EXPOSITION
Jutta Koether
Ken Okiishi
Josephine Pryde
Opening
October 15, 6-9pm
15 Galerie de Montpensier(par les jardins)
75001 Paris
October 15-26
Monday – Sunday
11am-1pm – 2-7pm+Le Brady
39 Boulevard de Strasbourg
75010 Paris
Ken Okiishi
Vital Behaviors
Screenings
October 17 @ 11am
October 18 @ 7:30pm

Jutta Koether

Two new paintings by Jutta Koether take as their basic form the enlarged shape of
the Venus of Lespugue, a six-inch figurine carved from a mammoth’s tusk or bone.
Discovered in 1922 in a cave at the foothills of the Pyrenees, this 25,000 year-oldstatuette became a kind of prehistoric fetish item for Parisian modernists, its replica
a must-have item in the studios of artists such as Picasso and Giacometti. The
material fact of this Venus – faithfully replicated in all its fractured glory – and thedesires projected onto it by modern men, resonated with Koether’s own focus on thefemale figure (the large bodies in Lucian Freud’s work are a key referent in recentcompositions). While keeping her own painting interests well on board, and workingspecifically toward this exposition in Paris, the artist returns the Venus as anopportunity to expand something already operative in her own painting.
Bluesed Grid is Koether’s version of the replicated Venus of Lespugue. This is thefirst large blue grid painting she has done to date, and follows the earlier
red "Bruised Grids" (of her Boogie Painting project). The new blue grids might beconsidered the opening act for something called the "Bluesed Painting Project,"whereas Bluesed V – another version of the blue Venus combined with a blue Vulva
and a plant– connects formally to and continues the artist’s so-called "DataCorrupter" and black painting path. Both works are formatted in "Golden Ratio"
proportions.
Both works also have near their center a small 1cm X 1cm red square. One mightlook at these paintings by focusing on that single red spot as a sort of central pointor eye of a large, expanding blue blossom. These works are therefore and also
hereby constituted as Blue Flower Paintings.
Jutta Koether’s exhibition Libertine is currently showing at the Museum Abteiberg inMönchengladbach, Germany (October 13 – February 16, 2020). The actual Venus ofLespugue resides at the Musée de l’Homme, Paris.

Jutta Koether

Bluesed V, 2019
Acrylic and metallic ink onn canvas ; Inscriptions: Malerei als
Lebensform and " Es ist als hätte der Himmel die Erdegeküsst"130 x 80 cm ; 51 1/4 x 31 1/2 in
unique
JK/P 54
USD 45,000.00

Jutta Koether

Bluesed Grid, 2019
Acrylic on canvas
130 x 80 cm ; 51 1/4 x 31 1/2 in
unique
JK/P 55
USD 45,000.00

Josephine Pryde

Atelier E.B (Beca Lipscombe & Lucy McKenzie) invited Josephine Pryde to produce a set ofimages featuring their new fashion collection for 2018. Atelier E.B had clear ideas for thedirection of the shoot, which Pryde was happy to explore with them. Works elaborated
under conditions resembling a commission also meanwhile enjoy a sort of autonomy outside
the assignment, showing here in 2019.
What Atelier E.B wanted to demonstrate in these photographs was a sense of how theirfabrics feel to the touch. They do not sell their clothes online because they want theircustomers to be able to feel them first. For people who have various conditions affecting ordiminishing their sense of sight, the sense of touch takes on a different intensity and reality.
Pryde’s models were all visually impaired or, in one case, completely blind. They agreed toappear in images they would never be able to see as clearly as she could, images moreover
which, were they to touch the prints, could only offer smooth paper. This was a situation
worked out as a relationship of an exceptional trust – between models and photographer,animals, people and camera.
The photographer, meanwhile, knew she was involved in the promotion of Atelier E.B, but
she also wanted to take the time to bring other aspects to the surface, too – different
knowledges, showing something of what the blind and partially blind models knew, perhaps,
as well as what the clothes looked like. Photographers Chantelle Gomez and Gernot
Seeliger were recruited to help with the camera and lighting and with the casting of models
and animals in the North East of England, where the shoot took place. Jessie, Bethany (andher mother Kirsty), Chloë and Ruby are all first time models. The clothing is by Atelier E.B.
The animals are a whippet, a pony, a dachshund and a terrier (Weasel, Sunny, Sossie andPatsy).
The photographs are overprinted with the word ‘exhibition,’ in the same way that online
images are watermarked for copyright protection. This was also a way of distinguishingthese works as made for display, picking up on themes of interest to Atelier E.B. in theirresearch for the exhibition Passer-by (Serpentine Galleries, London, 2018 and Lafayette
Anticipations, Paris, 2019). Jessie and Sossie for Atelier E.B (exhibition) was included in
Passer-by and the other photographs are showing here for the first time.

Josephine Pryde

Jessie and Sossie for Atelier E.B (exhibition), 2018
Archival pigment print
75 x 50 cm ; 29 1/2 x 19 2/3 in
2/3 + 2AP
JP/PH 221/2
USD 12,000.00

Josephine PrydeChloë for Atelier E.B (exhibition), 2018
Archival pigment print
75 x 50 cm ; 29 1/2 x 19 2/3 in
1/3 + 2AP
JP/PH 223/1
USD 12,000.00

Josephine Pryde

Weasel for Atelier E.B (exhibition), 2018
Archival pigment print
50 x 75 cm ; 19 2/3 x 29 1/2 in
1/3 + 2AP
JP/PH 224/1
USD 12,000.00

Josephine PrydeChloë and Jessie with Sunny for Atelier E.B ( exhibition),
2018
Archival pigment print
75 x 50 cm ; 29 1/2 x 19 2/3 in
1/3 + 2AP
JP/PH 227/1
USD 12,000.00

Josephine Pryde

Bethany and Patsy II for Atelier E.B ( exhibition), 2018
Archival pigment print
75 x 50 cm ; 29 1/2 x 19 2/3 in
1/3 + 2AP
JP/PH 229/1
USD 12,000.00

Josephine Pryde

Jessie, Chloë, Ruby and Weasel for Atelier E.B(exhibition), 2018
Archival pigment print
50 x 75 cm ; 19 2/3 x 29 1/2 in
2/3 + 2AP
JP/PH 230/2
USD 12,000.00

SUBLIME BROMANTICISM
On Ken Okiishi’s Vital Behaviors (2019)
Felix Bernstein
The plot of Vital Behaviors is simple—the artist (Okiishi) asks the young model (Brian) toreenact Instagram pictures, working backward from the present with no further constraints.
More like a Lacanian session than a “durational performance,” the variable-length finds its
closure only when the mutual interplay of recognitions hit a climax, more riddling thancathartic. However, unlike a Lacanian session, the timing is additionally manipulated by theexpectation of an audience, and it is subject to the editorial whims of the artist. Accordingly,Okiishi ends the long take on Brian zipping-up a hoody then jump cuts to him taking a water
break with a cheeky smile, seemingly poised for the video to loop, end, or carry on.
I should rather say that Behaviors has no plot and is a documentation of Brian’s
physiological re-composition of gestures from memory as if he were learning how to act (orreally, realizing that he can act) in real time. Brian, who is also Okiishi’s actual physical(somatic) trainer, is suddenly the one being trained in the art of balancing recall andimpulse. The gestures are recalled with increasing finesse (confidence, coolness, control,speed) but without becoming mechanized. The lesson is never to stray far from the “firstthought, best thought” of spontaneous impulse (freedom). Behaviors captures animpromptu improv game that trains in romantic recall. First thought, in Allen Ginsberg’s
theory of improvisatory writing, is not about repeating the content of a prior thought but
rather maintaining the desire of impulsivity without sacrificing the techniques of writing;just as the Wordsworthian poet isn’t channeling spontaneous overflow of feeling into raw
form but rather re-collecting themselves in the static realm of tranquility.
What is strange here is that Brian reenacts photos that were already staged with, at least,“lax” intention and framing. Nobody uses Instagram without an omnipresent awareness of
the aspirational behavioral modifications that the selfie inspires. However, the more
traditionally theatrical route taken in this video adds yet another reflexive layer to the selfie,
which, like an affective version of a color filter, attempts to fix what was broken in theoriginal and thereby discovers (invents) an unconscious (retroactively constructed) lack.
FEEDBACKThis training session ends up adopting the function of the screen test, in the practical senseof playing back and highlighting the subject’s strengths and faults in relation to a given role.
In this case, the screen test inspired the model to recognize his strengths at acting,enabling him to take on “actor” as a new role. The actor is the successful reenactor; hemakes it seem “as if” it is the first time (his origin lies in the role of the hypocrite). Brian
proved his finesse as actor, leading to subsequent casting in mainstream television shows.
As such, Behaviors belongs to the discovery genre of screen tests, often re-dramatizedin Star is Born narratives, rather than the more sadistic bathos of Warhol’s screen tests,
where the subject is caught in a feedback loop without upward mobility. Okiishi describes
Warhol’s films as examples of inassimilable cognitive dissonance that vivify contradictions in
the feedback loops that watermark his work and American media culture at large. Warhol’s
films contradict the unity of narcissism and solipsism that perpetuates the theoretical
Cartesian subject and the simulacrum as void. This contradiction does not refute thesetheories, or provide a queer alternative, or even a cogent analysis, but rather invents a newvantage point to observe from. Not Warholian in the sense of fixed or giddy, the vantage
point in Behaviors seems to be testing its own endurance in the face of the present.

SELFIES FUCK ME UP
The photos Brian reenacts are mostly stir-of-the-moment takes of him + cool location +friends. However, in one picture, Brian explicitly showcases mnemonic recall, as he takes aselfie on a cliff that is captioned by a reflection on the suicide of his best friend, or bro. This
staged cliffhanger elicits the sublime depths of memory by picturing them as the horror of
the abyss before jumping and mediates this terror with the controlled stance that rebinds
him to a bodily and representational holding-on. The ability to recall trauma and rebind it
through tranquil forms of reenactment is both a method of survival and what Adorno andHorkheimer pinpoint as the initiating gesture of the Enlightenment in The Odyssey. Training
oneself to move fluidly between absolute detachment and inactivity to figures of attachment
and enactment is the balancing act that unites the artist and actor as enlightened auteurs.
Brian’s inability to correctly recall with which hand he took each selfie leads him to say,“selfies fuck me up.” The inability to graft the present self to the past selfie is the same as
the process of taking the selfie to begin with, and before that the process of forming a self(the mirror stage), which is always (and already) an exasperated repetition. There isnothing before recording, which etymologically means, restoring the memory to the heart,
where it is always already missing. “Selfies fuck me up,” does not refer to the passivity ofthe model to the representation of their selfhood but to the impossibility of perfectmodeling. This impossibility has long been the Ur-Model of sculpture as an alleged record ofBecoming over Being–as with the pronounced pensiveness of Rodin’s Thinker, which has led
to an infinite regress of poser/poseur confusions.
Brian had not acted before this video, but he had modeled underwear. He is comfortable
wearing his state of undress as a natural costume. So, he was already a half-step awayfrom acting, since the index of recalled action is always half-dressed in veils. What the actor
models is not a “real” future or past but rather the mood of expectancy: a sublimely
artificial rendering of memory like the 3D-printed and 3D-animated models in Okiishi’s “AModel Childhood” (2018).
Brian, as social media trainer, models your future, an unattainable ideal, the index ofhotness. Okiishi, as media artist, models the unattainability of memory—his “modelchildhood” and his other remakes of authentic origins belie the difference between authentic
origin and simulated reenactment; attainment and aspiration. However, Okiishi’s work is nota didactic exercise to show all gestures to be always (and already) performative automatedcontrolled ideological mechanisms. Rather than debunking or valorizing the origin, he shows
there is something of the real in the conceptualization of the origin that remains no matter
what avant-garde operation is placed upon it. This work tells us more than what we know
through cynical irony, romantic sincerity, or their hybridization. That is, Okiishi points towhat we cannot know—blind spots that persist due to our inbuilt passion for ignorance. He
does not throw away nostalgia for origins, even when accepting there is nothing substantial
inside of origins, because something else can be adduced from the origin, by virtue of not
being in it, that can only be realized through Sisyphean searching.

REMAKE
It is often thought that the detournement of the remake (or the appropriative rephotograph) reveals something about the ideological context of the original that was notknowable before the remake superimposed its frame. Due to the homestead principle oftransforming the original through aesthetic and intellectual remediation, the remake isalleged to offer more than the original. This axiom depends on shortsightedness since thebuilt-in intellectual obsolescence that this presentist theory promulgates dooms the remake
to be remade. Rather than dwelling on the original vs. remake antinomy, Okiishi’s workshows that consciousness carries an impossible need for supplementary remaking (a needfor increased immediacy or intimacy) that cannot be satiated by discursive synthesis orbracketed as a paradoxical quandary since it is generative of the very mediation it seems to“fuck up.” As with his remake of Larry Clark’s Kids, “Telly & Casper” (2000), and his parodicquest to find authentic Chelsea queerness, “‘David Wojnarowicz’ in ‘NY’” (1999), Okiishi’sreconstitution of the signifiers of coolness and martyrdom reveal how they are alreadyimitations without origin, encoded and hypostasized. Okiishi’s jests, rather than reversing or
deflating the power relations, do something more extraordinary—they reveal how pre-codedgestures perpetuate themselves despite our awkward inability to adequately forge 1:1
reproductions.
INSIDE THE ARTIST’S STUDIO
The camera movements in Behaviors (jittery in and out zooms) seem to mime themovements of the eyes; they are the result of fidgeting fingers, a continuously restarted
effort to capture the performance as if tripped up by the power of the subject. Okiishi keeps
resetting the focal punctum of the shot, as if catching his breath, exasperated fromproximity to the subject. But then he physically rushes into and out of the shot (as a rovingrückenfigur) and for a moment nobody is behind the camera until he rushes back faceforeword — his presence (his “hand” and signature) announced by another zoom, which, weare to believe, is not a remote or automatic feature, though at times it seems to be ahuman imitating the automatic scan. Now, as with much of Okiishi’s work, we areapproaching the jestural scrambling of the Bergsonian reading of technological art, wherecomedy comes from humans strangely imitating machines (in jest) and tragedy comes frommachines strangely imitating humans (uncanny valley). Okiishi’s remaking and automationof painterly, lyric, authentic gestures are not meant to triumphantly prove simulation
theories but rather take certain aspects of simulation as a given in order to proceed withexperimental and new formalizations. Jest and gesture are not severed by the fallacies oftheory, but rather jesture is used as an aesthetic unit in itself that like a brushstroke (whichhe has also subjected to automated/authentic scrambling) remakes the very categories(genres and identities) through which art is officially read rather than being subject tothem.

Ken Okiishi

Vital Behaviors, 2019
HD video
RT: 64 minutes
1/3 + 1AP
KO/V 12/1
USD 25,000.00

https://vimeo.com/327575890
password: babh2019