None of this shit makes any sense. New York-based artist Uri Aran’s exhibition is a jumbled, confusing, incomprehensible mess. And that’s on purpose.
The basic idea in this show of absurdist videos, drawings, paintings and sculptures is that Aran wants to imply things, but he doesn’t want any of it to actually mean anything. So what you get is drawings and paintings with shapes that your mind jump to. Is that a rabbit? A cowboy hat? A dong? Nope, apparently they’re nothing. But they are pretty good, all dark beige, angry and expressionistic.
The videos find the artist and his twin brother engaged in a bunch of ludicrous mini-plays: pretending to slap each other in the desert, exchanging baguettes, repeating the same sentence over and over again, honking on a saxophone in a warehouse.
There are display cabinets dotted around the room too, like classic museum exhibits, but filled with a mess of toys and drawings. It’s a loud room, visually and sonically, and it’s hard to really wrap your head around.
It’s like he’s saying that everything’s an act that we should question: art, theatre, language, human interaction. Is this drawing actually phallic, or is it phallic because you’ve been told to see this kind of thing as phallic? On the one hand that leaves you feeling frustrated, annoyed and a bit condescended to by the over-clever, slightly irritating, ceaseless refusal to have any of it mean anything. But on the other, you realise the show is an ‘up yours’ to the way people traditionally look at art – searching for symbols, interpreting imagery, delving for what it could all be ‘about’. And then you realise that your urge to try and find meaning in meaninglessness is actually a neat metaphor for life and then, uh-oh: looks like you’ve found some meaning after all.