Accept Baby, 1983

image courtesy of the artist and Forde, Geneva

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Over three decades, MAYER’s work suggests that to resist becoming oedipal capitalism’s human waste is futile. One can only run to the bathroom and hope that their mind has enough time to pry open and squeeze out that small dingy bathroom window and survive the long drop into a new and unknown world. Having his particular approach to late capitalism termed as ‘accelerationism’, the British philosopher NICK LAND has suggested that by escalating capitalism’s processes, its fundamental contradictions will be exacerbated and eventually bring the entire system toward an early grave and with it theoretically rationality as its practiced. LAND notes that in the process, schizophrenia should pour forth from every new rift in capitalist reality; he writes, “Schizophrenia creeps out of every box eventually, because ‘there is no schizophrenic specificity or entity, schizophrenia is the universe of productive and reproductive desiring machines, universal primary production.’ It is not merely that schizophrenia is pre- anthropoid. Schizophrenia is pre- mammalian, pre-zoological, pre-biological … It is for those trapped in a constrictive sanity to terminate this regression.” – In Einer Fatalen Welt: Gender, Abjection, and Pessimism in HANS-JOERG-MAYER by MARC LEBLANC, 2013

Accept Baby (1983) by HANS-JOERG MAYER was part of the group exhibition Accept Baby presented at Forde in Geneva from November 25, 2017 to January 7, 2018.