THEMM!
3 Digital Photomontages, Sizes Variable: June 2020: THEMM!
“I threw the bottle rack and the urinal into their faces as a challenge
and now they admire them for their aesthetic beauty,” so Marcel Duchamp
lamented in a letter to artist Hans Richter. His other “readymades” met
a similar fate. When he grafted an inverted bicycle wheel onto the seat
of a plain, wooden stool Duchamp transformed both wheel and stool into a
useless object: the perfect deviant artifact for goading high culture’s
contrived and pompous mannerisms. Until it wasn’t. Duplicates of the
wheel can be found in most major museums today. Something similar is
taking place today. As we watch the toppling of monuments around the
world, THEMM! recognizes that one generation’s heroes are destined to be
the sacrificial readymades of the next. We hereby offer a solution to
both the petrification of Duchamp’s work, as well as a means for dealing
with the fractured remains of Christopher Columbus statues, already
beheaded, or soon to be so, by protestors infuriated with white
supremacy and systemic racism. THEMM! calls for the fusing the two works
together. The resulting synthetic post-memorials offer governments a
formula for dealing with the shattered remains of other effigies due to
monumenticide, but also a means of decolonizing Dada from its internment
in the toxic mausoleums of the art world.
Coming apart together in isolation.
THEMM! is the collective name of three intergenerational artists –Agata
Craftlove, Karl Lorac, and “TJ” (topjesus)– whose hand-crafted sculpture
(Lorac), artist books (TJ), photomontage, graphic novels and
experimental thrash songs and media (Craftlove) have appeared in
exhibitions at Momenta Arts, NYC; Queens Museum of Art; The Cooper Union
Art Gallery; The Austrian Cultural Forum, NYC; Gallery 400, Chicago,
Illinois; Reed Gallery, University of Cincinnati, Ohio; Thessaloniki
Center of Contemporary Art, Greece; Center for Cultural Decontamination,
Belgrade, Serbia; Gallery Nova, Zagreb, Croatia; NeMe Space, Limmasol,
Cyprus; Open Space, Vienna, Austria; and the Pori Museum of Contemporary
Art, Pori, Finland.