Frog Magazine Reviews Jack Early at Fergus McCaffrey
"Happiness is a dangerous thing for an artist. It’s easy, of course, to critique institutions; or to address our current environmental crisis, especially when you have the funds to, say, fly a bunch of glacial ice to Paris; or to maintain distance from any sort of content whatsoever by making objects—one hesitates to call them images, and this happens just as easily in three dimensions—that are six or seven times removed from whatever they resemble or were meant to address in the first place, a sort of latemodernist autoerotic asphyxiation that masks itself as “practice”. These easy, played-out tactics, though once novel, are now all that seems left to artists. There is very little lust, or joy, or misery, or beauty, or even ugliness, unless it’s dressed up as something else: as ugly-beauty, or a critique of the lustful gaze, or “the simulacrum of joy inherent in late-capitalist neo-liberal commodity fetishism”… Read Full Article from Frog 16, October 2016 (PDF).
Was on view at 514 West 26th Street, New York, NY from February 18 — April 9, 2016.
Reprinted from Frog Magazine.