It is appropriate that the first Chicago exhibition of Josef Strau’s work should take place at Rowley Kennerk, the small West Loop gallery steadily establishing itself as the go-to venue for viewing challenging artwork. Strau, a native of Vienna, has gained a devoted following abroad due to his ongoing efforts as writer, curator, artist and proponent of the “non-productive attitude,” an increasingly relevant conceit that recognizes the value of artistic ideas without requiring a physical (consumable) materialization of those ideas. Strau operated the Galerie Meerrettich, an avant-garde, anti-establishment project space, in Berlin from 2002 until 2006, when he closed it to focus on his own practice, a combination of writing, found-object sculpture, and painting/collage that seems at once humble and aristocratically aloof. The works on display here include several sculptures employing lamps (the mass-produced variety one might find at Target or IKEA); several collage-like works on canvas using, variously, strings of faux pearls, ink, acrylic paint and dust; and poster-sized inkjet prints of typewritten text in dense, ungainly columns that paper an entire wall and appear also on canvas and on sculpture. Standing before each of these posters and reading them in their entirety would take a considerable amount of time, and seems an outrageously inefficient/ineffectual method of delivering prose, yet it appears that this is precisely what Strau expects of his viewer. The writing itself is unsteady ground, an intensely personal amalgamation of philosophical musings, poetry and diaristic prose that follows no discernible logic of grammar or usage, the product of a non-native English speaker taking liberties with language and forging something new. Similarly, the various components of the other works—lamp, string of pearls, individually inked letter—begin to emerge as pieces of a vocabulary that, once recognized, leads to an understanding that is, according to Strau, “a more cautious, casual, quiet understanding.” (Kathryn Scanlan)
Lost in Translation: A Review of Crip* at Gallery 400 The strongest works in the exhibition succinctly express the ways the artist relates to their own body while calling out how the artist’s body and body of work has been perceived or coded against norms or ideals.
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