The Chicago Reader published a blistering review of the Cape Farewell exhibition currently at Columbia College.
“This sort of easy moralism, pandering to a like-minded audience, is bad enough. It’s the bland egotism that’s truly unsettling. The artists have put a hand on nature, framing it, manipulating it, and hauling it home like a lion pelt collected on a safari. They emulate the hubris they’re trying to indict. They suggest that nature is ours to have, hold, and fuck with. And fuck, with its sexual connotations, is the right word, too: there’s sadism in the unacknowledged, fetishized lust for control that’s put on display here. The world serves and is subsumed into the artists, who use it for their own pleasure and what they take to be its good.”
Thanks for this post… I’ve actually thought about this for a long while myself. I think in time more artists will consider that far away artists residencies are part of culture of globalised consumerism and much deeper thinking is needed. Creating such work also provides little room for audiences back home to relate to. Good to have the issues raised