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reviews christopher k. ho
Christopher K. ho:
hAppy BirthdAy
Winklem an Gallery, neW york
10 January – 9 February
‘Collaboration’ is the idea that animates most all of Christopher
Ho’s artistic enterprise, but it is collaboration conceived differently
than most artists do in the wake of relational aesthetics, or by those
who espouse ‘community’ or have banded together into one kind
of art collective or another. For Ho, collaboration implies or even
necessitates a certain antagonism. His favoured analogy is to the
tennis match, where two players not only compete against one
another but also collaborate in the creation of the match itself, which
somehow exceeds the inevitable outcomes of victory or loss. Here,
‘working together’ is stripped of its hackneyed utopian veneer and
set up as a constant and never frictionless negotiation.
For Happy Birthday, Ho’s first solo show, the artist’s (or really
any artist’s) standard artworld relationships – between artist and
dealer, artist and collector, artist and critic, artist and public – are
staged as so many different collaborations. So for example, Happy
Birthday from Nuit (all works 2008) takes the form of a critical essay
in the accompanying catalogue, itself the site of another of the
artist’s works, Happy Birthday to Ed, which retroactively prices and
redates Ho’s previous body of work for Edward Winkleman, the
artist’s new dealer, who is also offered the promise of future sales
splits. Happy Birthday from Nuit also serves to record a (fictional)
transaction between Ho and Winkleman, in which Winkleman
Gallery was bought by Ho on the date of the exhibition’s opening
and was then gifted back to the dealer after a supposed $30,000
increase in value, presumably due the interval of Ho’s show.
Some may attempt to dismiss Ho’s various Happy Birthday
gestures as so many manifestations of the political economy of
potlatch (insert Mauss here), but to do so overlooks the one piece
in the show around which all of the others necessarily revolve, and
that is Happy Birthday from Ed, a painted polyurethane statue of
Winkleman himself, naked and standing in the pose of a classical
kouros (the piece is indeed a perfect replica of the dealer, who the
artist flew to California for a full-body 3D scan that was then fed to
a CNC machine for milling).
So exposed, Ho draws his dealer into a double sacrifice, the
first of which, of course, is economic: Happy Birthday from Ed is the
only ‘object’ in the show and so stands as the sole enticement to
potential collectors. The second sacrifice, and the more important
one, is Winkleman’s sacrifice of himself – quite literally, his naked body
Happy Birthday from Ed, 2008, milled,
sanded and painted polyurethane statue,
– to his artist and public. Here the conceptual gesture never quite 185 cm (height). courtesy the artist
matches up with, or exhausts, one’s own rather visceral confrontation
and Winkleman Gallery, new york
with the work, which is not to suggest that Happy Birthday from Ed
somehow rejuvenates the category of aesthetic experience proper,
but rather to recognise how fundamentally discomfiting this kind of
doubling, this bearing witness to a kind of loss of control, can be.
Jonathan T.D. Neil
161 Artreview
march_REVIEWS.indd 161 5/2/08 13:56:47
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