I am not against the sacred, as much as I am not against dragons or unicorns. I just have this simple Abrahamic need to unmask the addictive innocence of mankind.

- Mookie Tenembaum

When I think about the work of the artist Mookie Tenembaum, there is a cluster of words that come to my mind: abstract, conceptual, eclectic, rupture, biopolitics. His work encompasses photography, video, sculpture, object design, and performance, and he dares to take on any subject. In an attempt to write about his work, I understand that abstract art is intended to unlock or bring to light the subconscious mind. Well, I say to myself, there is Tenembaum. When I think of the eclectic, I am referring to an open mind, without limits, to take the best from anything. Tenembaum, again. We may have the audacity to characterize him as a conceptual artist: a form of expression that tries to avoid optical stimulus in favor of intellectual processes in which the public is invited to share a thought with the artist. This notion does not define him at all. Many of his works, in a tangential way, border conceptual matters; is only an approximation to Tenembaum. However, his art is difficult for many due to its excessive verbal rhetoric. People do not like going to galleries and reading explanations. This does not happen with Tenembaum: reflection plays an important role in his productions, but his work is what you see, and there is no text other than visuality. I ponder: While the modern artist maintains a human relationship with the work and the viewer, the postmodern one dehumanizes himself; he sells himself completely; he prostitutes himself in his integrity or is absolutely absorbed by the system he says he questions, which is the same concept. The more anti-system the postmodern artist thinks he is, the more he strengthens those structures that applaud him, reward him, and pay for his attacks, creating a false sense of engaging in self-criticism. Since post-modernity is dead, is, by chance, someone called Tenembaum the way out of postcrisis contemporary art? Thus, the bio-political activation of Tenembaum’s art becomes his most frightening facet because, in the name of art, everything can or must happen. He acts critically and cynically at the same time, as the same staging, with all its frontal criticism and all the debate it proposes, is the sum of artistic profitability itself; art can never cross the barrier of its symbolic niche and bring to the scene the shadow of the desperation of its own impossibility. Contemporary art is and will continue to be the sole survivor of the crisis. The same is said of roaches. In both cases, it is possible – and deplorable – that it may be so. Perhaps, in contemporary art, there is space left for true aesthetic rupture and accurate criticism of the established, activities always encircled by the tension produced by the risk of feeding back the beast that is fought: the addictive innocence of mankind.

-Luis Campos, Media Arts Associate Professor, University of Buenos Aires, Argentina