KYLE
BELLUCCI
JOHANSON

Schematic diagram for a safe place for people i love or; How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love Weathering The Storm, 2017. Courtesy of Kim Zumpfe.

Review: Making Plans at Human Resources

By Dan Bustillo
Temporary Art Review
April 26, 2017


Excerpt

To refuse to engage the political imaginary at a time when it seems especially futile, capricious, or simply inadequate to contend with the violence of a post-truth reality—one that directly impacts specific communities in real ways—makes sense. But if we don’t mobilize the imaginary, how will we ever stave off the curse of Margaret Thatcher’s assertion: there is no alternative? Far from a recent task, this is certainly no less difficult post Brexit, post election, post inauguration, mid travel bans, mid deportations, post pipeline authorizations, mid discriminatory bathroom laws, mid presidential media wars. Furthermore, to merely restate (and often misquote) Adorno’s there is no poetry after Auschwitz, now, in 2017, is to submit to Thatcher’s mandate, that there is no possible alternative to capitalism, and much less (I’ll add) to corporate governance, white supremacy, heteropatriarchal, and heteronormative rule. Held at artist-run space Human Resources, in Los Angeles, from March 18 to March 26, 2017, Making Plans, organized by Kyle Bellucci Johanson and Matthew Lax, decommissions such a ruling by reminding us that to conceive of possible futures, we must first assess our present.

With works by Kim Zumpfe, Astrovandalistas, Ishi Glinsky, Nuttaphol Ma, Jimena Sarno, Díaz Lewis, and Aram Han Sifuentes, Lax and Bellucci Johanson approach the following quote by Fred Moten as curatorial material: “I’m not so much despairing as asking a question about making plans.” In the same conversation this quote is lifted from, On Poetry and the Turntable by Kevin Beasley and Fred Moten, Moten expands on a Deleuzian idea of working through exhaustion and proposes that within exhaustion, we arrive at other ways of making plans, of reconfiguring realities. Moten tells of a “social insurgency that accompanies that exhaustion, that desire to exhaust the system and make something else.”


Read more here.