Coolhaus

source: highlike
Work: Eilers’ performances function as social factories for the production and dismemberment of artworks and subjectivities. Objects that begin life in the studio might be reprocessed within a situation; props made for a performance might find their way back to the studio, where they are retooled for the gallery. Along the way, Eilers involves others in the process, either as collaborators, assistants, or audience participants. Artistic subjectivity is at times surrendered, though the communal feeling his work generates and embodies is never entirely free from a shaping aesthetic that is resolutely policed. The Screengrab series, works that take form in c-prints and occasionally resurface in sculpture, responds to artists’ use of newspapers – a history we can trace back before Dadaist collage to Symbolist poetry. Newspapers represented the mechanical ordering of information. The standardizing of value in their serial printed columns was a challenge to poets like Mallarmé, who responded by playing with typography. The computer desktop performs a similar function today, delivering our daily intake of words and images while allowing users a minimal freedom to adjust the arrangement. Eilers exploits this freedom, juxtaposing images in windows and then erasing the text, like Broodthaers’ in his update of Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard. The tension generated by different apparatuses – between the freedoms they offer and the constraints they impose – informs the whole of Eilers’ work. This goes for the aesthetic apparatus as much as the institutional and the carnivalesque. Liberated spaces (the Opening, Facebook, a night club) generate their own surveillance systems. This is the paradox of Twitter, another Eilers’ reference: access to community is at the same time submission to a general surveillance. Here we see the critical dimension that subtends Eilers’ perverse regression and culture industry excesses. The paradox of authority, at once absent and pervasive, is the autotune that streamlines his wobbly Coolhaus constructions. In 2009 he embodied this slippery authority, demonically permissive, in 4 Hour Fundamental, a performance in On Stellar Rays’s cellar. Several of his undergraduate students sold bizarre wares (homemade drugs, one night stands, ‘stolen’ art books) in a smoke-filled environment built by the group, over which Eilers presided in a crafted ‘thong hoodie’, muttering through his iPhone’s I Am T-Pain app., and charting students’ sales progress in green dollar signs daubed on the wall with a 5 foot long pencil. His performances are often structured like a self-contained micro-economy, in which production, display, and sale are incorporated within a single gest. The art world is identified with other controlled spaces, where pleasure is indistinguishable from strict adherence to rules or predetermined codes of conduct. In works like Secret Faggot, Greater New York, and Self-Portrait (Joshua Tree), there is evidence of past performances in which masks were cut out from the surface of a work and worn by participants, allowing them temporary anonymity and a the sense of borrowed authority. -Patrick Price, June 2010.
Image: Courtesy On Stellar Rays
Photographer: Adam Reich
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source: art21org
Debo Eilers (b. 1974, Texas, USA) lives and works in Brooklyn and New York, New York. He earned a BFA from University of Texas, Austin (2004) and an MFA from Columbia University (2007). His work has been included in the exhibitions Kaya 3, 47 Canal, New York (2013); Lille3000: Fantastic 2012, Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille, France (2012); Too Old For Toys, Too Young For Boys, OHWOW, Los Angeles (2012); Looking Back / The 6th White Columns Annual, White Columns, New York (2012); In your house. x, On Stellar Rays, New York (2011); Foot to Foot, Regina Gallery, London (2011); Signed, Sealed, Delivered, Zach Feuer Gallery, New York (2011); Greater New York, MoMA PS1, Queens (2010); The Amazone Conversation, Raum Zur Kunst, Basel (2010); I’ve got $3,000 in my wallet, On Stellar Rays, New York (2009); No Bees, No Blueberries, Harris Lieberman Gallery, New York, (2009); The dark show returns as a ghost, Paradise Row, London (2009); A minus suitcase, Brain Factory, Seoul (2009); The Fuzzy Set, LAX ART, Los Angeles (2009); Circular File Channel, Performa 09, New York (2009); Nothing is exciting. Nothing is sexy. Nothing is embarrassing, Museum moderner Kunst Wien, Vienna (2008); Swapmeet, High Desert Test Sites, Joshua Tree (2008); and This Land is Our Land, The Henry Art Gallery, Seattle (2007).