The Closer I Get to the End the More I Rewrite the Beginning
at Human Resources

Mark Leckey, Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999). Video via YouTube, color, sound, 14:44 minutes. Image courtesy of the artist and Gavin Brown’s enterprise.

The Closer I Get to the End the More I Rewrite the Beginning toys with cycles, time, and the construction of order in our late-capitalist world. This state of rewriting—or beginning anew—marks a moment of ineptitude. The end of the page, it seems, is always a far-off site. Modes of productivity, the workweek, and other social systems of order are challenged. The surveillance state, the Arab Spring, and various current events frame these contexts. Here, we recognize that we are forever grasping for something just beyond our reach. Most works in this group show compellingly inhabit this awkward state of exhaustion.

There is a sense of striving throughout, a desire to make objects whole, perfect, or at least improved. Broken objects like fragmented glass are reformed, reshaped, and reconstructed. Bodies, too, are trained, or, more aptly, corrected in order to try to fit more idealized models. But even when this works, the cracks and seams are all the more visible. Failure bubbles to the surface.

Motion calls forth a sense of desire, as if rocking toward a particular end. In video works, hips sway on a 1980s London dance floor, feet march in a turbulent 2011 northern Iraq protest, and thrashing arms club a stationary bicycle. Adrenaline seeps through the screens, coursing through bodies that inhabit this range of places and junctures. One figure’s end, however, might very well be another’s beginning.

Where, exactly, are these bodies headed? Does it matter? The show makes striking claims about the places we can go, or the static sites where we can remain. This sense of freedom is exemplified by Erika Vogt’s wood and plaster sculptures, which droop from a rope in the downstairs space, dividing the room in a graceful arabesque. At once grounded and suspended, they inhabit both possibilities at once.

The Closer I Get to the End the More I Rewrite the Beginning runs from November 21- December 13, 2015 at Human Resources (410 Cottage Home Street, Los Angeles CA, 90012)

Klara Liden, Bodies of Society (2006). Video, color, sound, 5:08 minutes. Image courtesy the artist, Reena Spaulings Fine Art, New York and Galerie Neu, Berlin.