"Toxic Waste. On Painting’s Unconscious."
On the occasion of the release of Monika Baer’s catalogue Große Spritztour, Kerstin Stakemeier, Aruna D’Souza, and Monika Baer will discuss artistic appropriations of painting’s modern underbelly. The traces of modernism that still haunt us today—and not only in painting—are not least those of its unconscious, which, as Alenka Zupančič argues, is a zone of objective reality that “is not full constituted and only exists as an excess over itself.” If the unconscious is not a simple “subjective distortion of the objective world, (but) it is first and foremost an indication of a fundamental inconsistency of the objective world itself,” what then can we imagine to be painting’s unconscious, and how does it coalesce and trouble contemporary painting practice?
To get to the heart of this question, and taking its cues from Baer’s work, Stakemeier will propose some theses on what she terms “the mediumistic understanding” of an artistic formalism. In her conversation with D’Souza and Baer, what may well emerge is a notion of the painterly that troubles history, gender, and painting by materializing the inconsistencies that fracture each of these categories.
Tuesday, Feburary 21st
Greene Naftali, Ground Floor
6:30PM