It is an ugly scene, something out of a horror movie, going on in gallery after gallery. Zombie artists slowly staggering blindly around banging their heads against the walls. As the blood and brains run down the walls the impeccably dressed gallerista numbers and each catalogues mark while a freelance curator provides a commentary about truth in materials in these futile gestures.
Vittoria Di Stefano, A certain kind of failure, 2015 (photo courtesy of Tinning Street)
Of course, after a life time of study and a future teaching high school students in order to pay off your huge student debt, you too might want to bash your brains out on the next brick wall. The subtext of their ‘artist statements’ is clear: “brain, brains, brains…”
The aquariums used as transparent glass plinths were the best part of Vittoria Di Stefano’s “Alien Artefacts” at Tinning Street. Soap, plaster, brass, plasticine, PVC tubes, concrete, wax are amongst the materials that Di Stefano works and reworks.
The titles of Di Stefano work are inter-changeable and read like a cut-up art student essay. “The object becomes a prompt. A hazardous experience. That shape is impossible without those connotations. It needs that desire. The process of thinking.”
Where Di Stefano art this going after the gallery? To another gallery; I guess that I don’t need to see Di Stefano’s up coming exhibition at Blindside. But in the long run where is her art going and why should I care? Should I mindlessly celebrate the great continuum of art and creativity as a mystical experience? Should I studiously tick boxes in a pedagogical critical appraisal?
This is not personal and I don’t hate Di Stefano’s art, it didn’t even particularly bore me. This is not about her studied anaesthetics. I felt nothing when I saw her Alien Artefacts, she had managed to perfectly alienate me. Di Stefano’s art is not unique. It is typical of an existential crisis in post-industrial economies, a pointless activity in a professional cycle of consumption and debt.
May 24th, 2015 at 5:09 PM
Your critique of the exhibition is interesting. I don’t know of the artist, but what do you think she and other like minded artists need to do to make their work more engaging?
May 24th, 2015 at 6:43 PM
What could have helped was if there was something that showed the artist had even thought about engaging with others.
May 25th, 2015 at 1:10 PM
Honest and humorous review. This continued interest in using materials in this way strikes me as a little bit facile, and a whole lot lazy.
May 25th, 2015 at 1:34 PM
Thanks Eugene, material can be interesting for its own materiality but, as you say, it can easily be facile and lazy. And there was a big lazy element to this exhibition without any slacker irony to it.
May 26th, 2015 at 7:33 PM
What did the Fox say?
May 26th, 2015 at 7:40 PM
You have commented on a different post Raphael. Foxes don’t talk but do listen.