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Let the Bullshit Run a Marathon
Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, New York
April 8- May 8, 2004
A group show curated
by
Nate Lowman
Included DH painting
Great Expectorations: The Mint Sophocles
(2004) and 3 other
Great Expectorations
Works by Art & Language, Patterson Beckwith, Bernadette Corporation, Jennifer Bornstein, Chivas Clem, Anne Collier, Ian Cooper, Jenn Cullen, Isa Genzken, Doug Harvey, Jonathan Horowitz, Gareth James, Jane Kaplowitz, Nate Lowman, Robert Mapplethorpe, Keith Mayerson, Adam McEwen, M.A. Peers, Michael St. John, and Aaron Young.
April 8 – May 8, 2004
Opening reception, Thursday, April 8, 6 – 8 pm
Gallery Hours: Tuesday – Saturday, 10 – 6pm
Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery is pleased to present a new group exhibition entitled “Let the Bullshit Run a Marathon” curated by Nate Lowman, opening on Thursday, April 8 from 6 – 8pm. The exhibition continues through May 8, 2004.
The exhibition gets its title from gangsta rapper Bad Azz’s embellishment on the phrase, “Money talks, bullshit walks.” In order to disrupt the mall-like atmosphere of New York’s fast track exhibitions neighborhood and activate a space in Chelsea’s cultural graveyard, works have been chosen from artists of varying ages who deal with cultural critique, especially of the machinations and accessories of Capitalism. Appropriation, displaced authorship, collaboration, and the relationship between artistic media and content are themes played out in the works of both the artists in the show who are only beginning to exhibit and those that have already been written into history.
Art & Language’s Axioms, compiled in 1978, are as relevant as ever. Robert Mapplethorpe’s portrait of a young boy, used by Jesse Helms in his attempt to dismantle the NEA, still retains, and regains, its cultural currency.
Bernadette Corporation presents video stills from a film that weaves found footage of the G8 riots in Genoa with meta-monologues commenting on the act of protesting, resulting in a critique of narrative. As in the exhibition’s other works, the critique destabilises the content of the image. (Chivas Clem’s re-photograph of Sean “Puffy” Combs, Anne Collier’s representation of self-help tapes, M. A. Peers’s painted portraits of mid-level corporate executives.) Reconstruction and re-evaluation (of the image) through startling combinations of media take place in both Isa Genzken’s sculptures and Jonathan Horowitz’s depictions of a modern American Gothic.
At its best, artistic practice remains on the peripheries of professional conduct. If money talks, bullshit (and other scatology) is the science of what is wholly other (Bataille). A recent press statement from Michael Jackson’s attorneys reads, “Lies run sprints, but the truth runs marathons. The truth will run this marathon in court.” Though such high drama has little to do with the explicit conceit of the exhibition, bullshit runs rampant within it. All of the exhibiting artists engage in activities and modes of production which refute essentialist work ethics and, via some bullshit or other, plot to (as Gareth James puts it) kill the idiots (sic).
Nate Lowman
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