ON THE NEVER-NEVER

Tenko Presents x Reena Spaulings

Sabina Maria van der Linden, perfectly you, digital video, 2003–05. Image courtesy the artist and Reena Spaulings.

All of this, of course, runs counter to the reigning paradigm of the New York group show, which seeks to elevate the staid offerings of gallery backbenchers by smuggling in a few elder or late statesmen on consignment (a different, more optimistic type of never-never). A Harun Farocki video here, a Karen Kilimnik painting there, maybe a minor piece by Andrea Fraser or even Peter Hujar, and suddenly the inherent vacuity of the commercial group show is absolved, or at least optimised for dissemination online. Such conditions seem ripe for a moment to reconsider Josef Strau’s essay “The Non-productive Attitude,” 2006, exemplified to some degree by many of the artists on view, alongside other models of artistic “badness” more broadly. What could it be like, conceivably, to revisit these strategies today, for the Tenko generation? “So embarrassing,” Strau preemptively concludes, although this show gently suggests otherwise.

For the rollicking Hollywood Superstar Review, I wrote about On the Never-Never, a group show curated by Tenko Presents at Reena Spaulings. Read it here.