NYAB Event - Alex Kwartler & Elke Solomon Exhibition

Alex Kwartler & Elke Solomon Exhibition

Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery

This event has ended.

In a recent book by a recently fallen star of hip philosophy—you know, “semiocapitalism,” etc.—he’s freaking out because babies like iPads so much. What will happen if our precious (European) babies don’t learn to speak from “the mother” but from the touchscreen? As if one technology automatically swallows up all others. As if “the mother” and “the iPad,” on an ontological, or even worse, on a use-value level, are even related. As if.

So much these days feels like freaking out about the Atari, or the Apple IIe, Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?, typing class in 3rd grade— or, like, the internet is new, or newly annoying—which it definitely isn’t. It was annoying from the start. The gripes are so 80s, so mid-nineties, so AOL dial-up—so Friendster.

But in the 80s, there was little Alex, and Elke. Post-70s, post Women’s Liberation, post Heresies collective. One of my favorite anecdotes about Alex as a child, other than the “witch lady who lived downstairs” (Interior Scroll), was his favorite T-shirt, one that his mom got him: Barbara Kruger, “Your Body is a Battleground.” I think he thought it had something really cool to do with Transformers (the toys), or something like that; but then again, it sort of did. A certain kind of prickliness that we have inherited from our feminist moms that appears in us, perhaps, from having growing bodies that arrived into these intense, visceral debates. We can’t help but have a certain repulsion to bullshit; we naturally fall into wild attacks on logics of awfulness. We have an ultra-sensitivity to emotional corralling, to beat-up bodies, to frayed feelings, to the points where the binaries sizzle and sparks fly. We might also find in all of this—as in the catholic background of Foucault—a bit of highly amplified, not entirely unproblematic sexiness. A hardcore that is also a very deep darkness.

A true belief that all surfaces are completely, permanently, malleable.

So now—now what? What does the techno-neon-upside-down-antitraditionalist-frenetic mom, who is also an artist, who is also hilarious, who has been active for 40-odd-years—and what does the kid, who is also an artist, who is also a man—a consistently cranky, persistent, focused abstract painter, do?

They have a show together that is rigorously formal—with no easy relationships (where you are left speechless, because these works just look so amazing together, and you can’t quite articulate why.) You can start to talk about Alex’s new Fresco technique—a raw pigment suspended in plaster and then polished hi-gloss—in an age of touchscreens, everywhere. And Elke’s formal rigor as a defiant insistence on indeterminacy as freedom.

But you can also let go, sit back, and enjoy the show. That’s the option I’m going for.

— Ken Okiishi