It’s about technology changing what it means to be human. There’s a self-actualization aspect to it that’s potentially positive, but I mostly associate it with the relentless push to squeeze more productivity out of workers—turning people into reliable, always-on office appliances.
—Josh Kline
Gagosian is pleased to present Laws of Motion, an exhibition of works by Josh Kline, Jeff Koons, Cady Noland, Rosemarie Trockel, Jeff Wall, and Anicka Yi. The exhibition will open in Hong Kong and travel to Gagosian San Francisco in January 2019. Its title refers to Karl Marx’s application of scientific laws to systems of capital.
Forty years ago, the art of Koons, Noland, Trockel, and Wall merged strategies of commercial display and formalism, isolating inherent social archetypes and stereotypes. Laws of Motion begins with key artworks from the 1980s that responded to a world saturated in the aesthetics and language of advertising, exploiting its techniques while making visible its latent and subconscious pull.
Koons’s paradigmatic series The New examines themes of domestic use and hygienic order, employing industrial readymades such as vacuum cleaners stacked and isolated in gleaming museum vitrines. The built-in obsolescence of domestic tools and consumer products contrasts with their aspirational qualities, raising philosophical questions of newness and desire. While Noland’s assemblage of emptied beer bottles and a discarded mailbox in Trashed Mailbox (1989) conjures a potent image of American male delinquency, Trockel’s wall-mounted stove top reduces or elevates a central symbol of domestic life to pure geometric abstraction, obliquely engaging a feminist discourse.