DARREN BADER – WONTHS EVERY FEW MONCE
2022-09-12JLG died last week. He was old (I’m not young). I’ve largely refrained from reading the obits/tributes because I want to continue to regard him and his preternatural gifts as I do (or prefer to): word and image, word and image, word and image, word and image, word and image, word and image—their confluence and dissonance (their never-to-be-consonant), their hauntings and their bliss. Spectac(u)larity.
I finished reading The Recognitions a few days before. It couldn’t but bring to mind persistent thoughts from my mid-aughts: (don’t) pity the artist who wishes to speak with new voice in this vast, decades-old organism of global cultural exchange—its audacious optimism, its shipwreck of meaning across countless shores—that artist was born decades late.
Postmodernism, as it was once quasi-commonly called. Not that (fairweatherly) fashionable, frequently-Francophonic facet of it fashionably denigrated in the conservative press, nor the ghoulish neoliberalism and/or late capitalism dogging many on the left. Rather [I reverently write]: the righteously quixotic embrace of everything—the utopia and vertigo of information, of exuberant semiotic superabundance, insatiable maw of manic (panoptic) panoply, sublimely fanciful farce.
Opposite – Installation view
Exhibition runs through to October 22nd, 2022
Sadie Coles HQ
62 Kingly Street
W1B 5QN
London
