This is Not a Hard Day/ Atelier 35, Bucharest - 2019

0. poster for the show

1. installation view

2., 4. O 0, broom stick, crayfish shells, paint, brick.

3.  Kurt Cobain in a tiger patterned jump suit, print on paper. Internet sourced.

 

This Is Not a Hard Day

Mihaela Buhaev
Pandele Pandele
Gabi Stoian
Sibi Bogdan Teodorescu

 

Directed by: Horațiu Lipot

Graphic design: Alice Voinea

Born Originals, how comes it to pass we die Copies? (Edward Young)

Our benchmarks are a continuous mechanical play between static observation and active involvement. The stance of an almost thermodynamic interaction of muscles and cognition, of mass that generates more mass, is replaced today by the ambiguous remoteness at the end of the click, close to zero entropy. We are computerized subjects, generic users with specific needs and desires who make vague connections by popularizing spheres of our self-interest in the new networks, in a world where products and behaviors are determined by the integration of a new and promised experience. Take the ride! it says in the common language of the inter-connectivity networks.

 

The self as an element can be located exclusively in the time-space coordinates, Internet containing little to none this property. The Web 2.0 areal it resemble us more like the lobby of a hotel, a mall, or an airport space - crossing places in which we do not live, but we try to signify them with the best of ones self. 

In a strange internalization of marketing mechanisms, the narcissism of each one tries to take control, this dualism making any original approach seem futile. This is also reflected on the creative areas, the alibi of the artist's autonomy, which represented the main impetus of the formation of modernism during the historical avant-garde, works today for the benefit of the capital market. Any work of art produced today that does not fit in a system of mutual appreciation and benefit, is automatically ostracized and eliminated from the public consciousness.

 

The mirror of our new anxieties, which are based on the idea that the internet imbeciles us (alienates us, transforms our sexual behaviors into deviants ones etc.) it resembles Plato's own concern, firmly convinced that the spread of literacy through writing among the population will destroy the oral tradition and the ability to create new and authentic memories. And yet, here we are, facing the same concerns in an infinitely accelerated context.In Alex Kitnick own observation, as the world submits more and more to the abstractions of capital, the inter-connectivity of digital networks, and the promises of the experience economy, the body responds by lying down.

 

This is Not a Hard Day,
Just a day,
Another.

 

Horațiu Lipot