09.06.07 - 21.07.07
Galerie mitterrand + sanz is pleased to present the work of three of the most promising young New York artists, Peter Coffin, Adam McEwen and Michael Phelan. While representing a small section of the greater New York art scene, these artists are engaged in a dialogue about the present with many more artists whose work speaks to the American condition and generally to the condition they find themselves in as cultural producers today. Coffin, McEwen and Phelan are all engaged in curatorial projects of sorts and various collaborative efforts with other artists, fuelling their own socially engaged practice. The “Slow Burn” exhibition, which was presented by galerie edward mitterrand in Geneva, last year and curated by Jonah Freeman, included these artists and many more who represent the New York scene collectively.
This exhibition offers a dialogue that is significant to the artist’s shared and complementary aesthetic or conceptual considerations and strategies that remain attentive to the omnipotent present, in particular to an ‘American psyche’ whatever that may be and continues to become as illustrated by Gean Moreno for this exhibition. Tie-die “paintings”, ready made texts in vinyl on the floors and walls or within the works throughout, poetic in their own right, complement the use of iconography and generic signifiers that elicit our attention to the disparate energy of the present.
Near the beginning of The Cosmic Puppets (1957), Ted Barton returns to Milgate, Virginia, the town where he spent his childhood. Slowly sinking into the soothing balminess of the familiar he suddenly realizes that he recognizes nothing—like the first time you hear The Melvins’ cover of Smells Like Teen Spirit with Leif Garret on vocals; you hear the first chords, recognize the song immediately (and still hate it) and then... Barton fails to recognize the town not because things are so different. They’re practically the same. Slightly off. A pharmacy now sits where he expected to find Doyle’s Leather Goods; Jefferson Street is now where Central Street should be. But both the pharmacy and Jefferson are run-of-the-mill. This is where Phillip K. Dick shines: in simply replacing one ordinary thing for another. The weirdness and the wonder are in the undisclosed and monumental magical operation which leaves us with one commonplace reality where another one should be.
In the tales of democracy that we like to tell about America, this magic is indistinguishable from the republic itself. One ordinary thing replaces another. It’s an endless Emersonian horizontality; an expanse that embodies nothing if not the possibility of doing it your own way. Of course these tales, like those old Melvins vinyls, won’t play right anymore. The tracks skip. Maybe it’s us who can no longer listen to them in the same way; we can’t quite get worked up to their rhythms any longer. The very idea of renewal they pedal seems depleted. Or worse: packaged. The only rhythms that we can move to now are those of commerce, and they’re brutally engaging.
Past whatever Barrier it is that we’ve crossed, things are still familiar even if they no longer add up. A little like Leif Garret standing in for Kurt Cubain. It’s been a slow, incremental reconfiguration of what we know. And we pick up on it only when we tune into the odd discrepancy here or there. Ours has been an inexact and low-frequency apocalypse. Without corpses. Or rather: with the corpse pilling up, as always, elsewhere. Phillip K. Dick’s ontology of forces and powers may just help us allegorize the trouble we encounter when attempting to cognitively map the intricate webs of global capitalism. We glide on a blank screen, like blinking cursors. From now on, our homecomings will always be to the wrong town, unfamiliar latitudes.
--gean moreno