Art Fag City at The L Magazine: The Artist As Chess Piece

POST BY: PADDY JOHNSON

Knight’s Move, installation view

This week at The L Magazine I review Knight’s Move at The Sculpture Center. I should mention that I’m really not a fan of Virginia Poundstone’s Flower Field pictured to the right despite giving a seal of approval on the show. Pourable foam looks the same no matter how an artist manipulates it, and ugly digitally printed curtains don’t help. Also, although it’s not touched upon in the review, it’s worth noting that piece for piece, the preceding exhibition, Leopards in a Temple, showcased stronger work. The teaser below:

In the unlikely event PS1’s Greater New York show later this month doesn’t tell us what New York art looks like, their neighbors over at Sculpture Center intend to fill that gap. Titled Knight’s Move, the Sculpture Center’s curator Fionn Meade hones the various themes of pluralism explored in their January-May show Leopards in the Temple.

This isn’t a bad idea. Leopards in the Temple did little but make it clear that contemporary art looks like just about anything, and that’s obvious. Knight’s Move attempts to take this thesis further by using the chess piece as a metaphor for the artist; like the fixed move of a knight, artistic practice either positions itself forward or backward (on the art-historical timeline), and explores laterally from there. Such horizontal movement was once described by a friend as “Aboutism”; the practice of finding some small niche and exploring the hell out of it. Virtually every artist does it.

To properly examine Aboutism though, many works by the same artist would need to be included in the group show, or at the very least wall text contextualizing the artist’s art. There’s neither, though a catalogue is promised for late June.

To read the full piece click here.