Review of

Korakrit Arunanondchai

Painting with history in a room filled with people with funny names 3

Palais de Tokyo

Published a Hyperallergic.com as

An Installation that Squeezes the Art Out of Painting

hyperallergic.com/233375/an-installation-that-squeezes-the-art-out-of-painting/

All images titled:

Exhibition view of Painting with history in a room filled with people with funny names 3,

Palais de Tokyo, photo by Aurélien Mole

Perhaps art as thoughtful high culture will become like drugs used to be: a transgressive

covert endeavor. If Korakrit Arunanondchai’s passionate but frivolous extravaganza

Painting with history in a room filled with people with funny names 3 is any indication

(and it is), we may be living in the stupidest times ever: a state of culture where much

debased art has capitulated to idiocy and banality.

At the Palais de Tokyo, New York-based Thai artist Korakrit Arunanondchai, a 2012

M.F.A. graduate from Columbia University brought to the world’s attention by Hans

Ulrich Obrist in Kaleidoscope, attacks our eyes with dripping lurid paint gone wild in the

presence of fashion dummies. His obscurantist Society of the Spectacle painting-as-

installation foams at the mouth and spits on us, as he poses like a heavy metal, cock rock,

super stud star of painting. His brush is so hard!

Exhibition view, photo by Aurélien Mole

But Arunanondchai’s shtick, which is more like masturbating a corpse than rocking out,

is a defilement of painting, not painting, turning it towards the chaotic stuffed emptiness

into which our globalized culture has plunged us and to which some artists seem to have

little option but to subscribe to. Arunanondchai’s heaving painting installation is

indulgent, boring, farcical and bleak. It is a place where our artistic sensibilities are

blunted by inanity. How much mindlessness can painting accept?

Arunanondchai foolhardily addresses, without critical distance, the all-encompassing

sensation-loving subject of the way many people live now. He has abandoned minority

high culture, which was truth seeking, profound, quiet and subtle, in favor of mass

entertainment, which must be accessible (written large). He presumes the viewer docile

and passive, lapping up his juicy world of splashy appearance. He has reduced the role of

the audience to a kind of stoned, bored, brutalized staring spectator of art as tawdry

theatre, where inner mood shifts from faux violence to unfurnished ridiculousness. His is

a sad devolution for painting, from what it used be. He, sorry to say, raises again

pessimistic opinions about the survival of coherent painting practice that isn’t primarily

entertainment oriented.

Arunanondchai’s bread-and-circuses painting installation makes claims of blending the

Buddhist and Animist framework of Thailand with popular culture. I must ask why

anyone with a thought in his or her head would be participating in such a cultural ideal,

one that is essentially valueless? The show bends (bows, actually) to aspersions of

accessibility at a time in which there is no resistant high culture left. It abandons

criticality and aesthetic discrimination with shifty enthusiasm.

The show is the epilogue to a series of works created during the past four years, about the

making of a painter. Not that this imagined “painter” offers any solutions or alternatives

to the art of painting. Rather, Arunanondchai develops a, what he calls, “memory palace”

for this imagined Thai denim painter.

The installation is divided in two parts. The Body is composed of awful large denim body

paintings, only visible in its entirety from a bird’s eye view. It is presumed to “function as

a landscape and a stage for the audience.”

Exhibition view from above, photo by Aurélien Mole

The Spirit, the second section, presents a video where the artist converses with Chantri -

the invisible main imagined “painter” as voiced by Chutatip Arunanondchai. Here

Arunanondchai’s visual bluntness reduces art to amusement, like celebrity watching or

sports or Trump-a-mania, disconnecting it from the historic reverence that was art. He’s

not a particularly gifted painter/polemicist and not nearly as entertaining as Paul

McCarthy’s “Painter” (1995) character.

His Painting with history in a room filled with people with funny names 3 , as curated by

Julien Fronsacq, leads us away from the history of art as modesty, ritual, mystery and

beauty. This bleak vomit-suggesting painting explosion should be considered by any

thinking person (young or old), exactly once.

Joseph Nechvatal