The Midwest Art Quarterly
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New Issue: Volume II, Number 2 is out now
July 23, 2024
St. Louis, MO
Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis
Paul Chan: Breathers
March 8, 2024–August 11, 2024
Chan is a wildly successful artist, though nothing in this exhibition remotely explains why. A friend of mine called the Breathers (his big nylon fan-bodies) vaguely “moving.” If they are, it’s pure bathos: human forms rendered in a faintly ridiculous and haphazard way, with materials connoting kitschy highway-side commercialism. Some of these Chan calls Bathers, which is a nice little reference to Cezanne and Matisse, though this seems to insist that the awkwardness and tackiness of these objects is in some lineage with those artists’ rendering of bodies. I’m not convinced. Tackiness is not a virtue. Yet Contemporary artists continually deploy it as a weapon against propriety, which is why we are drowning in mediocre camp.
—Sam Jennings