Claire Laude – Untitled from Upward on the Streaming It Mooned (2016)

I’m super into Laude’s work.

My immediate reaction to encountering this was: It reminds me of Stanley Donwood and Thom Yorke’s work on the album art for Radiohead’s OK Computer.

Actually, it took me a bit to figure out why in the hell I jumped to that conclusion. See I read the line work to the right of the figure as De Stijl-esque.

As–I’m sure–most of you know, De Stilj was essentially a form of abstract art based in Amsterdam, interested in reducing representation basic forms and colors. One of the key practitioners being Piet Mondrian. (It’s interesting to note that Mondrian fled mainland Europe for London to avoid the advancing tide of fascism that served as a prelude for the Second World War.)

The lines run off the wall onto the body and in so doing becomes less abstract.

There’s also the way in which the square and above the figure and the crude right arm, suggest a sort of robot personae. It’s as if an automation and abstraction flow together into a body rendered penitent through connection.

And if there was ever an album that dealt whole cloth with the topic of alienation in a historical context, it’s OK Computer. (Of which–confession: I appreciate only reluctantly. Radiohead has never and from all appearances will never be my bag.)

But I do think it’s interesting that OK Computer was released right around the same point into Clinton’s second term as we are into the current ‘president’s’ first… Although there isn’t much separating Clinton’s neo-liberal globalization vs 45′s nativism, there is a means in which abstraction as a trend has been co-opted and employed as a means of perpetuating these varied flavors of fascism.

It feels to me as if Laude is trying to harness the lightning of understated menance for the purpose of questioning the invisible effect rules and codifications of form have on shaping not only the relationship with the viewer but history itself.