Booklyn Artist Alliance is pleased to present Dora Budor + Maja Cule’s second solo show Life is Full of Important Choices. Budor + Cule will exhibit photographs, video and performance from their new series.

The title “Life is Full of Important Choices” comes from an advertisement for German beer that was remade into an ironic tag-line to describe everyday objects that have the same function but look different. Budor + Cule bring objects into context and remove their tangibility by creating inverted narratives and constructed realities. In their work’s absurdity and mystery comes from “unheimlich” and wonder but also from commonness as well as things you see when you open the door of a refrigerator.

Dora Budor + Maja Cule are a collaborative duo of visual artists from Croatia. They work and live in New York and Berlin. They are known for work which has subversive humor, and use of performance and gesture elements to create fictional narratives. Budor and Cule met in 2003 and held a symbiotic design practice for six years, recently Wallpaper magazine named them “the next game-changing talent”.

_Opening reception: Saturday January 22nd, 8 – 10 PM Performance will start at 8 PM For press or scheduling guided tour with artists please [email protected]_

Rosa Luxemburg suggested using this transcript of a 27-minute long conversation with the artists to accompany the exhibition

ROSA LUXE.: Intangibility is the ability to walk through solid objects, apparently. It is very possible for metahumans, aliens and spirits to have this ability. And if you happen to be a Ghost, it is something of an automatic situation. DW… but can it be trusted? PF… and does it have meaning?

ROSA LUXE.: (Should I just crawl into my bed and stop producing things all the time?) I guess it means abstract, being abstract. Please, by all means, consider also: irrelevancy, insubstantiality, nothingness, painted dog turds, unreality, inconsequence, littleness, pettiness, mystery, indissolubility and X. Statistically, intangibility is the separation of molecules, whose methods include merging molecules with others, mimicking elements, alchemy or transmutation. The sacred Duchampian fodder. But frankly, it’s all about the so-called “poetics of matter” and the bringing together of various rags. Ostranienie, immaculate conception, numinosity or suchlike. Every color has a history; red is the color of the communist flag, the color that makes a surgeon move faster and the color of passion. Well, guess what, I don’t see any RED in here. Deco(lo)ration can be a state of mind, an unusual perception, a misheard whisper, an old songspiel – and all those warm, mushy things one remembers from childhood when one went to the supermarket with mum and dad stealing tiny plastic horses and things made of rubber. Plein air, I’ve always liked that expression, en plein air, oh yeah.

• What we have to deal with is this: contemporary art hates us. Perhaps platonically but you get the picture. And what we have to understand is this: form is always metaphorical, never totally metaphysical; it is never a ‘destiny’ but always a fact. To put an object on a baroque base or clean it or whatever, means to monumentalize it, to make everyone aware that it exists or that it gradually, mesmerizingly, seizes to exist. The murky sludge dripping down into the plastic bottles underneath then becomes a certain idea of art, a certain idea of life, or a certain idea of a certain idea. Formung & entformung. Things are way easier to say in a foreign language, I figured that one out last night. Foreign words are fat and opaque: fleshy isolators of meaning. Mother tongue is pure naked signification. Ok, now bite me.

DORA + MAJA:* With pleasure. We like to waste our time, waste our waste and imitate life ad nauseam. We occasionally make exotic and opulent tapestry wrapping common bricks in discarded scraps of fabric. We play with the cultural and material residue of society, we strip it of its primary essence and function, we reduce it to the state of semantical ruin, we resurrect it , through foul play and desecration and re-assemblage, as not the New Thing, not an Abject d’Art, but as process and method and joie de vivre!

ROSA LUXE.: I think I remember when, in the early 80s, the work of Joseph Beuys, which featured a very dirty, very disgusting bath, was scrubbed clean by a gallery worker in Germany. And then there was that occasion when Marc Quinn’s “own frozen blood” head melted when Saatchi accidentally turned of the refrigerator whilst trying to fix his champagne. Random thoughts: 1 the weather outside suffocates like a sweaty, two-faced embrace 2 twin peaks smells of coffee, apple-pies and fog 3 if operaismo was workerist, post-operaismo is post-workerist. Duh. Yeah that’s fine, but…

DORA + MAJA: We hear the actual and meaningless ‘drip, DRIP’ as ‘drip, DROP’ and we have a story. Perhaps we ignore the formal properties of images in favour of their RAW instrumentality. Raw sewer, so to speak, we like that, yes. It’s the whole sloppy melodrama of awkward juxtapositions, unforgivable methods, eroded meanings, transubstantiation, just don’t get us started. We hate discussions and exchange of opinions because answers don’t exist and people are stupid. And in our case, there is no moral collision. We PRODUCE according to the postulates of practical reason. No, we will never be old enough to be excited by the “fulfillable” dreams. We like to make strange distinctive faux-rubbish piles which are able to stand up next to big, surreal seaside attractions like giant plastic gorillas and neon parrots, how about that? And yes, we know it’s shocking to all of you PC bohemians, but use-value is better than ironic-misrecognition. Our own private Merzbau is not some colloquial vocabulary of forms, but an Esperanto of functions! Yet most of the time we are spinning hula hoop, practicing the crucial 80s dance moves and watching gay films till the bitter end; what to aspire to NOW THAT WE HAVE ACHIEVED ALL OF THAT? /children of darkness, when thing start cracking up RIGHT in the middle, what will you do? what will you never do?/ I guess the only thing left to do is auto-dissolve. Actually, Metzger, a German artist who lives in east London, invented “auto-destructive” art in 1959.1959? Well, forget Art then. PLEASE.

ROSA LUXE.: Thesaurus.com asked me this morning: do you like our four-syllable substitute for happy? related questions: what is the MEANING of dvd? what is the MEANING of pdf? I scratched my tongue the other day and now I’m eating salty peanuts and thinking how those methods of self-punishment become more and more subtle each year. And I still haven’t decided if it’s better to be a living mediocre or a talented abstinent from life. I’m measuring the charge of objects. The veil lifts. Perhaps all this is just an attempt to nail the coffin shut on the whole ‘God is in the detail’ mentality. Over to you. Yeah that’s fine, but.

DORA + MAJA: In a nutshell, my dear: we molest form while desaturating content. We want to throw things in the direction of nothingness, into the structure of the second and last chance, into the glow of peripheral illumination! Ask us about those small painful distortions, those tiny cracks in the floorboards, the tacky little cigarette burns! Ask us about the mini-infections we get when our skin rubs against all the impoverished material from those most suburban of malls, all the plywood, hammers, telephones and chairs, rotting fruit and readymades, all the polyurethane! Oh we do not intend to ever abandon Bauhaus or China or Home Depot to mass culture and advertising and tourists, we are reclaiming that for us, cause all that we do, you see, is ever so slightly about redemption. Redemptive aesthetics you could call it, if you were not too squeamish, and so polite and so fearful of sounding overeducated.