Press Release
Retrospective is pleased to present Sebastian Black’s
Towards a Huger Terrace
In the interest of efficiency please regard these lines as a press release and also as an artwork in their own right. In the interest of inefficiency I've printed the page quite large. I've done so because objects estranged from their utility, like fruit picked from a branch, will gradually ripen and rot and it is widely agreed upon that "aesthetic" is a term which describes the most pungent and squishiest stage of this deterioration.
This historical harvest of art from life might have rendered the former useless but the distinction created a useful opportunity for arbitrage. To effectively extract value from this scenario though there had to be an equivalent or exchange rate between the two categories. Sculpture tends to suggest that this mechanism is the human body which is at one time equal parts image and guts, symbol and viscera, haptic fact and optic phantasm. As this is primarily a sculpture show I've decided to tow the party line, and though scale is perhaps the laziest way to get this point across, I think it's the most straightforward.
At my local Chase bank A.T.M.s with O.C.R. (Optical Character Recognition) software have aestheticized the once handy deposit slip. I don't know if the slips are gone, invisible, "infra-thin" or what, but I certainly can't see them anymore. The desks designed for the retrieval of the slips still mope around though and they release whiffs of symbolic significance as they decompose. If I were Parisian, such scents might engender remembrances or foment nostalgia. Luckily for us I'm a New Yorker - brevity prone - and even the most fetid pile of fish heads turns my mind to real estate.
-Sebastian Black, 2014