Andy Hope 1930 | Black Fat Fury Road
29 Apr - 23 Jul 2016
As the ancient evils create a gravitational pull towards an unknown force, bringing us into great trepidation for the future, the need not only for a divided self but also the all seeing eye is necessary for the mobilization of secret symbols in art to activate appropriate art historical positioning. Harking back to the monochromes of Malevich, Andy Hope 1930, for his 5th exhibition at Galerie Guido W. Baudach, Black Fat Fury Road, takes us on the path towards the promised land of abstraction – a journey cut short by the realization that there is nothing there but a contamination of the modernist membrane. The onlooker is sent back with no longer the comfort of a “mirage of salvation” but a dark, haggard reflection of an image, its foreboding endlessness, rather than an image itself. Is this what the post-modern deconstructivist project has left us with? Is this what we are painters for – to work under the umbrella of a greater impurity?
Hope incorporates a continuation of works from his UNappropriated Activities exhibition in 2015, where the detournement harboured within the works, embody a crazed sense of frustration with certain correlationist forms of will to power – strains that have left the mind at a loss. As a remedy, Andy Hope 1930 employs his own form of panpsychism – thoughts contained in all things and not correlated to being. He uses it as a device to make art that doesn't attempt games on the sociological dimension, instead it can dive directly into dealing with perception, aesthetics and, most importantly, pushing towards a speculative reality independent of human thought and experience without having to force these signs directly onto the hungry hive mind.
Our accursed share – albeit sanctified by an existence or right to participate in the art historical framework of painting – is sullied by the hand of doubt, yet as doubt, a term belligerently put into practice in the 1970s-90s, offered us very little except a streamlined acceleration of the decay of culture and its painterly irrelevance as a powerful tool, we are left with a displacement of gesture towards speculative alternatives, worlds and zones of comfort that subsume the shortcomings of painting. When looking at Hope's efforts, we must bear in mind that what is visible on the surface plain are not paintings but painting exit points. Paintings are not relevant for Hope, they are devices to suggest where modernist ideals of Art could find their appropriate place – locked into some strange immateriality, atheism and within a Kantian sense of a visible mind with the potential of altering our psychological state. His universe is queer as much as an alien race would be queer on our planet - queer in the sense that they would not fit comfortably on a German cultural stage.
Whether the discourse that surrounds painting is still lagging behind in the strange hero-worship of idealized, even now to be understood, demagogic tipping points – tribespeople with a hive-mind still look up towards the shadows of these false idols knowing full well that the forms created were only “shadows” or “myths” that are meant to keep the whole system in motion for whom? For those who are engaged in the reality of painting, its act and strategies, however, their theoretical examinations will lead to circumvention, repurposing and redefinition.
Hyperobjects are vast, long lasting objects distributed in time and space so vastly that they defy human notions of timely and spatial dimensions, for example nuclear radiation. In many ways, hyperobjects, albeit at least partly created by humans, may come closest to a human-alien encounter in our present time, they in fact may mark a historical moment in which non-humans could make a decisive and irrevocable contact with humans. Andy Hope 1930’s art is not a hyperobject itself, but it opens up channels on which to communicate with hyperobjects, it exists in the same universe as them.
-Flame
Hope incorporates a continuation of works from his UNappropriated Activities exhibition in 2015, where the detournement harboured within the works, embody a crazed sense of frustration with certain correlationist forms of will to power – strains that have left the mind at a loss. As a remedy, Andy Hope 1930 employs his own form of panpsychism – thoughts contained in all things and not correlated to being. He uses it as a device to make art that doesn't attempt games on the sociological dimension, instead it can dive directly into dealing with perception, aesthetics and, most importantly, pushing towards a speculative reality independent of human thought and experience without having to force these signs directly onto the hungry hive mind.
Our accursed share – albeit sanctified by an existence or right to participate in the art historical framework of painting – is sullied by the hand of doubt, yet as doubt, a term belligerently put into practice in the 1970s-90s, offered us very little except a streamlined acceleration of the decay of culture and its painterly irrelevance as a powerful tool, we are left with a displacement of gesture towards speculative alternatives, worlds and zones of comfort that subsume the shortcomings of painting. When looking at Hope's efforts, we must bear in mind that what is visible on the surface plain are not paintings but painting exit points. Paintings are not relevant for Hope, they are devices to suggest where modernist ideals of Art could find their appropriate place – locked into some strange immateriality, atheism and within a Kantian sense of a visible mind with the potential of altering our psychological state. His universe is queer as much as an alien race would be queer on our planet - queer in the sense that they would not fit comfortably on a German cultural stage.
Whether the discourse that surrounds painting is still lagging behind in the strange hero-worship of idealized, even now to be understood, demagogic tipping points – tribespeople with a hive-mind still look up towards the shadows of these false idols knowing full well that the forms created were only “shadows” or “myths” that are meant to keep the whole system in motion for whom? For those who are engaged in the reality of painting, its act and strategies, however, their theoretical examinations will lead to circumvention, repurposing and redefinition.
Hyperobjects are vast, long lasting objects distributed in time and space so vastly that they defy human notions of timely and spatial dimensions, for example nuclear radiation. In many ways, hyperobjects, albeit at least partly created by humans, may come closest to a human-alien encounter in our present time, they in fact may mark a historical moment in which non-humans could make a decisive and irrevocable contact with humans. Andy Hope 1930’s art is not a hyperobject itself, but it opens up channels on which to communicate with hyperobjects, it exists in the same universe as them.
-Flame