Brooklyn-based artist Louis Osmosis isn’t tied to any one mode; instead, he explores ideas of discontinuity and disruption through a variety of methods and means, from sculpture to performance. His first solo exhibition, PLEASE IT IS MAKING THEM THANKS :), on view at Kapp Kapp in TriBeCa, encapsulates this approach—Osmosis leans into Arte Povera, producing a range of highly conceptually rigorous pieces, all of which still manage to evade pretension. Perhaps Osmosis’ ingenuity stems from his commitment to found objects (a five-gallon water bottle; a fucked up ‘Future is Female’ tee). Perhaps it’s his openness to questioning; his refusal to accept or commit to blanket assertions.

The exhibition’s titular phrase was inspired by a neighbor’s sign, itself evocative of Nicolas Heller’s New York signs project. Except this sign didn’t end up in any such collection. Osmosis might embrace quotation, but this isn’t one such instance. Instead, in its changed iteration, the sign forms the basis of Osmosis’ most recent exhibition—an entry point into his thinking through optics, production, and positionality.

Flaunt spoke with the artist in the wake of the exhibition’s opening, delving into notions of ambivalence, citation, novelty, and kitsch.

PLEASE IT IS MAKING THEM THANKS :) has just opened—could you speak a little about the title of exhibition?

In my neighborhood in Bensonhurst, there’s this family five blocks away who raise chickens in their backyard. It’s funny that of all places to come across a free-range chicken operation for the first time that it’d be in bumblefuck Brooklyn. Naturally though, since the demographic is mostly negligent high schoolers, people had been throwing food into their backyard. The family put up a sign on 8.5” x 11” paper printed with the text “PLEASE STOP FEEDING THE CHICKENS IT IS MAKING THEM SICK THANKS :),” placed within an acetate sleeve. The more urgent parts [STOP FEEDING THE CHICKENS and the SICK] were printed in red ink, which is an unstable pigment. Over time, the sun had made the red ink brittle which was then completely obliterated during a freak thunderstorm. Their house is on my route to the train, so the following day I’d encountered the sign now as this found text object that had been redacted by the weather.

In its new iteration, I think the text makes it quite clear the objective is not one of legibility. What becomes apparent here instead is a lack by way of an incidental redaction, and what this lack generates is a shift in cadence from a literal plea to a rather suspicious, even facetious type of gratitude. The coy smiley emoticon, now bleeding a rusty hue, might even have ulterior motives. Considering how much I think about optics, artistic production, and the positionality of the artist, I couldn’t help but to have a kismet moment with the mutated sign insofar that it very deftly and immediately demonstrates an affected schism/tonal shift and could actually point to the lack that the work in the show is trying to signal and operate from. In short, it is very cool beans.

***Shtick Figure***, beaver-chewed wood, threaded rod, steel, epoxy, contact cement, threaded rod, rubber, dimensions: 23” x 32” x 82”

***Ship in a Bottle (Wreck)***, 5-gallon water bottle, pine, rust-dyed canvas, acrylic paint, cyanoacrylate, waxed thread, cement, screws, dimensions: 19” x 12” x 11”

Everyone, especially in NY, is so success-focused, culminating in this sort of ‘always-on-the-go’ mentality. Whereas you tend to explore more in the realm of futility and fatigue. What pulls you in this direction?

I don’t think the always-on-the-go mentality and grind culture is necessarily a bad thing in the grand scheme of things, which is a recent conclusion I came to. Sure, the conditions are really lame and exhaustive, but I kind of see a silver lining in it all; it makes the people who are actively trying to work in spite of this all shine that much brighter, not too sound too romantic about it. This makes the little communal symposiums that happen here and there have that much more stock. And I’m privileged to say my friends are those kinds of types where we can really tap in with and feed off each other.

The fatigue thing is symptomatic of the grind culture condition. If fatigue is the one thing the collective seems to have a surplus of in contemporary life, then it would make sense to try and work with that excess of material. Artists seem to have always thrived in the drudgery of things. When all else fails because everything else is working successfully, then the “exercise in futility” adage starts to look more and more like a viable strategy. To be forward-facing with this insurmountable affective exhaustion and deploy it laterally, as material proper, or as close as one can get to that. Pop L. William’s essay Canary in the Coal Mine is a great reference point for this in that he looks to performance as “a form that lives and dies on liveness.” I say futility and fatigue in the sense that I like working from a point of liveness that revels in and is contingent on its own precarity, a little double jeopardy moment. I don’t really know much else so why not lean into it and see what happens?

What value do you find in focusing on this ambivalence and discontinuity?

I think when ambivalence and discontinuity are approached with the leading edge of affect, they can be substantial ways to maintain authorial control, all the while avoiding the indie-sleaze trope where being disingenuous is supposed to infinitely generate viable content. Yeah, sure, you need some level of irony, some level of callousness, but that can’t be the central tenet. Unless you go all out with that, à la Jeff Koons’ unwitting businessman persona; or Lutz Bacher’s kunst-flavored elusiveness. The cronies who spray silver paint in their mouths in Mad Max: Fury Road are a great model for me when it comes to thinking what discontinuity has to offer…“I live, I die again! I live, I die again!”

***Articulated Heart (Dealing with a heart that I didn’t break)***, epoxy clay, gesso, stain, hinge, magnets, copper wire, copper tubing, adhesive, spalted tamarind, felt, dimensions: 9” x 6.5” x 19”

***Big Crate***, reclaimed shipping crate, modified satellites, screws, Crate: 64” x 25” 37”
*Satellite*: 50” x 33” x 42” *Satellite (Two Dancers)*: 26” x 21” x 30” *Satellite (Stars #1)*: 51” x 33” x 43” *Satellite (Stars #2)*: 41” x 21” x 40”

You work across a wide range of mediums—which is your favorite? Is there one that you feel to be most impactful—or is it this bringing together of different, perhaps incongruent, practices?

Sculpture is probably the favorite, but I use the term very loosely in conversation. To be frank though, I probably have gotten more from performance and performative gestures. Bas Jan Ader riding a bike into a river comes to mind, or when David Hammons documented himself pointing a conductor’s baton at the people installing his work at his Hauser & Wirth show in 2019. Also Patty Chang’s Fountain (1999). And Genesis P-Orridge’s lifelong work of body mods. The interdisciplinary thing is more from a place of whatever works, works. If it is more fitting for the idea to be a sculpture, performance, an essay, then so be it. I tend to give myself a prompt or thought experiment, especially when I’m trying to work with a found or reclaimed object, which I’d probably credit to having gone to Cooper Union, but also my science-fair brained way of approaching stuff. For example, there is a whale vertebra I modified into a functioning subwoofer with the help of my friend Booker Mitchell in my solo at Kapp Kapp. It’s titled Subwoofer (W***e Noise). My mental prompt for that was how could I suggest a whale song with the most incongruous of means. In my head, it’s more a gesture towards beached-ness than whale-ness, where instead of beaching being this incidental tragic spectacle that it could be a resolute pining for a terrain so antithetical, one would risk death. Call it an homage to irreconcilability or something. Hence, the sounds of garbled AM radio and 808 kick drums littered throughout–my friend Laszlo Horvath and I produced that together at his crib. Seeing that a whale song is usually understood as this austere melodic phenomenon, it seemed cool to me to restrict the score to a conversational and percussive sonic palette to generate a different type of vibe, maybe even for the thing to placate itself. And I thought of the AM radio sound as a way to date the piece concurrently with the viewing of it, like a demented cyclical resuscitation of the thing with every subsequent visual encounter.

Talk about the role of kitsch in your work—how and why do you incorporate humor into your pieces?

There’s that famous Clement Greenberg essay on kitsch where he says: The precondition for kitsch, a condition without which kitsch would be impossible, is the availability close at hand of a fully matured cultural tradition, whose discoveries, acquisitions, and perfected self-consciousness kitsch can take advantage of for its own ends…It draws its life blood, so to speak, from this reservoir of accumulated experience.

As Greenberg puts it, Kitsch exists as a parasite to “genuine culture,” where it “demands nothing of its customers except their money–not even their time.” Maybe at the time it could’ve been thought of as a looming almost terroristic presence, but in the context of contemporary life, I think there is something refreshing to how flagrant this modus operandi is. It’s like that adage of preferring racism be overt rather than covert–there’s no codification here. It presents its gambit from the get go and if that flies over your head, then that’s on you, and that’s also cool, too. Humor, especially via the visual and textual pun, has a very real immediacy when it hits. It’s a way of tapping into the realm of how and what instead of just the why. It’s also a great foil to the sappy sides of my work and myself. Not to sound overly poetic, but the platitude “Laughter is the best medicine” also comes to mind here insofar that it suggests a prognosis indicative of some shared deficiency or malfunction; it’s very much a Laugh Now Cry Later type of vibe.

***Companion (Hachikō)***, reinforced paper-mache, polystyrene, epoxy clay, acrylic paint, armature wire, MDF, plywood, PVC pipe, acrylic paint, velveteen, studs, adhesive

You use a lot of citation and quotation in your artwork—to other artists; to musicians (Matisse; Rachel Harrison; Drake). What do you hope to achieve through this use of intertextuality?

I love wearing my influences on my sleeve. It’s funny when you see artists who try to bury their work’s genealogy by incessantly talking around the thing; in my head, I imagine if the work could talk, it’d be agonizing to name its predecessors, to expose its maker. Being forthcoming with the influences is cool too because it doubles down on the whole idea of there being nothing “new” or “novel” in contemporary art by relieving the maker of that obligation, that the asset of newness is a fallacy. The only thing that’s new is that nothing is new! So that’s hot, this contemporary space of blah, that everyone is working from this shared blah. What fruits would bear from blah?

Citation/quotation works two-fold: (1) it opens a forum between dead/living, canon/esoteric, and established/emerging where a lot of playtime can be had and (2) irreverence is a really fun way to level the playing field where in giving no fucks, different types of fuck begin to reveal themselves. It also makes for a viewing experience that ricochets in its mental trajectory to avoid a topically linear throughline in favor of contextualizing disparate things in proximity to one another to see what mechanics come forth.

Your year as a Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program artist-in-residence is coming towards the end—what’s next?

Literally have been asking myself the same question! I’m trying to lock in another viable studio spot in NY in a similar fashion that wouldn’t hurt my pockets. I guess I’ll use the end of this interview as a bat signal for anyone with leads :)

PLEASE IT IS MAKING THEM THANKS :) is on view at Kapp Kapp until June 4, 2022.