Brody & Paetau - Problems in Contemporary Art

Brody & Paetau - Problems in Contemporary Art: a hybrid of rogue catalog, story collection, and pocket-manifesto, this book pairs Brody & Paetau‘s art with Travis Jeppesen‘s voice to map the comic, grotesque, and oddly tender corners of the contemporary art psyche. It tells you what it is-ten short fictions, one anchoring essay-and then misbehaves with precision. From "Dog Carpets," "Miss Krimi," and "Noise Pictures" to "Artforum Accident," "Made in China," "TransRatFashion," and "Night Shots," scenes slide between deadpan report, prank-document, and allegory: a dead uncle boards a plane, a teacher sprints after a runaway noun, and pictures seem to wag their tails if you look long enough. Plot is the decoy; spectatorship is the crime scene.Jeppesen‘s essay, "To-Lose: Anti-Enlightenment Aesthetics in the Art of Brody & Paetau," sharpens the lens: invention over biography, difficulty over decorum, the productive risk of losing over the narcotic safety of winning. Read against the artworks, it reframes outrage as method and bad taste as a tool-less shock for shock‘s sake than an insistence that art be allowed to make a mess (and make meaning through that mess).Formally, the book wears its hybridity on its sleeve: all images by Brody & Paetau; all text by Travis Jeppesen; graphic by Jan Broz and Daniel Vojtísek. The effect is a sleek, unruly "bootleg catalog" from the art world‘s id-smart enough for the coffee table, impolite enough to bite the hand that sets it there. Open it and the floor gives way: stories swap name tags, essays pick fights, images refuse their frames. Funny, sharp, and impossible to unsee,Brody & Paetau - Problems in Contemporary Art doesn‘t ask where the line is; it trips over it, circles back, and redraws it with a smirk.