Z. Susskind
New: Anti-Fog

December 13th, 2023 - February 4th, 2024

Tonight, hold a tall beer.

The silver can, black and red, should feel cold in your hand - like a fish, a fresh sardine.

A kilo of salt eats away at the dock and the moss eats away at the salt. Little births everywhere and the rust, leaving metal for water at every lapping edge, colors and shimmers when the citrus sunsets start their show and fins cut the bay like mirrored teeth.

You look out into the harbor, there’s the passage way, there’s the green statue. Steam, dripping from the bridge soaring over women carrying children, guys taking down buildings with their bare hands and the ruins, shining through dust clouds swirling ever skyward.

The best policy melts across the asphalt, down amidst the sewer grates, the fog, the smoke, the glowing lights in wet windows, the coins glinting in the road works at the busy courthouse. If you told me you knew and I said I didn’t believe you, how would you prove it to me!

My encounters with Z. Susskind can be best described as a process of interdependent facilitation in which a higher order of consciousness and connection is forged and constantly reinforced through a perpetual-relational-motion arrangement of the seemingly disparate, but upon deeper excavation, intertwined idiosyncrasies of ourselves.
I’m aware such a mouthful doesn’t provide the modeling necessary to quite illustrate the magic I’m grateful underpins our friendship, so I’ll resign myself to characterizing our encounters as explicitly ritual and therefore, sacred.

Z. Susskind is a New York-based, what I’d denominate as, conceptual artist utilizing found readymade objects that he assists as glyphs within a metaphysical language that seeks to express “potentiality” through a lyrical arrangement of disparate, and often dispensed, material. More importantly, though, he’s a friend who presents as an interesting prospect within the aesthetic-obsessed context of New York Contemporary Art — a prospect that propositions, in my relative view, a different conception of engagement and experiencing art that isn’t explicitly oriented towards the gods of spectacle, recognition, and consumption around which the CAW and the culture industry at large cohere. It feels as though we’re nearing the end of a period that can be best described as a stifling, sterile languor in which the culture industry failed in producing anything nourishing, but produced a ton for consumption, and while I experience extreme trepidation and reservation upon advancing such a claim, Susskind represents a satiating hope emitting from the ruinous waste trash heap on the other end of our conspicuous consumption.

His work isn’t in service of a particular aesthetic or zombified form, rather, it conveys a ritualism that’s present in the process, just as well embodied in his day-to-day existence, and orients itself towards a higher ideal. A higher ideal that can be succinctly understood as an ethos of potentiality, in which Susskind is intentioned, reasoned — always with a rationale — as a vehicle of facilitation, and with great sensitivity, for the readymade qualities, or “potential” in objects, people, and space. The “potential,” for Susskind, is realized and rooted at the point of relation, in which novel possibilities are encoded, and what I characterize as his art can be fulfilled.

It became obvious to me Susskind was engaged in something less subordinate to the spiritually bereft prevailing ethea of contemporary art that largely concerns its selves with the formulaic — a spiritless standardized eclecticism in service of our imploded, fractal subjectivity that liquidates as commodity into the hyper real labyrinth of technocapital. In other words, you are the brand, man, and we worship consumerdom here. Part of this reaction also entails Susskind, whether knowingly or unknowingly, taking upon himself the stewardship of continuing art history; a paradoxical act in an age of imploded historicities, but an act, no less, that distills an old sense of the artist’s responsibility. Wielding these two artifacts of art history, the readymade and the anti-aesthetic, Susskind continues a legacy of commentary on human hubristic myopia, a tyranny of the perceptual (qua representational) and its excesses therein, that has roots in the spasms within the question of “what constitutes art?” spurred on by Duchamp as a matter of tension with the homogenous “retinal” pieties that governed early 20th century modernism. In this vein, the readymade or anti-aesthetic weren’t uprooted aesthetic commodities or objects unto themselves, but rather an emergent primordial reaction to a totalizing modernist logic colonizing the industrial aesthetic in which rigid conceptions about the “potential” in and of objects, and our relationships to them, were harbored.

A rejection of celebrating a prevailing order for the pursuit of a metaphysical conveyance about a specific condition and moment contextual to modernism’s ascent that has germinating seeds which, in my view, goes on to eventually blossom into what is Susskind’s vignette-like object language that expresses the ineffable qualities of the decay of high modernism. Duchamp’s influence thereafter metabolized and diffused to the proto-conceptual and assemblage art of the Dadaist, eventually André Breton’s The Crisis of the Object and the yearnings for the unconscious in the Surrealist and the Abstract Expressionist, and then the Situationist International; all of which wielded these artifacts to challenge that which enjoyed imposing consensus within art, culture, thought, and now has since been embraced, or as I’d put it, sublimated into what is understood as contemporary art, and what was the postmodern, synthesized into a hyper-modern engine that fuels a homogenized eclecticism in which these artifacts exist in a disembodied pantheon, accessible for pilfering from a reproduction in service of our schizophrenic and ever-remixed present, that loops and loops endlessly as a result of the gluttonous consumerist force that looms supreme over New York contemporary art. As traditional forms of exhibiting lose their ability to enchant, as museums and galleries wane to the triumph of the mass reproduced image and with that become the utensils through which an insatiable gorge of mandated gruel and cargo cult detritus of glory past occurs under the veil of exalting the victory of universality, the invite made by Susskind to his downtown studio for a private viewing of his in-studio exhibition and chat on his process, how such constrains and coheres in his embodied life, was a welcomed one.

Woodson Legrand
New York City
2021-2023

Z. Susskind lives and works in New York City. His sculptures and image-objects have been shown in the United States and Europe since 2008, including at Gladstone Gallery, David Zwirner, and Kasmin Gallery in New York, Galerie Rodolphe Janssen in Brussels, ReMap in Athens, Fondazione Museo Pino Pascali in Polignano a Mare, Italy and Musem Dhondt-Dhaenens in Deurle, Belgium. New: Anti-Fog is his first solo gallery exhibition in the United States.

For a PDF or details please email louis@entrance.nyc