
HOW TO NEVER HAPPEN AND SUCCEED IN DYING OUT Sophie Barshall on Graham Wiebe at Final Hot Desert, London
Using the form of a book to explore the omnipresence and circularity of self-optimization discourse nowadays may seem anachronistic at first. In his third show with Final Hot Desert – which is no longer located at Utah’s Great Basin Desert but in a London apartment gallery – Graham Wiebe presents a selection of his book works. The source material, dating from the 1970s to 1990s, refers to a moment when countercultural ideals became intertwined with literature advising readers on how to adapt to a system increasingly defined by self-improvement and productivity. These assemblages, made from the covers of self-help books, push the rhetoric of the genre to extremes and reveal its persistence in the digital age, even as nonsense, as Sophie Barshall argues in her review.
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