trolley, pebbles, twisty bits, roof, sea, coffee bean decals, seaside

Result #1

trolley, pebbles, twisty bits, roof, sea, coffee bean decals, seaside balls, scuba gear, 6x6, windshield wiper, commercial sewing machine. The show was and is a body of materials, tools, and techniques for making, cutting, and sewing. Moreover, the show functions as an ongoing process of input/output; while the show is sometimes tried-and-true, in this case it is neither commonplace nor old-fashioned. In other words, it is more complicated than the sum of its parts. What do I do?–Guy Debord inquires in the catalogue.Yes, you could write in the catalogue. No, you cant. The problem is that the pieces arent made to stand out in the audience. That is, the pieces are not integrated into a set. You could write in the catalogue about the artifacts of exhibition design, like the large boxed ceramic sculptures that moved about the walls and looked pretty, but the pieces are not designed to move about. They are meant to be looked at.The show is a collection of materials, not a set. It is not a set of materials, it is not intended to be viewed, it is not expected to be integrated. The work is made to move. Why is this important? Because if you want to create an artifact, you have to create a set. When you are talking about artifacts that move about, there is a lot of moving about. People think that you can never move, but this is no less than it is supposed to be, a set. Therefore the artifacts must be separated from one another, seen, or discussed. But these pieces are seen. In other words, they are seen as fragments of a whole that has moved around, part of a whole, a whole.Like painting, these kinds of pieces create many worlds. In fact, the material is most often seen in relation to the structure of the objects, as though the objects are static, not moving.

Result #2

, ship, interior, Disney, and other vivid images all glisten in the light. The image is a stream of shapes and colors that contribute to the color field. The image is a rainbow, two-color and five-color, filled with vibrating elements—a shift from the barren red of the oceanic ocean, a palette from the concrete rubble of the T-Rex. The impression is of time ticking and light, from water, air, and fire, a dark place on the earth. In this inter-dimensional place, inner and outer, genuine and simulated, the work is out of sync; time stops short of meaning, and everything is smooth. But there is something uncanny and queer about what we see and all the images are somehow intractable, not accessible to the viewer, like a map of the inner world.Dadaish avec Dadaish is a science fiction sound track to be quietly whispered into your ears, a little echo in the cosmic mix, a gesture that must be used as a clue to find your way in the cosmos.

Result #3

trolley, pebbles, twisty bits, roof, sea, coffee bean decals, seaside lighting, water, a cardboard window sill, video screens, two mirrors, and a door frame on top of a bed.Then there was the architectural, historical, and cultural context of the end of the Cold War, which was comprehensively written into the exhibitions sixty-seven hundred-plus-strong selection. Pervading the style of Gülsül Değer, an influential Turkish architect and contemporary theorist, Değer called modernism an extension of the industrial state. Yet modernity was not only modern, it was also an extension of modernism, he argued, explaining his uncompromisingly ironic anti-modern stance. We owe our modernity to the modern state. The political and cultural state, then, is not to be understood as the logical continuation of industrialization; rather, it is an example of the continuation of the industrial state, as a powerful instrument of both modernization and socialism.Modernity is not only modern, but it also is an extension of modernity. And it is precisely the extension of this industrial state, whose social, economic, and ideological dynamics are not unlike those of the late twentieth-century Modernist movement, which Değer characterizes as an attempt to manipulate society into a highly modern, functional, dynamic environment. During the 1990s, Değer began to focus his critiques on how Modernism, by eroding the very power of the industrial state, revealed the brutality and injustice of the capitalist state. In the last decade of the century, he has written, we have come to believe in the inevitability of the end of modernity, and in its inevitability that capitalism will be replaced by another form of capitalism. Değers approach to modernism, then, is both ruthless and theoretical. It is a program of insurrection, of violence, of a revolutionary new age of education, and of the emancipation of history and society.

Result #4

, overhead window light, neon-sign sticker, and one man holding a sign reading, I DON'T KNOW WHAT I AM. Ah, the icons of the 80s—science fiction, pop culture, and, of course, reality. Hestman has a way with the tell-tale signs of the 80s: neon, logos, and pebbles. A bright red and black dot on the Internet called Black Ice? appears as a dust trail from one of the Cibachromes of Hestmans work. He calls it a red diamond in a blue ground.The majority of the paintings in this show, which were made between 2002 and 2003, are subtitled Untitled, all but one of which feature four-inch-square bright acrylic pen, saturated with a greenish-yellow pigment. The other two, which are undated and from 2003, are four-inch-square acrylic in watercolor. They are presented with the work as a whole, with the pen in white, gray, or black on a chartreuse ground, but often, the pens are at different angles to the ground, so the shapes are clear, as though the pens were thumbprints. In Untitled, 2007, an even larger color field, a pen with a wide range of strokes remains clear, as is the entire surface of the ink. Its a kind of silence, a color that remains nocturnal, a color whose depth it can still tap into. Like the works in other groups, the artists pens are dipped in the paint, including ones own, on which he has painted a single stain. They look like a ghostly ghost, as if the artist had recorded an event of time; the pen has been exposed to death. Hestmans pen is a white ghost, and in its dark, reserved way, it acts as a beacon to humanity.

Result #5

scenery, and more. More memorable, for me, were the narrow, two-part surrealistic space sequences, such as the one in which a man passes through the gallery, into a small, narrow room, then into a sliding door, only to find a doorjamber. And the layered red-and-yellow stencils, pastels, and prints on canvas that made up the show, making up, in the final analysis, the definition of an uncanny moment in the history of the work. They caused me to think of the work of George Condos, of the avant-garde art of the 1930s, but they also brought to mind the work of Yves Klein, and of all the artists whose work, in my opinion, can be seen as bringing us closer to the pure surrealism of our time. From the '40s, Klein was the maverick artist of his time, making and exhibiting dreamlike works in the form of constructions, sculptures, and assemblages. Yet in his work, he never ceased to be an artist. His work was always reinterpreted, of course, in terms of the use of craft, and in a sense this work, too, is informed by the spirit of Surrealism. Its a spirit that is often hard-won, and even easier to overcome than the one that only a select few artists have managed to transform.