M HKA Ensembles

The Electronic Monster and Thirteen Ghosts (2024) is a new work created for the exhibition, inspired by the memories of a double-bill horror movie Shaw saw at the cinema when he was nine years old. The installation brings together singing wigs, an aggressive vacuum cleaner, catalogue models, cavemen, a half-cake, half-intestine figure, and the ghosts of industrial power and consumerism in a last, grotesque, and outdated dance. The work resurfaces American society’s debris and components, like an adrift yet very much present floating ideology. It is apparent — in this piece and many others — that Jim Shaw’s oeuvre is marked by a vintage aesthetic that reveals how important the 1960s were in forging his vision as a young artist, while he now uses this aesthetic as a poignant means of both depicting and undermining “the mythologised golden age of patriarchy in post-war America, where white men ran everything”. The present spectacle confronts viewers with a typically European standpoint: hungry for and critical of a stereotypical America, existing beyond a reality one can’t quite grasp.

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