Texte zur Kunst no. 112: Dora García

The new issue of Texte zur Kunst (no. 112, December 2018) contains my review of Dora García’s retrospective at the Reina Sofia in Madrid, “Enjoy Your Sinthome.” Because my text turned out too long (what else is new?),  we removed an opening paragraph that was not essential to the discussion of the exhibition and the artist’s work, but that gives a sense of the artistic context I would place her in:

The reception of certain Europe-based artists since the 1990s is marked by a curious condition. Neither marginalized nor canonized by the art market and its retained art historians and media, they navigate the messy and ongoing transition from the old public funding structures to a project-based economy, and use the proliferation of “art worlds” and various kinds of funding and infrastructure (public grants, residencies, prizes, teaching positions) to develop practices that survive, and even thrive, while still not attaining the discursive presence of (for instance) either first- or second-generation institutional critique. As they share a networked habitus without forming a group or tendency, I can only say that my personal list at the basis of this diagnosis includes artists such as Eran Schaerf, Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Alice Creischer and Andreas Siekmann, Agency (Kobe Matthys), Sean Snyder, the Otolith Group, and Dora García. Most of them have never been given a retrospective; some of them may have problems with the format itself, and avoid it actively. This also means that there are few monographic texts on such artists, even while a veritable industry has sprung up around far lesser figures.

I sometimes feel that I don’t make enough of an effort to write monographic essays on such artists even irrespective of catalogue commissions, but reviews such as this small piece on Dora García can be one way of (partially) remedying this. Of course, there needs to be a good occassion: a somewhat substantial exhibition, which this one (its shortcomings notwithstanding) certainly was.

In other news: I assumed the second part of my e-flux journal essay on nuclear aesthetics would follow immediately on October’s first installment in the November issue, but due to the journal’s anniverary activities normal service will only be resumed in January.