Braden Skelton: Genre Fiction
@ Weatherproof
3336 W Lawrence Ave, #303, Chicago,, IL 60625
Opening Friday, December 15th, from 6PM - 10PM
On view through Sunday, January 14th
Weatherproof is excited to present Genre Fiction, a show of new work from Braden Skelton.
‘To effectively confront the “naked apocalypse” or cataclysm without redemption, the opposite of spiritual depth is needed: an utterly irreverent comic spirit. One should recall that the best movies about the Holocaust – Pasqualino Settebellezze (1974), Life is Beautiful (1997) – are comedies, not because they trivialise the Holocaust but because they implicitly admit that it is too crazy a crime to be narrated as a “tragic” story….The comic effect emerges because ideological fantasies and reality are not opposed: in the heart of the darkest realities we stumble upon fantasies. Perpetrators of horrible crimes are not diabolical monsters who courageously do what they are doing – they are cowards doing it to sustain the fantasy which motivates them…Most of us know the culminating moment of Rob Reiner’s A Few Good Men (1992) when the lawyer Daniel Kaffee (Tom Cruise) cross-examines the Colonel Nathan Jessep (Jack Nicholson) and declares, “I want the truth!”, and Jessep shouts, “You can’t handle the truth!” This reply is more ambiguous than it seems: it should not be taken as simply claiming that most of us are too weak to handle the brutal reality of the world…And therein resides the final lesson of the stories about venturing from fantasy into reality: we do not only escape into a fantasy to avoid confronting reality, we also escape into reality to avoid the devastating truth about the futility of our fantasies.’
-Žižek
Official Website
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Tags: Albany Park, Braden Skelton, Chcago, Genre Fiction, Weatherproof
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