LOUCHE OPS                                                       

If pictures describe themselves through the terms of their making, images tend to portray situations that render the materiality of their portrayal secondary, if not altogether absent. But while most anyone might agree that the vast majority of what constitutes the world is distributed well beyond our perception of it, its sensible availability to us as individuals, remains tenuous. This variable distance between subjects is one of the foundational problems of representation, long preceding the proliferation of the resource guzzling, black-box data centers that are emerging to dot the globe in order to send us little videos of dancing bears.

As art objects are disseminated into imagery, the ones that exist primarily as pictures and as things mutate into signs. Already teetering delicately one the ledge of subjecthood, their content seems unlikely to survive its abbreviation as an inversion of a representation, one step further abstracted. 

Colloquially, the concept of the post-medium condition is often divorced from its source, excluding Rosalind Krauss's description and skepticism of it. Instead, it commonly dovetails with an artist's defensive posture against being perceived as merely artisanal, prioritizing the preservation of material traditions that might indicate a nostalgic conservatism, cultural obsolescence and/or market subservience. If formalism is now more frequently understood as craft over query rather than as the inscription of content into form, one would easily sympathize with an artist's desire to distance their practice from this. But an overidentification with this anxiety, that considers materiality as nothing more than a provisional segue to discourse, maintains a suspicious link to the logic of the Reformation, and its protestant essentialism;  disgust for bodies, objects and Earthly residues. This occlusive tendency often produces little more than an illustrated rhetoric, a kind of pamphlet art. It can easily become the total inversion of what it wished to avoid, by blindly sidestepping the polemics of representation altogether. 

The problem of considering the subject of art that has merged with its image, if one still has expectations of anything like criticality, appears to be unreasonably stationed where the concrete and the phantasmic cross lines.