Gaston Damag, Damien Deroubaix, Manuel Ocampo
7 – 26 July 2007 
 
The usual press release may not serve the purpose for the exhibit which Gaston Damag, Damien Deroubaix and Manuel Ocampo will be opening at the Mag:net on July 7.  Words can only mean to complicate and deviate from the veneer of layered surfaces. Greil Marcus’ seminal book Lipstick Traces : The Secret History of the Twentieth Century seem to forecast the motives and/or raison-d-etre of their unaesthetic and difficult decisions deliberated on their works, despite coming from different ends, different systems, different teleologies, as though we are all as guilty as shoplifting from the dustbin :  

“What remains irreducible about (art or the hell everyone’s been doing) is its desire to change the world. The desire is patent and simple, but it inscribes a story that is infinitely complex – as complex as the interplay of the everyday gestures that describe the way the world already works. The desire begins with the demand to live not as an object but as a subject of history – to live as if  something actually depended on one’s actions – and that demand opens onto a free street (and consequently to the free market as well). Damning God and the state, work and leisure, home and family, sex and play, the audience and itself, ( art makes it possible) to experience all those things as if they were not natural facts but ideological constructs : things that had been made and therefore could be altered, or done away with altogether. It became possible to see those things as bad jokes, and for the (art) to come forth as a better joke. The (art) came forth as a no that became a yes, then a no again, then again a yes : nothing is true except our conviction that the world we are asked to accept is false. If nothing was true, everything was possible. 

In the ( milieu of contemporary art), an arena maintained by society at large both to generate symbols and defuse them, all rules (can just fall away). In (the brash appropriation of Metal lyrics woven into anti-capitalist propaganda sloganeering of Damien Deroubaix, the absurdist retentiveness of  ethnographic iconicity of Gaston Damag, the lump phallo-fascist-centric bingeing cesspools of Manuel Ocampo, demands were more than heard but resounded so to dance this mess around.) “ 

Their show will be on view until July 27, 2007.