Review: "ON THE NEVER-NEVER" a show by Tenko Presents at Reena Spaulings

Link to the Josef Strau essay is here.

For those who say we only write about Reena Spaulings, here is another stick with which to beat us with, and then yourself. What would you rather hear about, Marcel? Josef? Bloody, Jordan Wolfson? Charles Ray? Semi-abstract figurative painting by slade graduates?!?!? No, you're right. We're naughty. This is the last one, promise x sorry reena.

No, in all seriousness, please point to our floors. We are all ears to the podpol'ye.

Just kidding - this review was pitched and it was really good - sometimes exhibitons, by virture of their strength, actually eclose into a worthy review. Equally true of bad shows, harder to say for mid shows.

Anyway, with Jeremy, we have taken an unprecedented leap and allowed him to employ footnotes.

- The pretends of NYC group shows to install gallery backbenchers alongside new, trendy consignments.

- The identification of Post aspiration and post-professionalisation artists in older figures such as Seiji Inagaki kind of reflects what it is to be just any unrecognised artist. Just graduation is post-aspirational, a non-act.

- People always have, and always will, love Jean Genet.

Sydney

“By linking my production to your production, the curator also disconnects us both”: I kept returning to that old, half-remembered line – drawn from an old, half-remembered John Kelsey essay – while viewing On the Never-Never, a group show at Reena Spaulings, curated by Tenko Presents. (1) Exhuming shopworn pieces from the depths of Reena’s storage (Stephan Dillemuth, Danny McDonald, Josephine Pryde) and suturing them to works representative of the roving Tenko program (Thomas Cap de Ville, Seiji Inagaki, Sabina Maria van der Linden), On the Never-Never positions the group show format as a sort of Frankenstein’s monster, an experiment toying with spare or dead parts. Can they all be brought together and restaged, and ultimately imbued with new life? If the show indeed comes alive, it does so by way of devices intrinsic to the artworks themselves: through shoddy assemblage, tasteless juxtaposition, and rough-hewn montage, through forced combinations redolent of a bad skin graft or a rejected organ transplant.

Poor things – “unproductive, wasted meaningless, excluded from historical narratives, endangered by the prospect of complete erasure,” as Sabina Maria van der Linden’s undated poster states – these works remake Frankenstein as a kind of kitchen sink drama, a no-budget Mike Leigh film. The storyboard is provided by Thomas Cap de Ville’s Book 1 and Book 2, both 2017, a pair of oversized scrapbooks arranged on a clothed card table. With the tactile feel of a duct-tape wallet, Cap de Ville’s books document a gritty, heroin-shaped life we were promised by the exhibition’s title (an alternate title, playing on both US and UK definitions, might have been On the Nod.) They are composed of disposable camera prints and digital images printed on copy paper, print-outs of aughts-era horoscopes and dating webpages, sometimes framed by tacky patterned craft papers; chronicling a misspent youth at the advent of social media, but also comment upon it humorously in retrospect. The noon-until-noon binges, the stupid pranks and long-forgotten acquaintances, compiled years later, in a form evoking the mild-mannered family album. At least one page, featuring an image of a dreadlocked Cap de Ville, is completed by a cigarette burn. Yet in prizing unruly formal experimentation over careerist common sense – folding terrific standalone photographs, for example, into a far less salable form – these scrapbooks also supply the exhibition with its overarching ethos of poignant anti-ambition.

If we’re still in mind of the monstrous mash-up, there’s Danny McDonald’s Midnight Snack Encounter, 2014, which reads contextually as a witty riposte to the current vogue for conceptual sculpture. An Emperor Palpatine figurine leers at another of Twinkie the Kid, ensconced in a distressed sofa reminiscent of the after-after party. But the Twinkie figure carries a secret – he holds an actual Twinkie, by now possibly twelve years old. Like any good artist right now, McDonald lists every material in the work’s details, including the long inventory of ingredients deployed in the Twinkie’s production and (maybe eternal) preservation. (2) There are also two assemblages from 2015 by Stephan Dillemuth, who once ran the storied Cologne space Friesenwall 120 with artist Josef Strau. Both sculptures are grounded by plaster cogwheels, and both are interrupted by a number of self- or scene-referential objects – the cast of a forearm, a burner phone affixed to a “bad” golf-leafed painting, the 2014 Gallerists issue of Texte Zur Kunst. All of these things are embedded in the middle of the cogwheels, rather than between the gears, indicating that they aren’t really disrupting anything, not least in the present. Like the mostly reclusive, mostly middle-aged artists of On the Never-Never, these objects are closer to vestiges of an evaporated discursive zone, haunting the system once again through reappearance. Likewise, in a suite of exhibited photographs, taken from Josephine Pryde’s series Just What is Aura Anyway? (2006) a young girl is presented as a Victorian maid on Boxing Day, if the yuletide setting is to be believed. As in Jean Genet’s play The Maids (1947), Pryde’s role-playing maid serves here as an ambivalent figure, even a stand-in for a certain type of identity-fluid (young/old, rich/poor, now/then) artist LARPing faintly at systemic upheaval.

Although most of the artists included here have by now settled into a post-aspirational, post-professionalised groove of artistic production, one outlier might be the illustrator Seiji Inagaki, whose pervy, noncey, Pierre Klossowski-summoning drawings from the 1980s and 90s, for early Japanese gay magazines like Barazoku, have been tastefully framed and effectively upcycled, recirculated within a quainter, more “bohemistic” – to borrow a phrase from Dillemuth – economy of objects and images. We might spend some time thumbing through the original magazines, too, and lament, as with Cap de Ville’s books, a rich visual culture lost to the flattening effects of social media, a culture taken from us, in this instance, by Grindr. Variously presaging the more recent practices of Julien Ceccaldi, David Rappeneau, and Shogo Shimizu, Inagaki’s illustrations, and the queer culture they emerge from, derail us from the show’s predominant concerns while proposing yet another clever detour.

All of this, of course, runs counter to the reigning paradigm of the New York group show, which seeks to elevate the staid offerings of gallery backbenchers by smuggling in a few elder or late statesmen on consignment (a different, more optimistic type of never-never). A Harun Farocki video here, a Karen Kilimnik painting there, maybe a minor piece by Andrea Fraser or even Peter Hujar, and suddenly the inherent vacuity of the commercial group show is absolved, or at least optimised for dissemination online. Such conditions seem ripe for a moment to reconsider Josef Strau’s essay “The Non-productive Attitude,” 2006, exemplified to some degree by many of the artists on view, alongside other models of artistic “badness” more broadly. (3) What could it be like, conceivably, to revisit these strategies today, for the Tenko generation? “So embarrassing,” Strau preemptively concludes, although this show gently suggests otherwise.

1. John Kelsey, “Unclaimed Bags Will Be Destroyed,” in Rich Texts: Selected Writing for Art (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2010), 221–234.

2. Danny McDonald, Midnight Snack Encounter, 2014. Materials listed by the exhibition checklist: Emperor Palpatine action figure (vinyl, fabric, sound), miniature snacks and games (vinyl, plastic), antique salesman's sample couch (fabric, wood), Twinkie The Kid Twinkie storage container (plastic, vinyl), miniature carpet (nylon), string, Twinkie (Enriched Bleached Wheat Flour [Flour, Reduced Iron, B Vitamins (Niacin, Thiamine Mononitrate (B1), Riboflavin (B2), Folic Acid)], Corn Syrup, Sugar, High Fructose Corn Syrup, Water, Partially Hydrogenated Vegetable and/or Animal Shortening (Soybean, Cottonseed and/or Canola Oil, Beef Fat), Whole Eggs, Dextrose. Contains 2% or Less of: Modified Corn Starch, Glucose, Leavenings (Sodium Acid Pyrophosphate, Baking Soda, Monocalcium Phosphate), Sweet Dairy Whey, Soy Protein Isolate, Calcium and Sodium Caseinate, Salt, Mono and Diglycerides, Polysorbate 60,Soy Lecithin, Soy Flour, Cornstarch, Cellulose Gum, Sodium Stearoyl Lacylate, Natural and Artificial Flavors, Sorbic Acid (to Retain Freshness), Yellow 5, Red40), wood plinth.

3. Josef Strau, “The Non-productive Attitude,” in Make Your Own Life: Artists In and Out of Cologne (Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 1–4.