I READ SOMEWHERE THAT roosters wake up and scream because they know. We’re talking about the kind of esoteric knowledge that is also found in “My Last Will”(2023–24), a multidirectional artist book turned expansive group installation meditating on the agency of artistic heritage by speculating about its own. According to the foreword to the exhibition booklet, global trends of the recent past have shown us “very clearly the nothingness of our existence.” In the information age, “will to live” means readiness to get distracted, and this show is an all-inclusive: Hauntology, Buddhism, Generative AI, Environmentalism, Trash, Decay, Sex, Joy, Spite, Family, Existentialism, Positivism, Psychoanalysis, Post-Colonialism, Queer Futurism—you name it.
Instigated by the artist duo M+M (Marc Weis/Martin De Mattia), both the book and its subsequent constellation into forty-seven individual physical works of art present a vast range of disparate positions, invoking various considerations around the implications of death. I sense the motivation for this springs less from a transnational romanticized memento mori paradigm than it does from sheer logic, since artists are perhaps the only people for whom a happy or successful life often abjectly depends on the assessed value of a postmortem legacy—or better yet, an estate. They don’t live for retirement, they live at the hands of it. A cruel and often baseless dynamic, because no one can predict the future, least of all curators or art dealers, and only sadists like to pretend they can.
Inevitably, for many of the works on view, existence equals paradox. I enter the exhibition and stop at Agnieszka Polska’s graphic last will: a storyboard telling the story of a boy who gets beaten up after class for telling a story. Conversely, the imagined protagonist of the tale the boy tells is an illiterate medieval messenger who gets punished for burning a letter instead of delivering it. Two narratives unfold within one story line as negatives of each other, with the repercussion being the miserable same.
Installation view, Casino Luxembourg, 2024.
Another work allegorizing life as a death trap in itself is John Bock’s Special Asst. to Asst. Director in Charge of Info (2022), a somewhat morbid floor sculpture of arranged objects allusive to para- or wholly suicidal tendencies (cigarette butts, emptied blister packs, razor blades, strings, hooks, references to opioid intake). Then there is Keren Cytter’s video piece, psycho the rapist (2023), serving as a reminder that even if your physical body is looked after attentively, your mind and its (alter) ego are still likely to deteriorate. The film showcases a psychotherapy session derailing into a quasi-metaphorical schizoid speech riddled with interruptions, distractions, inconsistencies, and abstractions. The loss of agency, the depletion of justice, the decrepitude of physicality, the obsession with deconstructing identity ad infinitum—the aimlessness of intention that derives from that—all echo through the exhibition halls. Some artists seem to hold that death is loss, not legacy.
Alas, the zeitgeist continues to hop around: from realism to nihilism to post-ism. Legacy is fun to talk about because it’s post. It gives you something to want and hope for, motivated but not naive; something that represents yourself but runs detached from your active participation; something unverifiable in a future you will no longer account for. One recent frenzy of blockbuster bisexuality confirms the trend. In Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers (2024) the grind that is contemporary living, manifest in competitive tennis, ends prematurely for Tashi Duncan—who tears her ACL and has to give up on her fashion line, her foundation, and the goal of turning her entire family into millionaires. She relegates all of these ambitions to other “live players,” seductively training them to do her bidding. Tashi is contemporary in that she chooses legacy over life and understands something about tennis that some of the works in this exhibition understand about art. “You think that tennis is about expressing yourself, doing your thing,” she says. “You don’t know what tennis is. It’s a relationship.” Art facilitates relationships, it is nothing without them, and it is the continuity of those relationships that validates the legacy of art. “This is a game about winning the points that matter.”
A work by Clément Cogitore understands legacy not just as something to be left behind, but also as something to be inherited. In Zodiac (2017), a framed C-print photograph centrally hung at the end of a corridor, we see someone getting Albrecht Dürer’s woodblock print The Celestial Map (1515) tattooed across their back. In an era where everyone knows about everything all the time, understands nothing about most things, and lives in a state of perpetual confusion, astrology is like noninvasive plastic surgery for our tired minds: a testament to the age-old human fondness for inventing patterns based on vibes and then taking them to the grave with us. Esotericism was never not-mainstream. Belief is a coping mechanism that precedes even taxes.
By far the most representational of the works incorporated in the show is PPKK’s (Sarah Ancelle Schönfeld and Louis-Philippe Scoufaras) immersive sound installation 09.03 (2024), which in their own words “appropriates high-level nuclear waste (HLW) as toxic land art readymade crap and worships it with a sacred hypnoral dark hole priest club.” Pulling aside the narrow curtain hovering above the entrance, you enter barefoot into a dimly lit tomblike structure, insulated from wall to wall by razor-sharp, geometrically cut dark-gray sponge material. The room invites you to lay down in a hole in the floor, similar to a coffin, and admire the Brancusi-esque sculptural pillar of interconnected readymades (toilet bowls), listening to a symphony of atmospheric lullabies (cradle songs). Erected in memory of a global network of underground repositories housing high-level nuclear debris currently predicted to degenerate in a little over a hundred thousand years, the work manages to humorously critique the perceived irresponsibilities of late capitalism while reminiscing about the modernist turn in art, its readymades—Duchamp’s Fountain (1917) is impossible not to associate—and the theological role they play in an ideological theater persisting in total codependency with the problematics it’s been claiming to subvert for decades.
Elsewhere, another duo by the name of L.A. Raeven, who are twins and have been closely collaborating their entire life, created a distressed robot doll named Annelies (Liesbeth + Angelique). Adjoining not just the tonality of their names but also a dramatized, counter-normative version of their physical appearance, the barefoot replica with bristled hairs and frostbitten skin coyly sits on the floor and sobs to the hypothetical death of whichever twin dies first. Encountering this sensorial robot delivers a haunting, lasting impression, an eerie feeling that the more you try to substitute organic emotion with techne (Plato’s term denoting technology, craft, and art), the more you are prone to create a weirder third thing.
The contribution most in tune with Gen Z aesthetics is the work of Olaf Breuning. Reminding me of the album cover for Charli XCX’s recent brat (2024)—memeifiable, low-effort, minimal—the artist delivers his last will and testament by gradually increasing the luminosity on one of his selfies until the final photograph becomes a blank page. In place of it, a thumbs-up emoji. Enlightenment 2.0?
Having looked at more works spanning sculpture, a few paintings, drawings, more videos, sound, and installation, I leave the exhibition asking myself the same question as was asked of all these other artists: “What remains?” Dwelling on this, I simply cannot get Sean Monahan’s trend forecast out of my head: “Boom. Boom. One ship is flying to the moon. The other is sinking to the bottom of the sea. Everyone is squinting at their boarding pass, crossing their fingers that they are boarding the right vessel.”
“My Last Will” was shown at Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz from July 2 to October 1, 2023, and Casino Luxembourg from May 24 to September 8, 2024.
