Speaking of being a dick, I pre-reviewed (different than a preview) my good friend Jeff Schenk's art for Oakland's Art Murmur.
"Deconstructing the Poststructuralist Ethic of Recontextualization in the Art of Jeff Schenk, Which He Made, By Himself, with Some Tape. And Paint."
by Alex Cruse
At first glance, the tape art of (Anti-)Neo-Dadaist Jeff Schenk appears to be just that: tape. Actually, his technique is a postmodern navigation of compound narrative explication which alternately draws from The French School, The New School, The Symbology of the World Cup, a post-ironic homage to Jean Michel Basquiat (who, we shall see, emerges in Schenk's work as an avatar for the entire state of New York), all while subverting the paradigm created by this amalgamation.
The work itself emanates a certain "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat," and its totality is rife with the essence of fragmentization.
Schenk's negotiation of "the self" with "the other" is evident in the lens through which he gives agency to these normative visual modes--namely, tape and paint.
By adopting an overarching historicist ideology, Schenk confronts...wait, hang on. No. He asserts (yeah!) a binary that condemns the yuppie materialist ethos of his artistic forbearers, invoking Derrida's idea of intertextual "play" dually with Rothko's psychochemicalist treatment of color/structure/et al, etc. Thusly, tape and paint assume the role of dichotomist 0s and 1s--becoming, simultaneously, found objects, but also the DNA for a whole new era of art that will be, arguably, the best art.
Jeff Schenk's exhibit at the "This Party Blows" gallery runs from August 6, 2010, through August 6, 2010.
Alex Cruse is currently writing her doctoral thesis on The Economy of the pre-Dyadic Sign in a Post-Signification Society. Her writings on Tupac Shakur's hitherto undiscovered stained-glass paintings of the Cyrene Colony has been published variously in Bust, Adbusters, Maxim, 420 Magazine, and the Paris Review.
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