Osmosis’s sculptures are cobbled of fractured analogies for how materially removed we have become from the object world’s formerly resistant, concrete reality, and how the artist as scavenger of such a phenomenological ruin can imagine their version of what might be called a funky genre stability. Despite his works seeming at first to be composed of whimsical and fleeting non sequiturs, Osmosis is a profoundly considerate artist who exerts an uncanny capacity to make his ostensibly ersatz sculptures stick in one’s poetic recesses as substantially specific objects.
Raphael Rubinstein’s follow up to his influential 2009 proposal, Provisional Painting, is a fascinating study in skeptical digression. Throughout this entire book-length reprisal and reevaluation of his original thesis, Rubenstein expresses the kind of radical existential doubt that he also often refers to in the text as a patent impossibility in today’s “hip to that kind of trip” world.
This week, to coincide with the launch of “Matthew Barney: Redoubt” at London’s Hayward Gallery, managing editor Jeff Gibson introduces scholar and critic Lane Relyea’s 1991 essay on Barney’s breakout jock-and-gymnasium-themed performances and installations.“A sticky-fingered King Midas, Barney has a desiring touch that ripens the sexual connotations in all his objects, transforming his rooms from sports clinics into porn shops, candy stores, torture chambers.” So wrote Lane Relyea at the dawn of Matthew Barney’s singular and prodigious career. Deploying prose that is as provocative and energetic