Brand New Gallery is pleased to announce the opening, on Wednesday June 5th, of Tails, American artist Egan Frantz's first one-person exhibition in Italy. For the show, the gallery will first present a press release, in which it is written that the artist will present five types of artworks divided into:  

 

1.  baguette sculptures made of out baguettes,

2.  arrows,

3.  fountains,

4.  decorative needles,

5.  a gouache of an elephant tail.

 

A visual artist's work, despite an artist's sometimes-curious approach to presenting things in the world, is not philosophical and no one is entitled to take this designation lightly. It has been useful to consider what artists do in relation to philosophers ideas only in the name of attraction to rhetorical impasse. As if thinking the latent confrontation between Frantz and Heidegger, would take some of the work out of thinking the work, even great anti-philosophers such as psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan have been played into relation with Frantz' sculptures. It is true, Frantz' work, which is always made from objects already existing in the world, is always to be taken literally, to the letter. Frantz has been very clear about his admiration for the Lacan's methods, Lacan's matheme, but mostly Lacan's audacity - his "ethical audacity" we might say -- the invention of the cut - the fact that the heart of the psychoanalytic procedure lies in the act itself. 

I'm beginning to understand that unlike philosophy and psychoanalysis, which must be concerned with the transmission of knowledge, the only reason we have to truly care for the future of art is that it must be concerned only with the transmission of truth. Like the Pre-Socratics who identified the powers of discourse with the grasping of being [la prise sur l'être], without mathematization, without the grasp of the letter (la prise de la lettre), the Real remains captive to a mundane reality driven by a phantasm. This is why when asked, "what's this work about?" I sometimes reply, "say what you see". The point is, I believe that when you see something you already have the word (or words) for the thing you’re seeing, so saying it out loud may or may not change how you have already been affecting the work, it points to the fact that with the work itself I've already said exactly what I mean. 

Clement Greenberg devoted his life to proposing pretty much the same thing as what I am saying here. It would benefit art a great deal if Greenberg's ideas became fashionable again because then and only then will artists and their networks of support structure stop cultivating apologists. Only then will art be tough enough to become available to the public.  

Tails comprises some very new works and some more-familiar works I've been publicly developing over the course of the few years I've been exhibiting. Art begins with admiration - so, in words of The Museum of Jurassic Technology, a truly great artwork, which quotes Charles Willson Peale: “The Learner must be led always from familiar objects toward the unfamiliar, guided along, as it were, a chain of flowers into the mysteries of life.” 

 

Egan Frantz, May 19, 2013 

 

Egan Frantz was born in 1986 in Connecticut, USA. He graduated from Hampshire College in 2009 under the advisory of the late poet Robert Seydel. Recent exhibitions include “Egan Frantz: Multiples” at Tilton Gallery in New York and "Room Temperature", Roberts & Tilton, Los Angeles; “The Serial Poem 1 & 2 & 3 & 4 & 5 & 6″ at Tomorrow, Toronto; and "Sequence 3" at Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York. Forthcoming exhibitions include Art Statements at ArtBasel this year.