“[I] value passive-aggressive art, which is sometimes a fag limbo strategy: pretending passivity, pretending not to fight for ones place at the table, this art may meanwhile house rebarbative aggressions.” — Wayne Koestenbaum, 2004 Whitney Biennial catalogue*
Things in the new Terence Koh exhibit SLEEPING IN A BEAM OF SUNLIGHT (Moran Moran) are different now than they were when the show opened, and may change again during its final week. Cushions have been scattered, plants have grown, books have been read, the resident cat made quick work of a stuffed canary, and the news on the radio dangling from the ceiling has gone from bad to worse. Terence himself may have lost or gained weight, depending on the food that visitors to the gallery have brought for him—his only sustenance. Terence has gone back to the land in the form of a lived-in gallery installation, and all the inhabitants—Terence, his cat, the bees in the hive in the garden on the roof—are, for the duration, doing their thing. It’s immersive, it’s compost, it’s regenerative, and it’s home. Check it out.
TERENCE KOH: SLEEPING IN A BEAM OF SUNLIGHT, through March 11, 2017.
MORAN MORAN, 937 N. LaCienega Blvd., Los Angeles.
moranmorangallery.com/exhibits
Two weeks later, Terence returns to Moran Moran for a group show, an “exhibition associating artworks that are evocative of a desire to create parity and connectedness with the natural world….These artists do not endeavor to generate homages to ecology, or directly reference an environmentalist agenda; rather, the work contends with our origins—a human’s nature.”**
WHERE THE SIDEWALK ENDS (TERENCE KOH, DENNIS OPPENHEIM, VIRGINIA OVERTON, and NICK VAN WOERT), March 25 through May 13, 2017.
MORAN MORAN, 937 N. LaCienega Blvd., Los Angeles.
** moranmorangallery.com/where-the-sidewalk-ends
* Wayne Koestenbaum, “Fag Limbo,” in My 1980s & Other Essays (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2013). According to Koestenbaum, this essay was “partly inspired” by the work of Terence Koh and other artists who participated in the 2004 Whitney Biennial, and was originally published in its exhibition catalogue.
Terence Koh, from the documentary The Future of Art (2010), directed by Erik Niedling and Ingo Niermann.
Photograph by Christian Görmer
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