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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
SOFT UNDERBELLY RECOGNITION
curated by Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer
Eduardo Consuegra
Heather Cook
Eli Langer
Sidonie Loiseleux
June 14 – July 12, 2008
Opening Reception: Saturday, June 14th
little tree gallery
3412 22nd St @ Guerrero
San Francisco, CA 94110
415.643.4929
www.littletreegallery.com
info@littletreegallery.com
Some suggested guidelines
for recognizing signs of artistic agency in our contemporary
culture of high performance:
1) Refuse false binaries, such as ‘yes’ or ‘no’.
Opt instead to linger between opposed absolutes in gray areas, shadows,
interstices, and soft underbellies. Mysterious and volatile,
vagueness and abstraction can be provocatively uncooperative, resistant,
and reticent. Abstraction’s simultaneous address and non-address
of its subject, the latency and seeming illegibility of its meaning
make it a model of agency and autonomy. One need not be readily understood
nor immediately useful. Don’t expect to get anything right away.
Easy answers are no fun. Understanding takes time, developing in quiet
and often unrecognizable ways.
2) Claim and occupy time according to your own terms. Open
it up. Question regimented notions of time that perpetuate social expectations
of increased speed, productivity, efficiency, consumption, and cyclical
obsolescence. The ineffable, often invisible and intangible, process
of conceiving and making art alone in the studio can be a way to reconfigure
one’s experience of time. Re-commit to abstraction that testifies
to an interrogated logic of decision-making. Maximize time
given to looking and thinking, minimize gratuitous spectacle and budgets.
Art promises continual questioning, mutability, and delayed fulfillment.
3) As with time, so with space. Look for relationships to locality,
particularity, and difference, as well as absence. Generate heterogeneity
as a form of defiance.
4) Beyond announcing a political platform through slogans, physically
embody a politic in posture and attitude. Find political agency
in unlikely places and gestures. Consider softness, sponginess,
resilience, limpness, looseness, exhaustion, collapse, wear, and being-used-up
as rich political conditions. Prolong the recuperation and convalescence
that follows exhaustion as a period of fascination and potential when
so much is still possible. Represent the possibility of latent possibilities.
5) Dispense with the antiquated notion of ‘political art’
as separate from art. All art either advances or betrays a political
climate and position. The question of politics is one of perception
and recognition. Will you know it when you see it?
Compelled by vague convictions, I articulate these guidelines to myself.
In doing so, I draw heavily on the ideas and words of Jan Verwoert and
Bruce Hainley. I don’t presume to know their relevance to you,
though I hope and trust you can identify that for yourself.
For inquiries and questions regarding the show, please contact J. Brent
Large by phone at (415) 643-4929 or by email at info@littletreegallery.com.
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