De Rijke / De Rooij’s Bouquet II, 2003 Exhibited at LAXART

Sat, Mar 30 - Sat, May 18  2019

LAXART - San Francisco Consulate Region

_F_rom March 30 through May 18, Bouquet II, 2003 by Willem de Rooij and Jeroen de Rijke will be exhibited at LAXART in Hollywood. De Rooij (1969) and De Rijke (1970-2006) collaborated from 1994 untilDe Rijke’s death in 2006, producing films, photographs, objects, and installations. Describing de Rijke / de Rooij in an introduction to a portfolio of their work published in Artforum in 2008, art historian Pamela M. Lee states that in their work they trace “the recursive economy of the image: its affective power, its capacity to seduce and organize perception, and its mediation of time and subjectivity.”

About the Exhibition

It’s hard to imagine twentieth century art without the “crisis of representation” no matter how dead that horse. If anything, the crisis of representation is a euphemism for art as we know it, urinal and all. It’s link to abstraction, rather than the readymade, made it a fixture of the twentieth century. But the crisis of representation was not precipitated by the mere advent of abstraction. Crisis usually speaks less to a problem and more to its proportions, which in this case are those of abstraction’s triumph.

The ramifications of a triumphal abstraction were inescapable in the latter half of the twentieth century. The generation of artists coming of age in the wake of minimalism and conceptual art, for all their skepticism toward abstraction, were the painfully self-conscious heirs to an indelible rift between signifier and signified. Rather than abide by this condition, the works comprising this exhibition use the subject matter of flora to foreground the rift. In several instances the relationship between signifier and signified is hopelessly incommensurate as flora stands in for subjects that arguably exceed the scope of visualization. These include reference to a list of countries whose track record of human rights abuses qualifies as noteworthy (Christopher Williams); the 1993 Oslo Peace Accords (Auer/Mittelstaedt); the perpetual displacement of refugee communities (Fougeirol); subaltern women affected by religious fundamentalism (De Rijke / de Rooij); the economic treaties that all totaled go by the name globalization (Taryn Simon); and last but not least, a twentieth century timeline illustrated exclusively with breeds of daffodils (Lariviere). None of the works, however, smack of failure let alone mourning for a lost referent. The nature to which these artists resort is little other than a site of projection for nature holds no inherent meaning wherein lies its parallel with art, which in this case is not so much the thing looked at as it is a way of looking.

Bouquet II, 2003 – as interpreted by Pretend Plants & Flowers on March 29, 2019. Courtesy of the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles. Bouquet II, 2003 was first executed on January 25, 2003 and created by the florist Joseph Free, Los Angeles, California. The work consists of two components, the bouquet and the brochure featuring an essay by the artists.