Darren Bader’s second exhibition with Sadie Coles HQ, such are promises, brings together a diverse body of new work ranging from the absurdist to the imperceptible. Reflecting the artist’s personal, sometimes disarmingly literal, relationship with the ‘readymade’, many works make use of familiar objects or structures, often teasing them apart and reconfiguring them. Bader’s new works fall into a number of broad groupings, including word works, trash sculptures, images, collaborations, and tattoos. At the centre of the exhibition are two interactive games which invoke and parody the precepts of participatory art. In a giant chessboard of ceramic tiles, the chess-pieces are supplanted by human players, shoes, audio, and objects volunteered by visitors. In a pétanque court stretching half the length of the gallery, visitors are invited to aim balls at a cochonnet which has assumed the form of a cast piggybank.
Bader has made a sequence of objects in which a familiar and venerable sculptural form (minimalist abstraction, for example, or neoclassical) has become the sealed container for a quantity of waste, such as exhibition detritus or other trash. Extending the idea of the artwork as a container, Bader’s word works are pieces whose physical manifestations are mere ‘vessels’ for the words they host, rather than physical artworks in their own right. They have no fixed physical form, and are saleable as purely verbal statements which may be given a variety of material shapes.
Bader’s pervasive themes of appropriation and replication are also manifested in a large-scale sound installation, in which each speaker plays a compression of soundtracks. Various other works are termed either framed printed images; printed image or framed image and consist of authored works of art – garnered from unnamed and untraceable sources – which Bader has used as anonymous components within constellations of images. These redeployed photographs, prints and drawings often already play with notions of appropriation and translation – for instance a linear doodle in which Schulz’s Snoopy and Charlie Brown are amalgamated – and Bader radically extends these concepts of reuse and rearrangement. In his ambiguously formulated arrangements, authorship is both repressed (we are left to guess at, or spot, the art-historical source) and peculiarly reinforced: the disjunctions between images work to individuate them one from another. In other works, by contrast, Bader has collaborated openly with artists including Antoine Catala, Matthew Cerletty and Jesse Willenbring.
