2 APRIL – 30 MAY 2010

Marginal Utility is proud to present ‘The In Acts Out’, an installation of paintings by the Brooklyn based Artist Jaya Howey.

Through a quiet hostility towards the notion of autonomous artistic production, Howey’s paintings present a ludic engagement with the current trends and debates about the resurgence of formalist painting.

On first glance, Howey’s installation appears to be concerned primarily with ideas surrounding seriality and the object-ness of the painted surface. A closer inspection reveals that each canvas is actually a repository for a subjective and deliberate (albeit still very casual) group of painterly actions pushed just to the point of compositional stability. Howey’s subtle and considered play with the materials and dimensions of the built and stretched surface strikes a humorous contrast with a poster in the gallery that bears a Raymond Queneau quote. The text of the poster is an anecdotal observation of a boy on a bus that is drawn from Queneau’s book Exercises in Style that is an analyses and exploration of the way different modes of speech, rhetoric and poetry are deployed in written language. Situating the project between two registers of meaning, Howey plays a game of attraction-repulsion, where the works can be read singularly or as an installation, or a silent austere hall of mirrors, or a discursive set of procedures placed within a wide field of competing narratives.

Howey’s work engages the preset expectations of what painters produce in the post-minimal landscape. His practice develops through a process of self-interrogation, developing bodies of work that do not merely complement, but often puts in question what has previously been at stake in the artist’s work. In doing so, Howey asserts a stance that is larger and more nuanced than its individual parts.

Jaya Howey shows with Taxter and Spengemann in New York City and was recently included in the exhibition “Besides, With, Against, and Yet; Abstraction and the Ready-Made Gesture” at The Kitchen in New York.

Download Machete March 2010 (PDF)

ÉTIENNE DOLET, Margin of Utility/ AVI ALPERT, The experience of the steal/ HOLLY MARTINS, The Seductive Subversion of Plausible Artworlds:/ JAYSON MUSSON, PACKOFRATS is pro-life/ ALEXI KUKULJEVIC, Accepting the Lesson of the Worst/ MACHETE (GABRIEL ROCKHILL) Interview with CORNEL WEST, The Flickering Light of Performative Paideia… in the Night of the American Empire

Rethinking the Autonomy of Art: Adorno and Bürger

Saturday, March 20 , 8:00–10:00 PM
At Marginal Utility’s new location: 319 North 11th Street, 2nd Floor

DISCUSSION
Extending the Machete Group’s interest in the contested legacy of modernism, this meeting shall focus on the dispute between Theodore Adorno and Peter Bürger concerning the critical significance of the historical avant-garde and the theoretical role played by the concept of the autonomy of the work of art. To help frame the discussion of the material, there will be introductory comments by Alexi Kukuljevic, Gabriel Rockhill, and New York based artist, Sean Paul.

Download Theodore Adorno PDF (2 MB)

Download Peter Bürger PDF (4 MB)

ABOUT THE MACHETE GROUP
The Machete Group organizes workshops, mini-seminars, reading groups, screenings and other events open to the public that have as their general focus the intersection between artistic practice and its theoretical articulation. The guiding proposition of the Machete Group is the claim that practice without theory is empty and theory without practice is blind. The goal of the center is to engender a rigorous and open atmosphere outside a strictly academic context that encourages autodidacticism, a willingness to question all forms of mastery and specialization, and the desire to think critically about artistic practice in an historically, socially and politically astute manner.

Monthly workshops run by Alexi Kukuljevic and Gabriel Rockhill with invited artists and intellectuals organized around select writings and works of art.