Max Eulitz w/ Leonie Schmiese
Fin de Partie
September 9 - November 26
Louche Ops is pleased to announce Fin de Partie, a solo exhibit by Max Eulitz with Leonie Schmiese. Their installation interprets the Samuel Beckett play of the same name (translated into English as Endgame). In the original play, the characters are introduced to the audience in various states of decay, the relations between them having dissolved into an economy of exhaustion, resentment, bribery and spittle. To refer to the characters as either protagonists or antagonists would overstate their capacity to affect outcome. Agonists might be a more suitable term. On the brink of disembodiment, the extremity of the scenario takes on a perversely comic dimension, suggesting an ending without any end. Eulitz and Schmiese recast these figures as kerosene-fueled objects and situate the gaze of an audience as a silent chorus of emulsion. Fin de Partie imagines a play without actors as a sputtering transmission of images and steam, the surviving remnants of language burned into the support of its set.
Whatever modernity was, in plurality or in absentia, it now appears beyond our reach and obscured by the patina of its transmogrification. Having premiered nearly 70 years ago, the perpetuity of Beckett's pessimism is an odd sign that our time here might extend beyond expectations, whether we'd like it to or not.
JK
