Susan Hobbs

Buecking’s ongoing interrogation of the North American social fabric continues in WE THING, an installation comprised of architectural, sculptural, and video components that attempt to reify the largely intangible and abstract behemoth called neoliberalism, and enact its effects. Buecking locates the kernel of neoliberalism’s alienation within lifestyle marketing and the Human Potential Movement—a self-styled category of motivational seminars and affiliated material aimed at self-actualization and personal advancement—and WE THING assembles props and set pieces distilled from these vocabularies. Objects such as a Platonic tetrahedron, a giant Gap shopping bag, and carpeted display furniture illustrate and poke at this system already cluttered with false idols. As props in her videotaped performances, Buecking’s deliberately failed interactions with these components reinforce their futility. In these videos, Buecking employs humour as a key strategy to explore the power dynamics and ethics of the current system, especially in her use of the tried-and-true lightbulb joke—a readymade form of lowbrow social critique that can be adapted to any group. As Buecking writes, “Humour tries to make more tangible the distance between abstract models and the suppleness of reality, and to provisionally articulate that distance in a more humane way.”