RAID killed dead

The other project, "Fictional Structures," is the more surprising of the two. It's not much to look at, and it's a lot of work: snippets of reviews from leading art periodicals are arranged into diagrams that purport to show the formal qualities and effects of various media, including sculpture, collage, video and painting. Each diagram has 12 textual components, and the only regard Aghajanian shows for aesthetics is giving each a different colored background. There is sepia and cherry and violet. But what's surprising is the lucidity of the writing itself. Aghajanian has managed to find bits of art reviews that are interesting, well-written and evocative. "He smears the mutable paint into clownish mouths or convulses it into dense and turbulent atmospheres," one bite reads. "The antinomies of harmony/chaos, utopia/dystopia, refinement/vulgarity, hygiene/filth pervade the artist's impure aesthetic," reads another. Apparently, the leading periodicals need to find someone like Matt Fisher to make everything good and dense again.