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'Sadness, sad affects', according to Gilles Deleuze, 'are all those which reduce our power to act'. In this sense, sadness can be considered a general negative potential, not simply in a literal politically repressive sense, nor in the Romantic sense of a lost full presence, but in the more general and subtle forms of the administration and organization of our intimate little fears.
Since objects become sad through the relations they are entangled in, all objects are potentially sad. Can there, then, be sad art? Alex Gawronski's Sad Art attempts to materialise the production of sad affects. The title of the show, therefore, is less descriptive than performative.
The two 'sad objects' making up the show are silver, tent-sized, and irregularly shaped blocks, squarely placed on the gallery floor and radically inert. From a distance they might be mistaken for solid chunks of steel, but closer inspection reveals them to be silver-painted fibre board. The look is retro-space age, and there an element of obsolescence about these objects. Remember Sky Lab, Challenger?
The two objects repeat each other imperfectly. One is spotty, the other smoothly covered with paint; they are linked by wires and yet turned away from each other. Initially, the encounter excludes us. Yet, although they are sublimely passive, the objects' immense 'presence' seems to require response. And indeed, each attempts its own communication: from within one, we hear the final minor 'chord' of Schostakovich's Leningrad Symphony, a repetitive sigh on loop, a kind of 'pathetic' repeated musical utterance, intensifying its original programmatic theme (the Nazi siege of Leningrad during World War II); from the other, schmaltzy Jewish accordion waltzes flow along, oblivious to the other—as though