special announcement

I’m going to break format a little to post about an exhibition that’s opening tonight in New York that is very dear to my heart. Performance Anxiety is the inaugural exhibition at Stadium, a new exhibition space in Chelsea; it was curated by Nicolas Djandji and features the work of Ben Schumacher, Timur Si-Qin, Steve Bishop, and Christopher Chiappa. 

As some of those who follow this blog may know, Djandji and I’d worked together on several occasions in the past, and he was always the first person I discussed my projects with. I deeply valued his insight, his curiosity, and sanity in much of my wild curatorial scheming. Professional dealings aside, he was my best friend, as he was to many. Djandji was killed in a cycling accident on September 2, before he was able to fully realize his first curatorial project. In light of this, a group of Djandji’s friends worked in tandem with the co-founders of Stadium to finalize the project. I am so humbled to have been apart of this process, and am deeply moved by the support that this exhibition has received. 

Congratulations, Nic. We are all so very PROUD of you.

through December 20

Employing mass-produced products designed for bodily self-improvement, the artists in Performance Anxiety explore contemporary manifestations of consumer culture. Here, the notion that the pursuit of athletic, hygienic, and professional perfection should be sought through the constant purchase of new products is cast into doubt. Through a series of works arresting these normally utilitarian, performance-enhancing products in sculpture, Performance Anxiety waxes upon the paradoxical, collectively shared desire of the present-day individual to become superhuman–physically fit, sexually attractive, and immaculately groomed—by way of altering the body’s chemistry and obscuring its most basic functions. Contextualizing these items as aesthetic elements rather than functional goods, each artist carves a meditative space reflecting upon the absurd modus operandi of these products.

Drawing on the legacy of Minimalist sculpture, the included artists point to both art historical cues—for instance, the removal of the artist’s hand and the introduction of quotidian materials into the realm of high art—but also, in reversal, how the Minimalist aesthetic has come to factor into marketing consumer goods, specifically communicating measures of taste and sophistication. Speaking simultaneously to the degeneration of Minimalism’s once-radical content through its subsumption as a marketing tool, Performance Anxiety unearths our hesitance to critically consider our own relationships to both these types of items and to our oft-impenetrable, unconscious relationships to advertising, to which no one is alien.