“The Break of Alternate” presents a choice of John Miller’s paintings starting from 1994 to the current. Miller employs all kinds of supplies and media, making it tough to pin him all the way down to a selected or inventive type. And but his work is very influential, regardless that its mutability and limiting of private gestures probably finest specific a sure recognizable high quality. As a result of Miller calls into query artwork’s aspirations to transcend its subject material, this persistent method of impersonality has turn into the defining function of his apply. His work conforms neither to the mocking irony of postmodernism nor the overweening authenticity of modernity. How higher to dispassionately painting the actual than to attenuate these sentiments?

The connection between Miller’s artwork apply and the social and institutional elements that form the artwork world has been persistent, and it carries over unabated into his artwork and writings. Elementary to Miller’s discriminating standpoint is knowing artwork as commodities with an arbitrary worth associated to the vagaries of the market and public house. Miller reveals an curiosity in on a regular basis modes that usually go undetected. Like different materials situations during which folks discover themselves, consumption and structurally decided ideologies type and form consciousness of actuality. The world that the human topic constructs is the one it should inhabit.

The exhibition’s title, “The Break of Alternate” displays these points. On the one hand, the damage is the final word allegorical trope. On the opposite, alternate is one thing that essentially unfolds in house. Capital can’t exist in a vacuum. And in case you don’t take house into consideration, you lapse into idealist abstractions. So, materials alternate occurs spatially. In “The Break of Alternate,” Miller’s new and previous works each not directly allude to how the time period “damage” means that alternate or alternate worth fails us in some methods—or is a form of holdover from some prior constellation.

Curated by
Melanie Ohnemus

at Kunsthaus Glarus
till November 24, 2024