Morality
Featured Artists
Philip-Lorca diCorcia’s photographs focus on relatively marginal
subjects – pole-dancers and hustlers, for instance – with a strange logic based both on an aesthetics of glamor (Helmut Newton, for instance) and an aesthetic of individual emancipation (Richard Avedon), refusing to opt for either of these strategies. The subjects in the photographs are thus left in an ambiguous process of fictionalization of the body that is inimical to the emancipation of an individual subjectivity.
Marko Lulić’s Fragment of a Modernist Monument uses the bombastic
and abstracted modernist monuments from the Communist era, under Marshal Tito in Yugoslavia, as a point of departure. These monuments, idealized and heroic, were scattered all around the country in the public realm. He strips these monuments or fragments of them out of their original context, shrinks them, and reconstructs them with cheap materials into new locations. Lulić’s work explores the connection between form and ideology, architecture and power politics, and reflects the failure of systems and ideals.
Kris Martin’s Mandi VIII is a plaster-cast replica of the famous classical
sculpture Laocöon and his Sons. The snake has been removed, leaving the actors of this epic drama to wrestle an absent or intangible force, suggesting a panoptical theme of power and struggle: the disappearance of an identifiable origin, and the replacement of an ethereal, intangible power whose effects are disturbingly real. Martin’s sculpture thus adds a contemporary allegory to a figure whose allegorical connotations had for a long time been reduced to a specific Greek tragedy. It also reinforces the fact that our present continues to expand its relationship to that remote past from which we are ontologically distant yet fatally tied through a lexicon that informs most of our political ideologies.
Josephine Meckseper’s sculpture and photographs make reference
to the ease with which our culture brings together images of power, militarism, home, and consumption, replicating thus the contemporary drive to make power operative in every available social space. Yet, Meckseper indicates this by creating sculptures and arrangements, in which the different elements are kept clearly distinct, making it impossible to perceive them as a total system. In other words, Meckseper’s work aims to reveal the non-identical nature of the systems that
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