Mark Flood
Chelsea Whores
May 22 - July 10, 2009
Reception for the Artist: Thursday, May 21, 6-8 pm
Mark Flood
Chelsea Whores
Zach Feuer Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new paintings by Mark Flood. Mark Flood (1961- ) is widely understood to be the least important German artist of the post-World War II period. Conventionally provocative and predictably controversial, he and his peers posed as a thriving avant-garde after the long period, apparently ending sooner rather than later, of Pro-art repression. His influence is comparable to that of the American artist Andy Warhol, but whereas Warhol's work features talent, Flood unintentionally devises a tedious formal vocabulary, layered with meaning and metaphor. The centerpiece of the gallery is a set of five vitrines accompanied by two wall objects, constituting a mini-museum of works made between January and mid April. Flood often displays assemblies of paintings and collages in freestanding vitrines like those found in department stores and bank lobbies. This form of presentation has become as synonymous with Flood's work as his signature materials of gel medium and 12 oz cotton duck.
During the latter half of 1987 Flood was almost interesting and received some attention.
Additional words:
Canon fodder.
'Sthem-sell research.
Flavin: mood lighting.
Pollock: traffic in filigree.
Richard Jackson: body/ art fluid flowing through gutters and glory holes.
Jack Pierson: rededicated temple signage.
art neighborhood pioneered by dealers.
sex neighborhood pioneered by Johnson and Johnson.
Wanted to be a prostitute but was too busy giving it away.
Wanted to be an artist but was too busy giving it away.
BUY STUFF.
BUILD PRISONS. DIG GRAVES.
SELL YOUR ASS.
UPDATE YOUR RESUME.
DANCERS WANTED.
USE AND DISCARD.
Road signs with Tourette's syndrome.
Shredded lace hymens.
Signifiers re-attached like John Wayne Bobbit's penis.
It's the end of my dick as we know it and I feel fine.
Hickey-Baudelaire beauty mash-ups.
Cubist planes of stimulation of celebrity face pre-conditioning.
Sex and the non-city.
Time Square Disney pen.
Art authority. Port Authority.
Mark Flood is a
Something who did
Something somewhere,
Formerly nowhere.
Anderson Cooper
Mark and Clark
Katie Couric
Sex and the City dames
David Letterman
Will Smith
Barbara Walters
Jon Stewart
Hymn to Beauty
Do you come from on high or out of the abyss,
O Beauty? Godless yet divine, your gaze
indifferently showers favor and shame,
and therefore some have likened you to wine.
Your eyes reflect the sunset and the dawn;
you scatter perfumes like a windy night;
your kisses are a drug, your mouth the urn
dispensing fear to heroes, fervor to boys.
Whether spawned by hell or sprung from the stars,
Fate like a spaniel follows at your heel;
you sow haphazard fortune and despair,
ruling all things, responsible for none.
You walk on corpses, Beauty, undismayed,
and Horror coruscates among your gems;
Murder, one of your dearest trinkets, throbs
on your shameless belly: make it dance!
Dazzled, the dayfly flutters round your wick,
crackles, flares and cries: I bless this torch!
The pining lover for his lady swoons
like a dying man adoring his own tomb.
Who cares if you come from paradise or hell,
appalling Beauty, artless and monstrous scourge,
if only you eyes, your smile or your foot reveal
the Infinite I love and have never known?
Come from Satan, come from God - who cares,
Angel or Siren, rhythm, fragrance, light,
provided you transform - O my one queen!
this hideous universe, this heavy hour?
by Baudelaire, translation by Richard Howard
ARTFORUM review synopsis: Mark Flood...scavenger... cruel alterations... mutilated...unquestionably sadistic...stunning...cheap...unabashedly lush...acidic and horrifying...exercises in crudity.
From Violence and the Sacred:
Scholars are far from agreement on the interpretation of such passages and much of the modern debate on Euripides centers on this problem. It may be that the whole question has been falsified by a postulate implicitly accepted by all the commentators. This postulate relates to the type of knowledge the poet has declined to confront. We have taken it for granted that such knowledge cannot be unknown to us; the idea that anyone so remote from "modern thought" as Euripides could have perceived a danger wholly unsuspected by us, could have anticipated a truth whose existence has escaped us completely, hardly seems worth considering.
Modern critics are convinced that Euripides drew back before that same skepticism of which they themselves are the proud proponents - an intellectual viewpoint that denies the existence of a real basis for religion and declares the whole institution purely "imaginary". Euripides, they suggest, hesitated from conventional propriety or simple prejudice to acknowledge that religion was nothing more than mystification, an illusion specifically designed to offer consolation or impose restraints. Timidity kept him from acknowledging that religion was a figment of the imagination.
The modern intellectual is a romantic soul who likes to think of himself as the boldest iconoclast in history. At times he cannot but challenge the high place accorded Euripides by tradition and wonder whether the poet is not essentially too "bourgeois" in spirit to warrant such esteem.
But Euripides speaks less in terms of religious "faith" in the modern sense than in terms of the transgressing of limits, of the fearsome knowledge that exists beyond these limits. We do not seem to be dealing in his case with a simple choice between belief and disbelief - two equally abstract concepts. Something else is at play, something more to the point than sterile religious skepticism. This something else, still to be discerned, is nonetheless near at hand, in the text of The Bacchae.
Rene Girard
ZACH FEUER GALLERY
530 West 24th Street
New York, NY 10011
t. 212 989 7700
f. 212 989 7720
www.zachfeuer.com
Gallery Hours: Tuesday-Saturday, 10-6
