Tiny swan origami I made from a used Starbucks coffee bean package sealer

Result #1

Tiny swan origami I made from a used Starbucks coffee bean package sealer is a veritable homage to the legend of a cat who becomes a little girl in an airport as it passes from the cup to the wall. The folded paper, placed just so, is a reference to a brand of mini origami that might be a bit too cute for a grown-up. It is also a perfect example of the games Diller and her pals play—with no money, they seek inspiration from a drawing on a tattered newspaper by Cildo Meireles. This one-panel drawing on a paper is an amusing, if not exactly obliquity-free, parody of the kind of hyperbole that characterizes the greatest hits of tabloid comics—elements of which are often too innocent to be funny. At the same time, it is a simple, poetic, even ebullient, riddle, and also a perfect meditation on what it means to make art.The shows opening, entitled What if I hadnt been born, was a bit like the beginning of a song. Diller and company were given a short introduction by a narrator who spoke of how they are two of the biggest names in art in the world. As they listened to a recording of their own song They Wanna Be Missy, they sang their own song My Daddy Daddys High, My Daddys Low. It is a sweet, kind of romantic song, with lots of love and lots of cuddling. It is also funny: the main character is a man who is, in addition to being a daddys in a long time, also a man who is a slave to a woman. This shows theme was the lives of people who love themselves and others, but cannot function without a certain amount of self-centeredness. Theres plenty of irony to go around. Diller and company were also given a video of a woman called Missy, who plays a character in the video.

Result #2

Tiny swan origami I made from a used Starbucks coffee bean package sealer, $10.99, 2013, recycled plastic, 80 1/8 x 53 3/8 x 17 5/8". From the series K-Mart (all works cited, 2014). The exhibitions title, Love Is Not a Feeling, is a riff on a line from the 1990 pop song Kiss Your Mother, by the feminist punk band Bikini Kill: If I say love, its gonna be love. In K-Mart, a plain-pack red box with a pink interior, is flanked by two cardboard boxes—the spaces between the pink and the red. The idea of the box with the pink interior is also underlined in a pair of similar works, in which a stack of boxes and a stack of boxes are topped by a white padlock that looks like a generic piece of furniture, its lock, and an embossed reproduction of a poster depicting a smiling B. J. Lipchitz, with the word LOVE below it. The work evokes a number of things: both the iconography of the coffee cup and the iconography of the star; both are commodified, with both being stamped with the stamp of the commodity. From the outset, the show had to confront the question of what happens when products of mass consumption come to resemble art. Some of the works present a kind of playful self-reflexivity; others, more seriously, explore the consequences of the disappearance of art.In a small room, three large cutouts of candy wrappers, each made from a different candy shape, are arranged on a table, their tops cut out to the point that they begin to resemble decoration. These candy sculptures look like toys, and their presence makes one think of the work of John Armleder, whose sculptural toys of the 1970s, in which the artist shaped candy into expressive shapes, were a favorite of the late pop artist Barbara Steele.

Result #3

—one of the many objects that seems to have been smuggled into the interior of the museum (and thus clearly on display in a manner that is itself captivating). The last of the galleries presents a group of papers and documents documenting Diller and her various projects, ranging from the ones she did to the ones she left behind (the artist spent some time in the museum researching and documenting the original location of her work, for example). The papers and documents provide a kind of record of the various stages of the artists practice, from her early conceptualization to the realization of her last works.What emerges from this exhibition is the idea of the artist as a voyeur. Its a reminder that we still live in a world where we expect, rather than look, but also one that demands a different level of engagement. Like those who read the stories that are found in the stories of the other, we expect some level of disclosure from the other. This is particularly true when dealing with art: It is not simply a matter of circulation, but of possession. And like the other people in the world, we are always on the lookout for those who might notice us.

Result #4

. I had a scrapbook of unexpected encounters, a T-shirt with a dot-and-dash logo with a name-brand logo on it, a digital print of a dreamy IKEA chair, and a bunch of other detritus from the day. My ultimate revelation was a large painting of two old television sets, the image taken from a TV set, with the word I written in large, bold letters on one. The question of my meaning was central to all the work, but one had to wonder what it would mean to say I made this, or that, or both. That was the point: to get out of the sticky muddle.In any case, this show was compelling, and even if the work werent quite up to the level of a conversation piece, it was worth the time to see. In this show, Ive come to see my art as a way to get close to the real world. As a result, Ive found myself thinking more about what Ive done in the past than about what I can do now.

Result #5

(Invented in Japan, 2015) and an old fashioned shoe (Loosely based on a photograph by Jorge Luis Borges) in his photograph A Man, A Woman, A Planet (all 2015). The exhibition was conceived as a kind of informal film or video installation. An inscription (always a sign) on the door would read, in part: The text of a script is a form of dialogue, and a text written by a script. This apparent contradiction between the traditional meaning of the script and the contemporary conceptual proposition of the show—which, as with all art, is always a matter of interpretation—is the very point of the show.This is not to say that all contemporary work is problematic. To the contrary, if we were to look at the problem of the exhibition as an act of resistance, we might discover some beautiful works, but that would be to disregard the historical and sociopolitical conditions that shape the development of art. In short, if we were to regard the exhibition as a kind of ephemeral text, we might discover that the legacy of art today is a dynamic and radically contested one.