Formalist fuck-ups. Failed iterations. Etymology excised. Faux-tech. Dreading the new semester. Leering at the minimalists. Drunk on Public Art. Molesting the Post-structuralists. Heaving up conceptualism.

Dan GrahamVanDamme. Laurence OscarMeyerWeiner. Frank StellaEllaOla. Piero Maserati. Pet Peeves Klein. John Cageless. Clement SmokeGreenberg. Off Kawara. Yoko NoNo. Raygun Johnson.

Double Dutch serves as a simultaneous descriptor and refutation for the newest collection of work by Liam Crockard, Ben Schumacher and Hugh Scott-Douglas. Created specifically for Scott Projects, Double Dutch implies both the form of play as with three players and a jump rope, and the expression of dismay conveyed by the popular idiom. Observing the work under this guise, a number of crucial questions begin to arise surrounding the framing, materiality and distribution of the present-day readymade and its extensions. Crockard, Scott-Douglas and Schumacher all work from mass produced objects with few reservations for wholesale appropriation or subversion. This implicates everyone: reflecting the unscrupulous tendency amongst younger generations to draw from any and all sources, Double Dutch suggests linkages that may extend beyond their component parts.

Liam Crockard’s collage work often employs disorienting silhouettes and landscapes, which defy seamlessness and favor form over coherent narrative readings, though an alternating sense of displacement and scrutiny arises in the work’s installation as well as questions surrounding the formalities of exhibition and the materiality of rough studio practice . One might consider a continuation of these dichotomies between formal and gestural practice embodied in Hugh Scott-Douglas’ painting and collage. Can a critique and and empty gesture co-exist? How does one negotiate a product for negation? Scott-Douglas engages and abuses the reified gestures of subversive art practice, equally longing for the return of their auratic power and wishing them dead. Ben Schumacher’s work takes up the possibility of a legitimate embrace of the once disruptive Readymade in the information age. Physical presence and participation are taken up in their most immediate form – the online RSVP – and translated into emblematic, permanent objects. Questions of skill and labour remain crucial in Schumacher’s work, but are strong components of both Crockard and Scott-Douglas’ approaches as well. Ultimately what sits at the core of Double Dutch are a series of these dichotomies – deskilling and the readymade, subversion and the hollow gesture and studio and exhibition practices amongst others – which come to reflect something of the climate for art making today. Crockard, Scott-Douglas and Schumacher are not being prescriptive with their work about the way things are. Instead, they prefer to ask questions, make comparisons, and settle somewhere between jump rope and an idiom.

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Tags: Scott Projects, Wicker Park