In Old Rope at the Stephen Friedman Gallery, heaps of used maritime rope overwhelm the gallery space, transforming discarded material into a critique of the overused language of the readymade, which once subverted art institutions but now risks becoming an empty formula. This installation refuses elegance or minimalism, instead presenting a monument to excess, residue, and ecological collapse, echoing not only the weight of material history but also its exhaustion. Your piece with rubble sits near this logic—not as a found object, but as material aftermath, replacing the conceptual with the concrete, and emphasizing what remains when form and function decay. Together, both works reject the fetish of the object and turn instead to entropy as message.
