Two Flags

Javier Arce | Beate Geissler/Oliver Sann

June 30 - July 29, 2022

There has been a shift that has been in the making for some years now. As many of us either brace for the worse or hope and work for a shift in the other direction, we find ourselves on the cusp of two Americas.

Javier Arce’s "Serie Estrujados" reflects upon the hallowed significance of the great works of art. Here, Arce has redrawn them on indestructible paper, crumpled them up only to recover them later.  Ironically, the resulting photocopy feel imitates a strategy of the vanguard, which consists of avoiding craftsmanship to distance itself from design and decoration, which paradoxically sum up the refinements that great art abandoned. This exhibition features Arce’s reproduction of Jasper Johns’s Flag (1994) as an artwork that ensconces an entire wall of the exhibition space.

Jasper Johns has stated that the flags that populate the artist’s oeuvre aren’t about their inherent symbolism, but more about the stroke, the material, and the density or scarcity of paint. As Arce’s piece is conceived to visibly sag under its own weight and completely envelop the viewer, we are confronted not only with the marks of its making, but also the emotions that are embedded in this emblem. What do we do with these symbolic pangs of patriotism and sense of duty instilled by our ingrained desire to pay constant homage to the undead white males that created the rules and the chaos?

Beate Geissler/Oliver Sann’s Volatile Smile, published in 2014, investigates the impact of technology on systems of global commerce. Sparked by the glut of foreclosed and evacuated homes the artists encountered during the early days of their tenure in Chicago in 2009, Volatile Smile includes images, otherwise unseen, from the operating centers of Chicago’s financial industry. This publication suffered controversy as one of the finance houses featured in the book sought legal action against the artists, fighting to have some images excluded from this body of work. Rather than involve themselves with a lengthy and expensive legal battle that could be financially devastating, even if eventually victorious, Geissler/Sann opted to settle, agreeing to obscure the images in question. 

In this exhibition, the censured images, now fully darkened by swaths of black paint are accompanied by images of groomed poodles, visible and hidden, a reference to Goethe’s Faust I, the unassuming animal that follows the doctor back to his study and then transforms back into Mephistopheles at the beginning of the familiar tale. While Volatile Smile is borrowed from the term volatility smile, an implied volatility pattern that arises in pricing financial options, this latest chapter transforms it into a Machiavellian smirk.