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Il mondo non è banale? ░ Il linguaggio conveniente del Sublime Prefetto

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¨ Sutta  (vedico: s ū tra; letteralmente: filo * ) del linguaggio conveniente del Sublime Prefetto ** Mia Nonna dello Zen così ha udito: una volta dimorava il Sublime Prefetto presso la Basilica di Sant’Antonio, nel codice catastale di Padua. E il Sublime così parlò: “Quattro caratteristiche, o mio bhikkh ū *** , dirigente dell’area del decreto di espulsione e dell’accoglienza e dirigente anche dell’area degli enti locali e delle cartelle esattoriali e dei fuochi d’artificio fatti come Buddho vuole ogni qualvolta che ad esempio si dica “cazzo di Buddha” o anche “alla madosca” o “gaudiosissimo pelo”, deve avere il linguaggio conveniente, non sconveniente, irreprensibile, incensurabile dagli intercettatori; quali quattro? Ecco, o mio dirigente che ha distrutto le macchie: un dirigente d’area parla proprio un linguaggio conveniente, non sconveniente, un linguaggio conforme alla Dottrina del Governo, non in contrasto con essa, un linguaggio gradevole, non sgradevole, un lin...

Lucy McKenzie ░ Inspired by an Atlas of Leprosy

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Lucy McKenzie at Daniel Buchholz



Lucy McKenzie at Buchholz
Artist: Lucy McKenzie
Venue: Daniel Buchholz, Berlin
Exhibition Title: Inspired by an Atlas of Leprosy
Date: November 20, 2015 – January 23, 2016
Lucy McKenzie at Buchholz
Lucy McKenzie at Buchholz

Lucy McKenzie at Buchholz
Full gallery of images, press release and link available after the jump.
Images:
Images courtesy of Daniel Buchholz, Berlin
Press Release:
A moral and legal grey area is opened up when the prefix ‘Inspired by …’ is used in matters creative. If the subject of inspiration is obscure, the motives to exploit it are justified as educational, revealing to a wider public something of merit. If the material is somehow questionable, the relationship can be safely classified as critical rather than complicit, especially when it is presented in the context of a museum or gallery. Acquisition and colonisation, and their parallels in the natural world, are the theme of “Inspired by an Atlas of Leprosy”.
In this, her fourth solo exhibition with Galerie Buchholz, Lucy McKenzie has taken over the upstairs gallery to install a simulation of a private dwelling – the quintessential ‘live-work’ interior associated with young cultural entrepreneurs. The members of this social group are characterised as having lifestyles in which the traditional boundaries between industry, leisure and intimacy have apparently dissolved, and in which their values are reflected in the spaces they inhabit. The simplified décor of the apartment here ignores this stylistic doctrine, eschewing bare bricks and beanbags for patrician marble and the trappings of bureaucracy. The thresholds between genderised spaces (the boudoir or ‘below stairs’ for instance) are misaligned; their erotic charge redirected.
How the imagined owner of this studio apartment makes a living is unclear, yet it is not hidden behind a screen of phoney transparency. The narrative of the décor suggests perhaps banking, manufacturing, education or religion. No matter which, exploitation is in the mix. Marble can symbolise authority, evoking interiors constructed in an age when those in power had limitless means at their disposal. It also represents the prized status of natural resources. This, for McKenzie, has parallels with culture’s appetite for the genuine – political and ecological alternatives, subculture and the historic avantgarde, are often mere content to be mined and polished, instrumentalised through appropriation into works of contemporary art.
McKenzie studied at a private school for decorative painting in Brussels in 2007- 2008, and the commercial techniques she learned there have been central to her work ever since. She employs trompe l’oeil for the marble and wooden structures, and in the quodlibet pin-boards and table compositions. These include ‘found’ compositions, derived from sources as random as offices, churches, a waiting room and student accommodation. Its labour-intensive mode of production, especially its alignment of value with craftsmanship, makes the quodlibet an innately conservative idiom. Yet it is this conservativism that facilitates the tense relationship between form and content, and which gives it its subversive force.