contemporary art bibles, no.1
I love @ avocado_ibuprofen. I will muse on their universe.
@avocado_ibuprofen have a 120k Instagram following. At this count, for this narrow of a professional niche, they may as well be dubbed the new curatorial bible, and be incorporated into syllabus globally.
Their posts range from salt-of-the-earth pictorial memes, to conceptual ramblings collaged with degraded photography, to cheeky merchandise promo (which, of course, manifests in meme form). Followers are drawn into a cacophonous courtroom where it seems every possible art theory from the past 100 years is deployed, ridiculed, worshipped, burned down, and resuscitated.
I wearily claim that the main tone is both absurd and absurdist. Absurd in the way that all gen-z memes seem to be, but also in pursuit of humility and self-awareness within such an elitist scene. Absurdist in the hilariously futile atmosphere which emerges in the more ‘profound’ posts. Especially as the conflict between aesthetic affect and the material economy are explored.
~ the moss-bit
One way this manifests is through the recurring bit of ‘moss art’. Moss metaphorises some essential human desire, which is apparently at odds with the contemporary world. This conflict theme recurs, ‘nature’ as anathema to ‘tech’, which is used here to define contemporary life. We double-tap this content through our phone screens and then indulge in Arcadian wet dreams. The classic absurdist bind- simple, but wonderfully ironic.
So, moss comes to mean everything and nothing, all at once. I must admit I’ve grown quite attached to it.
Like all the internet discourse about the cool art that people make during economic recessions, what about all the cool things people curate under fascism? Perhaps future historians will choose to skip our generation, and, could they really be blamed?
~ humble self-effacement
Although the moss-bit is quite tongue in cheek, it also gestures to a deeper yearning, which is felt in all seriousness. To mitigate this, other posts are explicitly self-effacing, and focus on the heavy-handed use of empty language in contemporary art. They mock the way concepts are distilled into simple catchphrases and used with laziness in institutional discourse.
See here “care”, simple but loaded. Emotive and profound, while simultaneously unsentimental.
This next one is a classic. The very title is telling- how can one be anti-contemporary art? Supposedly the most democratic art moment yet, with no real periodic grounding beyond its vague reference to current time.
And, they recently posted this hate message. I love this comment, and the all the discourse on this page. Every time I venture into the comment section, I feel surprised at the amount of people who find this content funny, or dare I say ‘get it’ (ah yes, the grand contradiction).
But anyway, what a great gesture of humility! Posting your hate messages, which actually put up valid arguments. But what is this “actual work” that the hate comment mentions?
~ “work”: image and text collages
This merely is a guess, but the extensive text posts collaged with eclectic, degraded images are avocado_ibuprofen’s said ‘work’. Viewers are taken on a journey of the author’s stream-of-consciousness commentary on art, politics, and contemporary life. These take the form of intellectual ramblings with spontaneous divergences. One moment they are reflecting on the death of contemporary art, and the next on badly drawn dogs. The images used are completely relevant and irrelevant. They use the previously mocked buzzwords without inhibition- care, ecology, etc, before humbling themselves completely. Extreme profundity interjected with inane nonchalance.
and a top comment, which demonstrates the absurdity of the avocado_ibuprofen universe:
Visually too, this ‘work’ is undoubtedly sexy in an industrial, post-structural, poor-image, reproduced-to-the-point-of-grungey-degradation, type of way. It gestures to some early digital aesthetic, encouraging us to lament the present state of technology which only brings us sensory inundation.
Of course, I have to bring up Walter Benjamin’s auras here. While this concept proposes that the atmosphere, affect, and magic of a work is reduced through mechanical reproduction, these text posts seem to lean into the affordances of this process. The images are sent through an unknown number of filters, the traces of their augmentation left in the form of pixels and mottled colours. Its completely aestheticised. It is then only natural to state that these posts are a form of art in themselves. Somewhere between performance, appropriation, and the readymade.
~ concluding ironies
The posts on avocado_ibuprofen seem to occupy every possible spectrum. Their content is incredibly niche while also making very broad claims. It is unserious with an absolute earnestness simmering underneath. It positions artists against curators, and then re-marries them. It reveals the oppressiveness of arts academia, while upholding it unabashedly.
What can we learn from this (if we must?!). avocado_ibuprofen’s profile demonstrates the very current behaviour of oscillating between depth/seriousness and irony/triviality in critical cultural discourse, using one extreme to try and mitigate the other. It reveals the seemingly futile effort of trying to comfortably chill in some middle ground…
Our faithful ouroboros comes in clutch once more, but I fear it speaks to more than the self-sustaining cycle of discourse and dismantlement in contemporary curatorship. It feels more masturbatory, which is a pain to admit. Mocking yourself isn’t that subversive, if anything it creates more inside jokes for you and your contemporary art buddies.
RESIST! and, inevitably, succumb. You are here because you are a wanker, avocado_ibuprofen merely holds up a mirror. You witness your reflection, decide in spite of it that you’re still quite sexy, and walk away unchanged, but with ‘self-awareness’ as a new form of ammunition to whip out at the round table.
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Gabriella Bartolo-Kanellopoulos, written from the online abyss