George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann "Oliver Payne and Nick Relph: ‘Ash’s Stash’" @nytimes by Karen Rosenburg
An installation view of “Ash’s Stash” at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, with shelves of formerly trendy gadgets and accessories. Credit Courtesy the artists and Thomas Müller/Gavin Brown's enterprise, New York
“Today everything is always ‘on’ at once, simultaneously forever — we’ve simply run out of past,” the British duo of Oliver Payne and Nick Relph write in a statement for their latest show at Gavin Brown. There, boutique-style shelves hold small, colorful assemblages of formerly trendy gadgets and accessories, among them, Reebok pump sneakers, Sony Walkman cassette players and one forlorn-looking Macintosh Classic computer with a protruding floppy disk.
The whole installation is itself a “reissue”; it dates from a booth at the 2007 edition of Art Basel Miami Beach. And the artists have restaged it because they found it oddly predictive of the current trend for sharing carefully chosen photographs of our bookshelves and closets on social media. As they cleverly put it, “Cupboards become catwalks, and possessions pose for the camera, waiting to be liked.”
The cheeky little displays here do look as if they had been made for that exchange, with their high-low, tasteful-kitschy juxtapositions; witness the gilded cat that seems to be “driving” a black-and-gold sneaker, with a Confederate flag pin serving as a hood ornament, or the bottle of Chateau Latour that sports a chunky white digital wristwatch. (The many wine bottles tucked into sneakers may balance out all the expired tech and fashion with suggestions of increasing value.) The assemblages also make an interesting complement to Jeff Koons’s boxed Hoovers at the Whitney — which implies that to “run out of past” is not exactly a new phenomenon of the Instagram age. In fact, it sounds a lot like postmodernism.