Doug Aitken, Bill Burns, Adam Chodzko, Gary Graves, Matthew Higgs, Elizabeth Peyton, Pike Powers, Maggie Roberts, Gillian Wearing
It’s hot and you’re tired and things wont work. In the circumstances, any course of action seems justifiable. Sounds familiar? Perhaps you’ve seen too many movies where this passes for a plot - a bespectacled loner out to buck the system goes mad in a mall with a machine gun. But forget Falling Down, Peter Finch said it best years ago: “I’m mad as hell and I won’t take it any more.” So where does that leave us now?
Okay Behavior brings together the work of nine artists from North America and the United Kingdom. Through diverse means, each records traces of human activity, or offers us the residue of an act as an artwork. They do so against a backdrop of references - cultural, social, or obscurely personal - that locate the work firmly in our experience of modern life. Inevitably, this is to the detriment of conventional aesthetics, for the closer art gets to life, the more such categories are rendered problematic.
Executed in a spirit of fascination rather than judgement, the work of these artists suggest the inevitability of certain actions. Pascal famously thought that the problems of mankind stemmed from our inability to sit quietly in a room doing nothing. He was right.
Okay Behavior has been curated by Gavin Brown and Gareth Jones. Publication available.