The Brooklyn Rail

“I’m kind of obsessed with notions of objecthood,” Darren Bader confessed in a 2015 artist talk—a remark that in retrospect is less an admission than a statement of intent. His current exhibition at Matthew Brown returns to objecthood as a construct: what counts as an object, when does it become an artwork, and the point at which that question itself becomes the medium. Bader’s works seek resolution through a series of logic exercises, operating according to Gestalt reasoning: they arrive as wholes that cannot be derived from, or reduced back into, their parts. To describe them piecemeal—as many critics do with the best intentions—is to misunderstand the pursuit at its base level. Language can list, categorize, and caption; it can add intrigue, reveal humor, and belie truth. It cannot stabilize what these pieces are.

Bader has long toggled between image and word, object and text, matter and name—not to collapse the categories, but to force recognition of the very system by which they become categories at all. His exhibitions often look studiedly out of order, and Youth is no exception. The show begins with a work viewers might chance upon only by way of the show’s checklist, everything you don’t need (all works in this show have no date), at the foyer’s (empty) center. Here, for the duration of the exhibition, viewers can titularly ponder.

What follows are an array of readymade, assemblage, and relational sculptures; a web-based video/gif; some photography; a few large-scale works on paper; and at least one conceptual conceit. Skittery aluminum coils are strewn across the floor, like the aftermath of a children’s magic trick, as if the show has been physically shaken and never reset.

Socks (suite), consists of three Amazon delivery totes; large, cubic, and thermal; designed to keep commodities at a stable temperature while in transit; now functioning as ambiguous sculptural repositories. On an adjacent wall, written in pencil, is an improvised instruction/invitation: “Sock donations are welcome! / orange bin: washed orphan socks / green bin: unused rolled pairs / blue bin: washed/unused sock tops.” What might initially read as a charitable collection immediately dissolves into something else through its corresponding checklist entry, which proposes an escalating chain of possibilities: “a. socks for musical notation / b. sock garden / 3. parts of socks for whale cocks / 4. Botox® and/with Poe socks.” (The latter: a pair of socks, knit with Edgar Allan Poe faces, which have been injected with Botox. Forevermore: longevity beyond having one’s likeness sold as knitwear.) The work employs three different conventional display modes—found-object sculpture, museum-style wall text, and bureaucratic checklist language—to place the viewer inside a semiotic trap: no single form of designation outranks the others, and each proliferates meanings rather than narrowing them. Ownership, material specificity, and use value are made unstable through categorization itself. What, precisely, is the artwork—the totes, the notes, the socks (present and anticipated), the donor’s and/or owner’s participation, the accumulating narrative, or the absurd taxonomies themselves? And how does Poe’s eternal youth relate to nearby Substitutions: Qohelet (1), a serial wall totem of urine cups, toilet paper rolls, and other assorted objects of hand-held size embodying a teacher, preacher, and “collector of sayings” who narrated Ecclesiastes?

A unique condition of the present moment is that value often becomes perceptible only within commercial or display frameworks. This reality, and Bader’s antagonistic relationship to it, subordinates concerns with religion and legacy found throughout the exhibition. In 9 plinths that malleability registers as ambient fact, like a sculptural humidity. At first glance, each plinth appears to present a discrete artwork—a 2016 New York Post front page featuring Ruth Bader Ginsburg as “DARTH BADER,” a set of terracotta tiles, a copy of Stephen King’s It under a lumpy puddle of jam—inviting the viewer to search for symbolic charge, anecdotal backstory, or conceptual payoff in the objects themselves. Yet the work is not the objects but the plinths: modular units that can hold anything, be arranged in any formation, and serve as sculptural placeholders for future possibilities. The perceived “content” atop them is merely one among infinite hypothetical configurations. In revealing the plinth as the true artwork, Bader flips the logic of artistic valuation: the pedestal, historically an ancillary site for meaning, becomes the site of meaning, while objects take on the tenuous status of props, proposals, or perceptual bait.

The dissonance cultivated here violates the laws of commercial productivity, destabilizing the expectation that artwork must conform. Bader’s sculptures, once prefiguring the uncanny logic of AI-generated media, now seem to comment on it. His materials, once unplaceable, now echo a world in which Google Lens can identify objects faster than the human eye, yet fail to offer context. If technology has left us closer to semiotic play than ever before, the temptation is still always to decode. Bader triumphs in making that instinct visible.

But meaning emerges only when perception organizes the total encounter—tone, place, strangeness, humor, sincerity—into something irreducible. This is why, paradoxically, to know the story behind each object is to miss the truth. A letter to Tom Hanks dipped in butter may be amusingly anecdotal—even olfactorily present—but fixating on such narrative deconstructs its greater sculpture, early, into conceptual illustration.

Reappropriation, too, is less about source than circulation, with Bader recycling objects from former exhibitions not as ghosts but as reassignments. As such all works are date-less, open to the flux of redefinition, recontextualization, re-combination—only ever fixed for the duration of a command performance. Neither language—nor, in an increasingly digital world, footage—can “stand in” for their encounter in time and space.

With that in mind, Youth arrives in the wake of Bader’s widely publicized 2023 proposal to sell his entire artistic “practice,” a gesture that, had it not “failed,” might have rendered this exhibition—or any future one attributed to the person currently known as Darren Bader—ontologically impossible. If the work resists stable characterization, it is not simply because its parts resist explanation, but because the unity of “Bader” itself is revealed to be provisional. Like the sculptures, the practice cannot be disassembled and reconstituted without losing the elusive totality that makes it what it is—an ever-clever whole forever exceeding, and slipping away from, the sum of its parts.