boink!

or, alex katz is totally gay!

In 1991, Swiss artist Riso Mattner co-authored the Museum of New Art as a "fiction of authenticity" in order to redefine the borders of art and to critique dominant modes of presentation. Now, his exhibition BOINK! at the Museum of New Art is a quick and dirty tour of many of these themes. 

BOINK! is first and most obviously an esthetic battleground over the image of art, but more pointedly of society itself -- what is permissible to say or to show, and who is allowed to say and show it. The artist/iconoclast abuses and thereby accentuates the basic elements of the chosen art object and its artist to make visible and decode their underlying message.

While the semiotic reading of artworks is the predominant mode of interpretation for Mattner's current œuvre, the special significance of these vandalized art-advertisements seems to lie at least as much in the borrowed iconography of the original material. Mattner believes that too much time is spent picking over the idea of art and placing it within a scheme of art "regimes."

This complex archaeology can be simplified substantially if one realizes that what Mattner is doing is combining, in a clever way, art history with popular history. In his day-to-day world art ceases to be a simulacrum, but at the same time it ceases to be displaced from the everyday. Contemporary art especially can be free of the restrictions of hierarchy and history, because it doesn’t have to be shackled to any particular noble content that distinguishes it from everyday life. And that it can never be detached from the current politics of time and place.

Failing to deal with presumed notions of art skeptically can only make the art world more insular, and more pompous.

saturday,

january 27

reception:

3-7p