Gaga Feminism

Abstract

In an extraordinary body of work, Berlin-based artist Kerstin Drechsel explores the sexual entropy of the everyday and the chaos inherent to capitalism. Drechsel refuses the neat division between a chaotic world ordered by capitalist modes of production and the chaos of anarchy that capitalism supposedly holds at bay. Drechsel’s work recognizes that capitalism too is chaotic and disordered, that the world we live in tends towards breakdown, and that the state simply manages and marshals chaos for capital accumulation and biopower. Anarchy is thus no more oriented to chaos than capitalism. In the series Unser Haus, Drechsel confronts messiness directly in paintings of explicitly junky domestic interiors. In some spaces, the books and the paper overwhelm the spaces that should contain them; in others, the materials we use to clean away the traces of dirt-toilet paper, for instance-become waste itself. e paintings of messy interiors taunt the collector and liken the collecting of art to the collecting of things, useless things, stuff. ey menace and snarl; they refuse to be the accent on a minimal interior; they promise to sow disorder and shove any environment rmly in the direction of anarchy.

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