View of “The Confidence Man,” 2011, Tanya Leighton Gallery, Berlin. From left: Pavel Büchler, Modern Paintings No. A47 (blue and red abstract, Manchester, August 2007), 1997–2007; Aloïs Godinat, Déchirures (Podesta), 2010; Tobias Madison and Kaspar Müller, bora bora structure, 2010; Aloïs Godinat, Déchirures (Heimo Zobernig), 2011.

The neo-Surrealist objects operate in precisely the opposite way. While the gray paintings aim to counteract the physiological and informational conditions of their distribution, the neo-Surrealist objects, with their jarring colors and juxtapositions, exacerbate those conditions. If information, following Gregory Bateson’s famous definition, is “a difference which makes a difference,” these works combine maximally different differences in order to create a peculiarly ultrainformative image. Think of Josh Kline’s digital composite based on a JPEG of Nicki Minaj wearing a purple crystalline dress, a soft-serve necklace, and leg bandages at the 2011 MTV Video Music Awards, a print that was exhibited at the gallery 47 Canal in New York in November of that year. Kline’s work points to the pervasiveness of these visual phenomena beyond the sphere of contemporary art, with screen-ready neons reemerging in fashion at the same time. And the list of “ingredients” in a work by Anicka Yi, arguably the most complex of all the artists currently reviving the Surrealist object, gives a sense of how different these differences can be: Convox Dialer Double Distance of a Shining Path, an aluminum stockpot included in a group show at Bortolami Gallery in New York in April 2011, contains “recalled powdered milk, abolished math, antidepressants, palm tree essence, shaved sea lice, ground Teva rubber dust, Korean thermal clay, steeped Swatch watch . . . cell phone signal jammer, and electric burner.”

Where the Surrealist object proper aimed to liberate the unconscious from bourgeois subjectivity, these neo-Surrealist works are addressed not to repressed subjects but to physiological and informatic bodies. The convergence of information and dietary or medicinal regimes in Yi’s work encapsulates this shift. As we relate to information in increasingly metabolic terms, obsessing over managing our information intake at “healthy” levels, we now seek out “foods” that are pure and essential (food as signal) over entropic soups. And if Vaerslev’s work aims for zero affect, depressing the viewer into a pseudomeditative state, Yi’s is an “antidepressant” (to cite one of the ingredients in her stockpot). Through Yi’s affective jamming, the WTF is used to provoke another form of the blank stare, the equal opposite of that dilated gaze elicited by the gray noise of Vaerslev’s paintings.

Yi and Kline were not included in “Grouped Show,” but they are implicated in it through the logic of circulation that seems to define meme art (a blanket category that includes, as I have said, the neo-Surrealist object). The term meme, of course, derives from Richard Dawkins’s biologistic account of how genetic and nongenetic data spread, like viruses, through their corporeal transmitters.¹ And corporeality and transmission are exactly what is at issue both in the circulation of meme art and in the redefinition of the group and the group show in the present. In April 2010, Kline exhibited paintings made with Axe body wash in a two-person show with Yi, who also began to work with liquids with corporeal connotations around this time. The transmission of information between this collaborative duo took place very much within a group context: the specifically social milieu of 179 Canal, the predecessor of 47 Canal. The following year, in “Grouped Show,” Berlin-based artist Timur Si-Qin exhibited Axe Effect, a bottle of Axe body wash, its lid open, dripping neon-green liquid down the wall.

Although Kline’s and Si-Qin’s works use the same materials, the latter marks a shift. While Kline is interested in Axe as a cultural signifier, one lifestyle brand among many, Si-Qin leverages the physiological effects of the product’s specific design. The Axe bottle was redesigned by Unilever in 2011 using an innovative method of product testing designed to bypass the verbal reports of test subjects by fitting them with glasses that tracked their retinal movements within a virtual 3-D environment.² The X shape of the new design, repeated in its central logo, effectively concentrates attention on the object at its center—crosshairs for the eye’s targeting function, using increasingly aggressive formal means to centralize the gaze. And when the Axe body wash was again taken up by Yi and Kline, first in September 2011 and then in July 2012, it was no longer through a process of collaborative osmosis in the context of a group show linked to a social circle, but through the logic of the meme. Si-Qin’s meme, which includes both the Axe bottle and its liquid contents, then replicated itself by splitting into its two component parts, taken up by Yi and Kline, respectively. In Yi’s fall 2011 exhibition “Sous Vide” at 47 Canal, we found drips of olive oil, a liquid whose color (at least on the screen) almost exactly matched that of the Axe body wash, running down the walls of the gallery. Kline then exhibited a row of vessels containing, among other ingredients, Axe body wash in a Haim Steinbach–like configuration along a shelving unit in a group show at Night Gallery in Los Angeles.