This is your brain. This is your brain on Ikea. (Or as Ikea.)
Or “The World as Will and Ikea.”
Peicasso
Alexandre Singh completely blew my mind with the latest in his ongoing Assembly Instructions series, a sweeping survey regarding memory, logic, history, knowledge, and showroom architecture. This lecture, (Manzoni, Klein, et al.)was the second in a series of events and performances comprising the invited (cordially uninvited), curated by Krist Gruijthuijsen for the Artists Space exhibition The columns held us up. Lucky attendees filled the faculty apartment of Alex Nagel in one of NYU’s silver towers, a Pei/Picasso landmark.
Alexandre coolly paced before two overhead projectors, relics of last century’s classrooms, precariously perched atop stacks of art history hardcovers. His audience included art fixtures Fia Backstrom, Sam Gordon, Michael Portnoy, Lisa Oppenheim, Benjamin Tischer, and Bob Nickas; and about 30 other people I didn’t recognize; and at one point, an obese, fluffy cat. Alexandre, alum of SVA Fine Arts ‘05, is one of the most successful artists from SVA’s recent graduating classes, already embarking on international shows and a White Room exhibition at the impenetrable White Columns, and of course, he was on the three stripes creating Hello Meth Lab in the Sun, later regenerated at Art Basel Miami and now compounded at Deitch Projects, both without his involvement.
Alexandre dressed in his signature black suit/black tie, a neutral and uninflected mantle, and – in a rare happy marriage between art and fashion – Adidas trainers, reminding us of his book/video/research exegesis, The Marque of the Third Stripe. His mic was a thin wire connected to his ear, very cool.
Yipes, Stripes
And then he began a feature-length soliloquy, identifying the determined IKEA design with the mysterious architecture of our brains, how departments of the store could model the regions of our brains, inventory our concepts. In fact, his PAX storage systems, a faceless multiscreen of closets and shelves, and its contents could stand in as a structure of earth and its kingdoms and phyla.
Renaissance Art scholar and event host, Alexander Nagel (l) with friend
Via dreams, dreams of dreams, and dreams of other people’s dreams – no electric sheep – Alexandre strung together Piero Manzoni, his Base of the World (1961); the pecking order of marine life; Sculpture éponge bleue sans titre (1959), and its auteur, Yves Klein; the Campidoglio and its Marcus Aurelius equestrian bronze, long misinterpreted as depicting Emperor Constantine; a camera that could record everything in the universe; a projector that could convey it back; a machine that created anything starting with the letter “N,” including “nothing;” the last dying breath of Julius Caesar; the color brown in light, in paint, in shit, in theory, and color theory; Baruch Spinoza; Barack Obama; monads; and more, though not in this order. The apex was the dazzling segment claiming that, “Inevitable mutations bring about uncertainties about old knowledge and the continuous incarnation of lies,” with those words ping-ponged from projector to projector.
Didja get all that?
Did you get all that? Neither did anyone else. Alexandre was purposefully hyperlinking through strata of ideas. It was a free association of images, yet guided by logical connections. It reminded me of Lars Laumann’s brilliant Morrissey Foretelling the Death of Diana (2006), whereby a stream of concepts, with shifting criteria and lacking formulas, is enabled to drum up syntax and patterns. It’s like Alice in Wonderland playing croquet with the Queen: the rules keep changing. And Alexandre’s barrage of names, titles, terms, and leaps between languages seem meant to overwhelm any listener. It’s information maximalism. Alexandre wields ideas the way Jason Rhodes uses materials: countless, dense, and surrounding. However, recreating a Jason Rhoades would likely require a diagram, numeric coding, and documentation. Recreating (Manzoni, Klein, et al.) could theoretically happen by retracing the logical steps and connections. It’s knowledge you already know; it’s talk between Plato and Meno.
GPS: Good Pointing Skills
To illustrate his material (immaterial?), Alexandre sifted through a sequence of transparencies to simultaneously cast their images from the twin towers of overhead projectors. Each image was a photocopied from Alexandre’s witty and marvelous collages, layering art historical images, hijacked book pages, witty diagrams, repatriated photos. The hundreds of images themselves would be a sufficient exhibition; so we get a show in a lecture and a lecture in a show. Pick a department, dynamic metaphysicians: photocopies = photography? Collage = mixed media? Acetate/sequence = film? Presence = performance? Stacked materials = sculpture?
Codex/Index
It could be that Alexandre sounds brilliant because he has an English accent. Or it could be that his brain is a boundless MegaIKEAPlex filled to the brim with goods that could make this lecture series a lifelong undertaking.
IMAGE: Tom Fletcher; all others Michael Bilsborough
