuman, mineral utopia starts to look like the paraphernalia of an
adolescent’s bedroom, reduced to a scattering of crystals, candles,
incense and glitter. In photographs of totemic figures, Plastique
Fantastique hysterically intone their visionary and, politically, somewhat
underwhelming communiqués: ‘this is the dead time, the time of capital,
the time of entropy’; ‘latte rots your brain and shrivels your sexual
organs’. There is a particular curatorial blather that appropriates
unthinkingly the more easily travestied aspects of Deleuze’s philosophy
of pure immanence. I’m not sure the writer s of the press release really
believe their fervent assertion that the exhibition ‘might summon forth
new, radically mutant subjectivities’, but these artists are cannier
than that. Bouvy/Gillis acknowledge, in the adamantine glamour of their
perverted stick figures, that the utopian ‘power of the false’ is as
much the preserve of apparently vacant consumerism as of any
‘alternative’ community. And Burrows & O’Sullivan imagine the
simultaneous attraction and silliness of a new crystal vision whose only
purchase on political insight is a vague sense that global capital is a
Bad Thing. Somewhere among the innumerable mirror images of the
contemporary baroque, suggest both duos, the face of the future is
waiting. Brian Dillon ALINE BOUVY JOHN GILLIS DAVID BURROWS SIMON
O’SULLIVAN A L IC E D A Y, B R U S S E L S 1 DECE M BER – 25 JA N UA
RY Aline Bouvy / John Gillis, Kevin #3, 2006, collage on wood, cloth,
bamboo, tape, bronze. Courtesy Aliceday, Brussels p135-149 Reviews AR
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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Art Review - March Issue
Manifesto
Dispatches
Consumed
Tales from the City
David Lynch
Marcel Dzama
Future Greats
Art Pilgrimage: Moscow
Mixed Media: Moving Images
Mixed Media: Photography
Mixed Media: Digital
Reviews
Book Reviews
On the Town
On the Record
Art Review - March Issue
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