The Brooklyn Rail

A lot of the best art is useless, yet perfectly so. This is most evident in the reappraisal of objects in the world whose former use was quite certain—a snow shovel, a bottle rack, a chocolate grinder. Duchamp’s readymades weren’t randomly objective though. They were poetically reimagined as proxies by Duchamp in order to evade his “job” as just another reproducer of objects. Louis Osmosis is an artist who is keenly aware of this dynamic, and it is from this awareness that his art derives its frank authority.

Only by vigorously emptying out and detaching found materials from their representational purpose can one then refill them with a convincing contemporary ontology. His abject objects are actually quite rich in their renewed containership precisely because of their equivocal status as securely bounded concepts. Take his Content House, for Los Angeles and Content House, for New York (both 2024) for example, which derive their titles from actual real estate properties occupied by groupings of social media influencers to collaborate on content for platforms such as TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube.

These properties’ discreet locations seem a nostalgic nod to “place,” despite the fact that a virtual limbo is the ultimate destination of much viral posting. By repurposing the fad term “Content House,” Osmosis explicitly critiques the inherently empty gesture of such self-perpetuating content generation. It’s worthwhile considering how the contemporary impoverishment of the phenomenal, to some extent via its replacement by virtual life worlds, affects different generations, the supposed fixity of author/viewer/subject constantly cast into doubt by such an existential dilemma. Content House, for Los Angeles is a white painted and cut-off podium suspended from the floor, stuffed with a cast-off wedding dress and a pile of end-cuts of PVC pipes that resemble an abstract pile of logs. The work’s overall monochromatic tones evoke a ghostly stand-in, similar to how Cady Noland “trademarked” her use of aluminum, chrome and stainless steel to invoke, what Lane Relyea has described as “something more indeterminate: chrome bestows the glossiness of eternal youth, turning heavy metal into speed metal, its surface miraculously wiped clean of the marks and stains of history.”¹ Similarly, the primarily monochromatic collage of Content House, for Los Angeles tends toward a timeless dimension, yet, unlike Noland, for whom the ruins of the American Dream are explicitly mined, Osmosis has chosen much less determined materials to begin with, effectively making their literal (formerly known as) associations even more contingent, hence his excavation of their objecthood takes on a more attenuated character. These are objects lost to their formerly well-known use value, and, perhaps most interestingly, even their status as useful placeholders for contemporary art.

Content House, for New York is a bit more complex, with its synthetic material draped across, creating a moiré pattern echoing the striations of the plywood box it hangs from. On top of this sits a medium to small declension of cardboard boxes in almost a parody of a golden ratio spiral. The plywood box invariably brings associations of Donald Judd, while the cardboard ones are reminiscent of some of Tony Feher’s similarly quotidian box towers. The topper is what appears to be a kitsch paper flower encased in a mylar box, the kind you might find in novelty stores like Pearl River Mart in New York’s Chinatown.

Osmosis drives home a further point about the often equivocal nature of authority, in this instance administered from without, by circumscribing almost the entire gallery space with the kind of black cloth cordon suspended by metal stanchions typically seen at airport boarding gates and museum waiting lines. He’s distributed discrete sculptural artworks at points along the cordon zigzag. With this intervention, Osmosis brings into the exhibition mix commentary about not just administered spatial navigation but also the self-limiting aspect of attention deficit in the incapacity to engage unrestrainedly with objective reality. There is a real connection between the two when one considers the virtual agoraphobia engendered by too much screen time because of an abstract perception manically toggling between an abundance or scarcity of time at all times. As an artist engaged primarily as a sculptor, one of the traditionally slowest time-based mediums, one could even presume Osmosis is projecting a Luddite attitude toward contemporary time with such a broadly arresting gesture.

One large wall of the gallery is taken up by an image of the Statue of Liberty. The image was sourced free off the internet, enlarged, and then plastered to the wall like a billboard. Onto this are attached three cartoonish wood piles, meant to invoke boarded-up and vacant buildings, therefore coming closer than the other works in the show to Cady Noland’s allegories of the Fall of America. Each wood pile is painted in monochromatic colors, (silver, red, and a gray-ish blue, respectively) and evenly distributed across the Liberty image. Sourced as it was from the public domain, this underlying image recalls Hito Steyerl’s 2009 essay “In Defense of the Poor Image” in which she states:

The circulation of poor images feeds into both capitalist media assembly lines and alternative audiovisual economies. In addition to a lot of confusion and stupefaction, it also possibly creates disruptive movements of thought and affect. The circulation of poor images thus initiates another chapter in the historical genealogy of nonconformist information circuits.²

By superimposing a barely there cartoon sculptural assemblage on top of such a “poor image,” Osmosis makes explicit a fascination with the disruptive potential of a conjunction of “lightweight” materials, creating, pursuant to Steyerl’s hypothesis, a newly imagined conduit for a radical re-circulation of “heavy” sociological and philosophical concepts.

A note of comic relief is sounded with the artist’s “Mascot” (all 2024) line up, an absurdist collection of comically personified and antically hatted sperm cell personages. The largest (almost human-sized) is Big Mascot (Ragamuffin) which is topped by what seems a combination of Lewis Carroll’s Mad Hatter with Roald Dahl’s Willy Wonka top hat. This larger work acts as a kind of pied piper to the six smaller (tabletop) sperm sculptures getting in line behind. Two tend toward masculine cliché hats like the propeller beanie of Small Mascot (Co-Pilot) and the Viking helmet of Small Mascot (Weekend Warrior) while Small Mascot (Orient) sports a Chinese laborer hat. Together these seem proxy personifications of toxic male categories for race, gender, and, in the case of the banana peel hat of Small Mascot (Slippery Bastard), a reference to the schadenfreude of practical jokes.

The sheer variety of sculptural invention in the remaining works of the show is remarkable for its witty conceptual consistency: a repurposed Plexiglas riot shield, nonchalantly tagged with a stylized image of a cigarette fuming on its own in Smokin’ Tiki (2024); a retro baby high chair bisected by a galvanized stove pipe, in Chair with Pipe (2024); and an electric organ weighted down on its black keys (sounding a droning chord) by a portable radio tuned to an AM news station, in Score for Ellipsis and Roundtable (2024) each reinforce the artist’s intent to construct of his found materials poetic vehicles that purposefully code switch between their older and newest manifestations. Such an indeterminate situation might prompt what Lauren Berlant has termed “genre flailing” which she describes as:

a mode of crisis management that arises after an object, or object world, becomes disturbed in a way that intrudes on one’s confidence about how to move in it. We genre flail so that we don’t fall through the cracks of heightened affective noise into despair, suicide, or psychosis. We improvise like crazy, where “like crazy” is a little too non-metaphorical. We see it in the first gasps of shock or disbelief, and the last gasps of exhausted analogy.³

Osmosis’s sculptures are cobbled of fractured analogies for how materially removed we have become from the object world’s formerly resistant, concrete reality, and how the artist as scavenger of such a phenomenological ruin can imagine their version of what might be called a funky genre stability. Despite his works seeming at first to be composed of whimsical and fleeting non sequiturs, Osmosis is a profoundly considerate artist who exerts an uncanny capacity to make his ostensibly ersatz sculptures stick in one’s poetic recesses as substantially specific objects.

1. Relyea, Lane, Hi-Yo Silver, Artforum, Volume 31, No. 5, January 1993
   
2. Steyerl, Hito, In Defense of The Poor Image, e-flux, Issue # 10, November 2009.
   
3. Berlant, Lauren, Genre Flailing Capacious: Journal for Emerging Affect Inquiry , Vol 1 No. 2, 2018, p 1567