I READ SOMEWHERE THAT roosters wake up and scream because they know. We’re talking about the kind of esoteric knowledge that is also found in “My Last Will”(2023–24), a multidirectional artist book turned expansive group installation meditating on the agency of artistic heritage by speculating about its own. According to the foreword to the exhibition booklet, global trends of the recent past have shown us “very clearly the nothingness of our existence.
” In the information age, “will to live” means readiness to get distracted, and this show is an all-inclusive: Hauntology, Buddhism, Generative AI, Environmentalism, Trash, Decay, Sex, Joy, Spite, Family, Existentialism, Positivism, Psychoanalysis, Post-Colonialism, Queer Futurism—you name it. Instigated by the artist duo M+M (Marc Weis/Martin De Mattia), both the book and its subsequent constellation into forty-seven individual physical works of art present a vast range of disparate positions, invoking various considerations around the implications of death. I sense the motivation for this springs less from a transnational romanticized memento mori paradigm than it does from sheer logic, since artists are perhaps the only people for whom a happy or successful life often abjectly depends on the assessed value of a postmortem legacy—or better yet, an estate.
They don’t live for retirement, they live at the hands of it. A cruel and often baseless dynamic, because no one can predict the future, least of all c.
