Society is the public space of a group of artist studios above Mother Foucalt's Bookstore.
Christian Alborz Oldham, all the way from Berlin, brings Having No Talent is Not Enough. He was art-schooled in the NW. He will visit in person in November.
Society has writers in the house and they wrote this.
"Having no talent is not enough is a concise edit of works in print, sculpture, painting, and publication, including Moon High School, a new 200,000-word florilegium published by SOCIETY on the occasion of the exhibition.
Each of these works is a double: bootleg, replication, edition, pair. Some are artifacts of research of a connoisseurial nature that additionally attends to the historical. One is reminded of another thread of Oldham’s work that traced the trans-Pacific reciprocal flow of historical cultural influence through the works of an avant-garde fashion designer. But there are also here images of that category of casual observational or representational catch-and-release that one once found on tumblr and are now a social media commonplace.
It’s not the questions of authorship, appropriation, fabrication, replication raised by these works that preoccupy us. These questions have been well and properly wrung out after a century of their exercise in modern and contemporary art practices and discourses although taken together they do say something about the practice of contemporary art in 2025. Rather, SOCIETY is interested in the social dimensions of Oldham’s works to include reception and its delays, assertions of a genealogy, the auto-production of discourse, modes and means of circulation of image and text through which social forms may be constructed.
SOCIETY posits additionally that attention to these vertical and horizontal temporal axes is the underpainting, as it were, of art history, taking up the question Seth Siegelaub posed in 2011 through a poster edition recently made again by Oldham in their exhibition at Kunstverein München: 'How is Art History Made?'
Christian Alborz Oldham’s practice presents a ludic approach to the politics surrounding production, re-production, and reception with a particular interest in garments and textiles, technology, copy, transaction, and economics. These concepts are explored in a dedicated practice of ikebana, an art form resistant to permanent exhibition, sale, and preservation. Oldham holds an MFA from University of Washington, a BA in Art History and MBA from Willamette University, and has certification as a freestyle sensei from the Ryusei school of ikebana."
At https://societysocietysociety.com/ 711 SE Grand upstairs above Mother Foucault’s. 5PM-7 Free.
