Avantgardo

General Expenses presents Two wings & a prayer by Avantgardo.

General Expenses welcomes you aboard this daring flight into the human psyche. Fasten your existential seatbelt and prepare for departure!

From the (dis)comfort of first class, take in stunning views of our morbid attraction to catastrophe. This irreverent exhibition takes a satirical nosedive into the spectacle of disaster, daring you to confront humanity at its most unhinged.

In Avantgardo’s video “Is That All There Is to a Miracle?” our team of stewardesses, or as we like to call them, Crash landing Cuties, will lip sync amidst a deadly crash site, please recline to the sound of disco as it evolves into wry social commentary on our voyeuristic attraction to the macabre.

Don't miss your boarding call! Ascend with us on a bumpy ride through clouded skies, for an unparalleled view from 30,000 feet of the ultimate black box - the human heart.

Avantgardo (1996) is a graduate of the San Francisco Art Institute. His work is characterized by combining different cultural devices to work with desire and its manifestations in consumer culture. Avantgardo proposes cheap luxury and pop simulacra as concepts to understand the constitutive role of consumption and spectacle in subjectivities. His process takes as its starting point the readymade in the present moment, assumes the purchase as a form of research on the commodification of desire and consumption as a means of communication to reinterpret parody and recreate products as a testimony of consumer society and contemporary life. In sum, Avantgardo's research explores the phenomenology predicated in Madonna's aphorism: 'Cause everybody's living in a material world and I am a material girl, you know that we are living in a material world and I am a material girl'.

— General Expenses