The Final Floor Show

The Final Floor Show is no reflection of analytical or evaluative ambitions. As a temporary and precarious construction, this group show embodies in the first place an approach ex negativo, a self referential and powerless inversion, characterised by persistence in denial. If anything, this exhibition pretends to be a note in the margin of the cultural condition in which strategies of negation and reversal gradually lost true meaning and capacity, or at least in which the perspective on that reversal significantly changed. Irony for example, among other things because of its omnipresence in publicity, evolved in what one could describe as the new straightforwardness, nearly to the point at which the ironic formula touches the 'Bushism', not witty but erratic in nature and very serious business (G. W. Bush: 'If affirmative action means what I just described, what I'm for, then I'm for it.', 'Our priorities is our faith.', It's clearly a budget, it's got a lot of numbers in it.', 'I think the human being and fish can coexist peacefully together') It is clear that the 'feigned ignorance' (>Gr: eironeia), the subtle mockery in which one seemingly serious says the opposite of what is meant, has become a more diffuse notion and, what is worse, takes part in an immanent and socially supported desire for affirmation and approval. Moreover, it appears that irony no longer houses exclusively in the intention of the message, but also in the uncertainty concerning interpretation. A condition of hyper irony? One who mourns this development - a development that is in fact part of a more general deficit of language - is left with only the beautiful paradox that the weight and the meaning of antithesis and inversion were destroyed at the moment when they started interfering with our perception of reality in this blunt way. The deficit of language in favour of affirmative and appropriating systems is perhaps an outstanding breeding ground for a paranoid imagination, but possibly also effectively the mechanism -that defines subcultures through style, and not in terms of transgression, -that generates an image culture in which the e.g. documentary status of an image is a matter of rendering and enhancement, -that creates the illusion that things only exist to the extent that they are didactically translatable, -that...

The Final Floor Show
kuratiert von Gerrit Vermeiren

mit Stefan Brüggemann, Salvador Dalí, Walt Disney, Joris Ghekiere, Gerard Hemsworth, Jesper Just, Mike Kelley, Fabian Luyten, Robert Mapplethorpe, Pamela Rosenkranz, Sung Hwan Kim