Sergio Mendes Never Gonna Let You G
A figurehead of new Chinese photography, Lin Zhipeng (No. 223) reflects a certain spirit of unconventional Chinese millennial youth. Mixing love and chaos, fantasy and eroticism, his photographs act as a poetic diary of this generation eager to escape social pressures and aspire to the pleasures of life in an indifferent and constantly changing society. Also inspired by utopian ideals, Thomas Lélu's declarations on cardboard reactivate the spirit of contestation of fusion between art and life, when art takes to the streets. With irony, he hijacks these counter-culture attitudes with slogans specific to our time, soaking up daily life and our individual and social behavior.
A metaphor for fragility as an essential vital force, the elegant collages and meanders of paper by Joël Andrianomearisoa form monochrome landscapes in permanent motion that become a total opera of ethereal architectures. From one story to another, Athens by Night (2021) by Andreas Angelidakis transforms a journey through the remains of the ancient city into an immersive environment, questioning the history of Athens in the face of other possible futures. Like so many archaeological fragments of Greek marble, the modules of foam cushions are multiplied in copies of themselves, movable, stackable and lend themselves to the free interpretation of visitors as in a collective construction game to reconstruct a common world. The changing world that is in motion in the paintings of Romain Bernini: between wandering, shifting and trembling, his psychedelic paintings are the beginnings of contemporary mythologies between symbols and spiritual worlds. His search for an ecstatic relationship with nature begins with his Trees whose iridescence remains unclear: is it a proliferation of chemicals, pollution, or self-generated irradiation as a substance for their survival? ?
In 2021, as the world fought to shake off the deadly effects of COVID-19, a newly rapacious instrumental logic took hold. In the shadows of what President Joe Biden termed a global “cascade of crises,” art moved ever closer to pure commodity status (as a crypto-currency), Sotheby’s achieved an all-time record $7.3 billion of luxury goods sold in a single year, and—as the annus horribilis waned—Melania Trump floated her first NFT (titled “Melania’s Vision,” the digital “watercolor” of her grifting gaze retails at $150 a pop). In the words of critic James Rushing Daniel, while everyone slept, tens of thousands “bankers, financiers, hedge fund managers, crypto bros, promoters, collectors, and at times artists themselves aggressively vacated art’s political projects, abstracted it from labor, and transmogrified it into a format ideal for trading and speculation.” An important side effect of these developments: contemporary art has become even more uniquely representative not just of money but greed itself—this despite many artists’ overt political critique and messaging.
Enter the Turkish-born, Brussels-based artist duo of Yasemin Baydar and Birol Demir, a.k.a. :mentalKLINIK. Together since 1998, the pair has long tracked the financial world’s desire to turn art into frictionless commodities, while remaining uniquely attuned to the informational farrago behavioral economist Herbert A. Simon christened “the attention economy.” The duo’s métier is best described as an open laboratory process. Production, presentation, and authorship shift and morph, especially when projects involve additional creators or thinkers. According to supercurator Jerome Sans, the group’s strange moniker alludes “to the laboratory where practice and theory coexist, as the mind (:mental) refers to the mind, and the KLINIK to the practice.” Per the artists, they say they have merely learned to conceive of themselves (and their collaborators) as something more perverse and obstreperous—“counter-cooperators.”
In their latest exhibition, oxymoronically titled HYPERMOODY to underscore the split between life as lived and as advertised, :mentalKLINIK harnesses, among other materials, tempered glass, polished aluminum panels, water-based emulsion, silver confetti, robot vacuum cleaners, audio inspired by “slime ASMR” (the term refers to the involuntary tingle, or “autonomous sensory meridian response,” derived from sounds made by things going “squish”) and air diffusers spritzing champagne scented essence, collaboration with the high-concept molecular parfumerie Aether. Besides turning the tables on the use of art by major luxury brands—think Jay-Z and Beyoncé posing in front of Basquiat’s Equals Pi (1982) for Tiffany, and skin-care giant La Prairie commissioning French artist Maotik to confect installations for art fairs—:mentalKLINIK mobilizes these and other elements to create an object-laden, digitally-aided, gallery-wide sensorium. The environment’s ostensible payload: dozens of paintings that, in point of fact, are not (conventional) paintings at all.
Foursquare wall-hanging objects the artists have dubbed “showoff paintings,” each series presents the medium not as an age-old radical métier but as the cliché of an art market commodity—while sarcastically evoking tiny variations animating several decades of abstract painting styles. There are the “Wet Paintings” (transparent resin pours on sheets of tempered glass), the “Soft Paintings” (polyester woven fabric mounted onto canvas or constituting its own support), the “Dirty Mirror Paintings” (glass surfaces printed and mirrored with Mark Rothko-like horizons), the “Hyper-Chromatic Madness Paintings” (bent polyester solar film made to look like crumpled metal) and, last but not least, the “Disgustingly Awful Paintings” (everything-and-the-kitchen-sink compositions made with resin and glitter on aluminum). As a final flourish to finger our golden age of vapid financialized excess the artists deploy several pounds of confetti—signaling either carnival’s end or, lamer still (cue The Velvet Underground & Nico), all tomorrow’s parties.
Taken together, the entire exhibition resembles a Xanadu-like pleasure palace, a gleaming showroom floor so exclusive it resembles a Maserati dealership or a super-premium art fair like Art Basel Miami Beach—the trade show that, arguably, kicked off the beginning of the end of art and the start of the art market. It’s no accident that :mentalKLINIK should look to echo this and similar sales platforms: after all, they remain staging grounds for art’s cooptation by entertainment, celebrity, screen culture, and high and alternative finance. Just before the COVID-19 pandemic a young American artist named Nikita Gale portrayed ABMB in terms that, not so accidentally, also describes this :mentalKLINIK exhibition perfectly: “It’s like being inside of Instagram. . . . It feels like everything’s compressed in a bizarre way. Art, commerce, capitalism, celebrity culture, beach culture, party culture. It’s pretty surreal.”
Designed as a series, the first version of the Bitter Medicine project was installed at the gallery space of Belgrade Contemporary Art Museum, which was closed due to public health concerns, and streamed live 24/7 on the museum’s website between May 5-June 30, 2020.
Imagine…-Shiseido- The Skincare Foam, Hydro-Refining Softener, Visible Luminizer Serum, The Skincare Day Moisturizer, Matifying Stick and BOP Eye Contour Cream are applied oh her face in order of appearance as preparation for the make-up…her make-up is done using -Uslu Airlines- airbrush make-up system air(o)pack, liquid colours, loose powders and concealers… the make-up achieves an effect of varying sun-tanning on the face…her face has a gradient colour with ranging shades of exposure to sun…the same make-up is applied on both of her arms…x liquid colour is airbrushed on the inner side of her eye socket…-Shiseido- after make-up Soothing Spray is used for finish…
