aestheticofaccumulation

[aestheticofaccumulation]

Accumulation as a chilling echo of the Holocaust and other genocidal atrocities. Accumulation as finality, closure, and tragedy. Accumulation as witness, as evidence, as uncomfortable spectacle.

[aestheticofaccumulation]

Accumulation as ironic re-presentation and making-permanent of the single-use, ephemeral, consumption-driven trash ("materials that do not revert to the earth") of contemporary life; accumulation as the reassertion of craft in the face of industrialisation; accumulation as the repurposing of luxury industries (porcelain manufacture) for even-more-luxury industries (conceptual art).

Liu Jianhua, Discard (2002/2023), porcelain, at Towada Art Center, Aomori, Japan.

[aestheticofaccumulation]

Susan Hiller (1940-2019), “Dedicated to the Unknown artists,” 1972-76. 305 postcards, sea charts, and map. Tate Britain T13531.

Accumulation as elevation of the mundane, as collective experience, as appropriation art, as collective endeavour, as protocinema, as misuse.

[aestheticofaccumulation]

Accumulation as climate activism by children; as photogenic feel-good news.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4gwykzqed5o

[aestheticofaccumulation]

Accumulation as montage; as retrospective; as remix. Bruce Conner at Thomas Dane Gallery. https://website-artlogicwebsite0087.artlogic.net/viewing-room/62-bruce-conner-three-screen-ray/

[aestheticofaccumulation]

Accumulation as speculation: dolphins celebrating the imminent demise of humanity? Accumulation as source of interspecies fascination.

[aestheticofaccumulation]

Accumulation as flotsam and drift; as migration; as loss; as entrapment. Accumulation as process (casting salt into rope).

Karyn Olivier at the Whitney Biennial: How Many Ways Can You Disappear (2021), and Stop Gap (2020).

See also https://www.tanyabonakdargallery.com/viewing-room/44-karyn-olivier-at-the-intersection-of-two-faults/

[aestheticofaccumulation]

Accumulation as minimalism.

Mary Miss, Knots, 1969/2020. Pinakothek, Munich.

“These many knots suggest community. They revivify the potential of a cultural memorial. The traditional association of knots and memories suggested that this field was not a formal exercise in reduction but a trace of past events. Miss’s practice exemplified expansion, referring to the inclusion of new occurrences and practices as sculpture.” — Andrew Stooke, 2020

https://stookeandrew.medium.com/this-minimalism-which-is-not-one-patriarchy-in-an-expanded-field-99e34884a8d6

[aestheticofaccumulation]

Accumulation as unintentional quotation; art history as a practice of accumulation for narrative invention and canon-building. Phyllida Barlow (at Hauser & Wirth Somerset) as Marie Watt as Mummers.

Photos by author at Hauser & Wirth except:

Marshfield Mummers about to perform, Nigel Goldsmith, 2015.

[aestheticofaccumulation]

Accumulation as cultural exploration, as technological symptom, as conservation challenge.

Nam June Paik – Electronic Superhighway: Continental U.S., Alaska, Hawaii, 1995, fifty-one channel video installation (including one closed-circuit television feed), custom electronics, neon lighting, steel and wood; color, sound, approx. 15 x 40 x 4 ft., at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, photo: CC BY 2.0 by Cea.

https://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/features/nam-june-paik-smithsonian-59238/

https://americanart.si.edu/videos/nam-june-paiks-electronic-superhighway-american-art-moments-163756

[aestheticofaccumulation]

Accumulation as erasure; monopoly as mass failure; empty frames as minimalist art. The great computer crash of July 2024 inadvertently mimics the conscious erasure of urban visual pollution in Brazil’s 2006 decision to ban outdoor advertising.

Photo credits: Getty, of Times Square (New York City); Tony de Marco’s São Paulo No Logo Flickr set (https://www.flickr.com/photos/tonydemarco/sets/72157600075508212/)

[aestheticofaccumulation]

Accumulation as overflow, excess, obsolescence, decay, and the return of the repressed; as a stand-in for human masses and movement. Accumulation as a logistical challenge; as liquid.

Phyllida Barlow, untitled: stackedchairs, 2014. Hauser & Wirth, Somerset; installed 2024.

Doris Salcedo, 1550 Chairs Stacked Between Two City Buildings, 2003. Istanbul Biennial.

[aestheticofaccumulation]

Accumulation as inadvertent reinscription of the masculine as normative. Accumulation as echo of emblem books, Rembrandt etchings, eugenic photographs and visual documents of insanity by Charcot and others. Accumulation as negation of portraiture.

Sophy Cave, Expression, 2006. Kelvingrove Museum, Glasgow.

[aestheticofaccumulation]

Accumulation as activism, as theatre, as mourning, as protest. Accumulation as collaboration; as collective grief. Accumulation as the tension between overpopulation, the excesses of capitalism, and mass extinction.

Puppet Back Up At God’s House Tower, Southampton; Extinction Rebellion’s Funeral for Nature, Bath.

[aestheticofaccumulation]

Accumulation as digital occupation; as religious expression; as Muybridgean aesthetics (the conflation of the aesthetic and the technological); as somatic; as dance.

Lisa Jamhoury, L’entrée, 2024. Multimedia installation at Glow, Kings College London.

[aestheticofaccumulation]

Accumulation as public health action. Display of flags standing in for people with colorectal cancer, on the Mall, Washington, D.C.

[aestheticofaccumulation]

Accumulation as averted gaze, as memorial, as paradox of memory without experience. Anton Kusters at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: https://www.ushmm.org/information/exhibitions/museum-exhibitions/blue-skies