At Elizabeth Dee, Miranda Lichtenstein Goes Shopping for Imagery

THE DAILY PIC (#1440): This is a photo by Miranda Lichtenstein, whose latest solo is now at Elizabeth Dee in New York. The image shows one of the manipulated plastic shopping bags that are the main art form of her fellow artist Josh Blackwell. I’m not sure I know of another example of works of found-object art, or “assisted readymades”, by one artist being used as found objects in the art of  another.

This matters because we seem to have lost track of how vexed the whole found-object tradition has turned out to be. We see it everywhere in today’s contemporary art, but it is mostly used naively, as though there were nothing at stake beyond what the found object happens to look like. Lichtenstein and Blackwell know that there’s much more to it than formal play.

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