The Trouble with Order
In the Mistake we called “the nineties,” practices of decentralization, provisional arrangements, and collective production emerged from the long shadows of monumental certainties organizing culture, from Reagan and Thatcher's programs, the Wall and Big Blue, and all them ideological binaries of this or that. They sustained other ways of working.
Of course not all these arrangements worked like the bricolage of paving stones, shards of the Vendôme Column, and doors, materials wrenched from their assigned functions to obstruct circulation and open a zone for the emergence of social space. Increasingly, platforms of accommodation promised bricolage itself, offering places to gather and facilitating circulation. Distributed operations producing concentrated power. Sure, a place to be for a while, but the fog of optimism didn't last so long. Certainly by '94, with the release of Microsoft's brutal demand-phrase “Where do you want to go today?”, we could feel where we were going.
But let's not pave over practices engaging abstraction as something other than the mere reproduction of cultural constructions passing themselves off as nature. Yve-Alain Bois's Painting as Model was a cold shock to me, as a child of Red Dawn. Peter Eisenman's architecture challenged my inherited assumptions about what a wall or column was supposed to do, let alone look like. And then, in painting, there was Jutta Koether's work, which I first encountered in the early nineties and during those years found almost entirely incomprehensible. Now for us Covidian subjects, contamination hardly needs an introduction. Nor does it require the prior existence of something pure. Passing between bodies without necessarily following the authorized channels of inheritance, painting, that monstrous offspring, belongs to its lineage without submitting to its
authority.
In red rectangles, purple dots, black lines, white ground, three rows, more order, the title reads like an inventory that has turned into an instruction. More order? How much more? Geometric abstraction and expressionism arrive already burdened with histories, expectations, and judgments. But the familiar distinctions are hardly secure. A mark that appears expressive can establish an interval; a geometric division can become awkward, emphatic, excessive. Their operations interfere with one another, accumulating decisions that alter the conditions for whatever comes next. The painting registers these decisions without necessarily resolving the distinctions through which we attempt to
understand it.
The infrastructures that organize cultural circulation also classify, rank, exclude, and accommodate differences. As judgment becomes increasingly automated, even deviation can be assigned a value and put to work. More order. The sorting machine doesn't have to get it right to keep going. But degeneracy, degeneration, degeneracity: these needn't designate another deviation awaiting classification. They might instead operate on the distinctions through which classification proceeds, putting those distinctions to other uses rather than simply responding to or violating their terms.
Max Ruf's monsters bring already contaminated forms and procedures into relations that alter their functions. Each operation changes the circumstances of the next. Distinctions emerge, interfere with one another, degenerate, and acquire other uses. The paintings sustain a kind of interfacial tension through which distinctions are produced, compromised, and made to operate against their assigned functions. What accumulates is a particular structure that cannot be reconciled with the intentions and procedures that produced it.