Aram Moshayedi currently lives in Los Angeles where he is a second year Ph.D. student in the department of Art History at the University of Southern Calfornia.
As Jason Kunke prepares to disembark from CalArts with an MFA, it will be interesting to see what direction he takes with his work. Thus far, he has relied heavily on the institution of art education to frame his practice. Without this frame and its discourses of semiotics and phenomenology—rendered both visually and literally through models, diagrams, and witticisms—the possibilities for inquiry are sure to be both expansive and daunting.
Kunke’s scripting of the art school narrative is most clearly articulated in the three works Unfinished Reading (2006), The Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary and Cultural Criticism (2006), and the series Sign-Up Sheet (2006). Unfinished Reading could be considered the introduction to this narrative, consisting of books and bookmarks arranged on a shelf. Reminiscent of Carol Bove or Peter Wüthrich, Kunke’s work depends upon the materiality of books, while instead putting his knowledge on display; we might ask, are these weathered books really unfinished? The next work to consider in this narrative is the diagrammatic drawing rendered in graphite that maps the contents of the dictionary of the work’s namesake in a large web-like configuration: “abjection” relates to “decentered subject,” which relates to “mirror stage,” which relates to “imago,” and so on and so forth. The mapping out of The Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary and Cultural Criticism employs further irony in its consideration of how the guidebook’s promises of mastery might look when visualized. Finally, Sign-Up Sheet puts all of these exercises to work, providing a space in which one can sign-up “for meetings with Jason Kunke.” Given the contents of the work that surrounds this performance, the direction of that conversation is likely to be rather predictable.
