THE GREAT RESET
An Early Career Retrospective of Nandi Loaf and Martin Lang
May 10 - May 24, 2025
By Brandon Bandy & Rachel Jackson
“The work of art exists, but “the artist” is a myth.”
Just what is it that makes this kind of practice so different, so appealing?
In 2014, Martin Lang staged an exhibition at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville entitled, Friday, Next Friday, Friday After Next. For the exhibition Martin placed a table by Vista of California in the center of the gallery, its surface occupied by show cards, bottles of San Pellegrino, plastic cups, and a bowl of M&M’s. Surrounding the table were rented folding chairs, and on the wall, a countdown clock with an accompanying banner reading “Time until we can go to the bar.” Two potted monstera plants appear in the documentation of the show, situated in the corners of the gallery nearest to the door, reminiscent of Marcel Broodthaers. This work was situationally derived, as University of Tennessee, Knoxville is a dry campus, the exhibition was oriented around not only standards of what an opening might look like, but the fact attendees were likely impatiently waiting for the opening to end so they might go out for afters.
That same year Martin would produce another work included in The Great Reset, a bootleg Chagall painting, the subject of numerous headlines that same year. The text describing the work on Martin’s website states: “In 1982, Martin Lang, 64 of Leeds, purchased what he believed to be an original Marc Chagall painting at auction for £100,000. In 2013, Lang took the painting to the BBC program Fake or Fortune? in an attempt to confirm the authenticity of the painting. It was deemed a fake and, according to a contract signed by Lang and French law, the painting was destroyed, an act which Lang called ‘draconian.’ In Martin Lang 2/2 (Nude 1909-10), I have had the faked Chagall replicated by a Chinese oil painting company that specializes in replicas. The source material for my replication is a 642x482 pixel jpg from a news article about the incident. I had two replicas produced, one of which I’m keeping as my 1/2. The other I’ve sent to Martin Lang as a replacement for what was destroyed as well as an act of namesake camaraderie completing the 2/2. I am awaiting any response from Martin Lang.”
Lang’s work since has continued this investigation of the artist’s namesake and persona with works such as Name/Date $3.98, 2014, Crisis, 2017, Untitled (Midterms 2018), 2018, and Boiler Room, 2021. The latter consists of engraved aluminum panels, which faintly depict an Apple Cinema Display containing the artist’s desktop with a YouTube tab open in the browser. Embedded within the panels is a screen which plays the YouTube video “Martin Lang Boiler Room Set,” in which the artist inserts himself DJ-ing an hour-long set, with clones of himself as dancing audience members. In Untitled (Midterms 2018) Lang has taken the political yard sign and bumper sticker as a site for exploration, declaring “Contact Your Curators, Demand Martin Lang.” This work expands upon the trajectory of Martin Lang as persona, building upon Clever, 2014, a bumper sticker that enigmatically reads, “Relax, it’s just another clever piece by Martin Lang.” Lang extends this methodology to video work in Crisis, 2017. Presumably titled after Jordan Wolfson’s early video work, Lang takes the once popular “Hitler Reacts” video format, turning it on himself and altering the subtitles to satirically speak to his difficulties attaining a tenure track teaching position in a moment where the dominance of white males within professorial roles was being reconsidered.
In Name/Date $3.98, 2014, Lang undertakes the iconic nature of the artist’s signature as ground for further study. The text on Martin’s website reads: “Working on a series of drawings that were an attempt to understand the China marker, I realized I should go to the master of the material. I took six sheets of paper to the thrift store (a place I stop in 10-15 times a week), where everything is priced in China marker. I asked the pricing employee to write my name, and birthday three times, once each in black, red and white, the three most available colors of China Markers. I then put the drawings in the sleeve that the Yupo paper is sold in, and asked her to price the object as if it were donated to the store.” Lang’s China marker signature has become a hallmark of his practice.
In an unexpected fusion of the vernacular and institutional, Lang’s work embraces both pop cultural and art historical referents to an unexpected end–engaging in a process of character-building that seems all too familiar, yet anomalous and tonally distinct. This convergence is present in Lang’s Proposal for a Billboard, 2015, a speculative work consisting of a signage mockup, that reads “Just what is it that makes today’s world so different, so appealing?” Appropriating its text from the title of Richard Hamilton’s 1956 collage, a work considered to demarcate the beginning of pop art, Proposal for a Billboard is actualized in The Great Reset as Monument Sign, where it is prominently displayed as signage on the front of the gallery. The work suggests an inversion of the principles of appropriation that informed Hamilton’s original collage–an era that capitalized on the transfiguration of the mundane into the art object–by demoting the prestige of an art historical juncture to the humility of the billboard. This modified phrase is central to Lang’s practice, and it seems appropriate to have executed this proposal for a retrospective, taking the place of many other works that could have been displayed.
These works among the rest of Lang’s practice form a distinct resistance to what in turn has become the primary mode of artistic production among a generation of artists. While others turn their backs on a genuine conceptual practice in favor of legibility or commercial success, Lang uses the language of ego, self promotion, and careerism to build an oeuvre which in actuality is anything but.
Nandi Loaf is the truth
Outside of gallery websites, reviews, and explicitly exhibition related materials, the only remnant I can find of Nandi Loaf online is a YouTube channel with the description “Nandi Loaf is the most important artist of the 21st century.”
On this channel are 4 videos, the oldest of which is titled @nandi_loaf Favourite Part of “The Exorcist” (1973) with the caption “This is my favourite part…” the video is 22 seconds long and includes a short clip of main character, Regan, projectile vomiting alongside Nandi’s instagram handle. A video from 2016 titled slipknot (cover) - @nandi_loaf is comprised of a surrealist freestyle “using the traditional technique invented by Andre Breton of DADA” read by an early stilted text to speech voice and accompanied by video footage of a gas burner on a stove filmed in the dark.
These early works function as an origin point of what seems to be a continual interest in mediated identity and personal taste throughout Loaf’s practice. Absent a website, viewers must reconstrue Loaf’s practice through art writing, exhibition documentation, and usernames for profiles that do not exist. This elusivity contradicts the imperative for hyper-legibility that has been urged upon young artists; a social code that pushes the adoption of online platforms as a necessary marketing tool and insists upon the artist as persona.
In Nandi’s Third Solo Exhibition, 2021, at King’s Leap, a scrolling LED marquee proclaims Loaf’s status as “most important artist of the 21st century,” while a grid of wall-mounted tracfones mines cryptocurrency, capitalizing on access to the gallery’s electricity for the run of the exhibiton. Twitch livestreams during open hours fill an adjacent wall with Loaf playing Call of Duty, suggesting a further entanglement between the role of the artist and digital creator. Illuminating the space with red and green dot-matrix type, signage ushers viewers to “FOLLOW @nandi_loaf” while displaying her increasing follower count. These works indulge in self-promotion symptomatic of a culture of content-production, a “creative” arena that has slowly grown to dwarf the once lauded influence of the artist. Yet in Loaf’s case, this promotion is void of returns–none of the handles link to active accounts, leaving the viewer destabilized by the contradiction.
The Loaf oeuvre further examines this deletion in 7 at Profil Galerie, Paris, 2024.
The exhibition’s press release opens by noting: “Nandi Loaf asked the visitor to find the point of artistic creation, of artistic objects, submerged in a world deep in the process of utterly dismantling itself. She sought to give the viewer nothing, and in doing so give her audience nothing that might be taken away.” Loaf creates a spatial intervention of nothingness, vacating the gallery of salable assets in lieu of an all-encompassing aura of alienation. Stark wall vinyl reading “je ne sais pas” and a depiction of Jack Skellington clothed in Santa Claus attire, gestures towards text which “is intended to read “there is no spectacle” in Japanese, but could be translated to “there is no show,” “the show is over,” or some other variation depending on the machine or viewer.” These served as the only visual attributes, while what appears to be text-to-speech audio, potentially similar to that which is in this exhibition, reads strings of numbers and “vast amounts of data” as referenced in one of the artist’s bios.
Loaf’s most recent solo exhibition Ever, 2024, at King’s Leap, similarly implicated this absence through a complex orchestration which resulted in multiple stages of the exhibition. Upon entering the primary gallery, light fixtures were concealed in gels while a metal pipe in the back room pierced the wall, emanating red liquid into a bucket placed upon the floor. Similarly considering art world normativity, Loaf designated that guests sign boxed Funko Pop figures in lieu of the traditional guest book. These boxes would later be encapsulated in the artist’s signature smoked acrylic and placed within the gallery’s lower level. This in turn was viewable during open hours upon invitation to those who identified as collectors, curators, or writers. Throughout the opening a milieu of young artists, clad in Loaf designated maid attire, milled about guests, doling out fireball shots as requested by the artist. Similarly in The Great Reset Loaf has orchestrated the production of Jell-O shots, which are purported to be the distillation of Loaf’s work into liquid form. John Baldessari’s, “The Cremation Project,” comes to mind in which the artist’s early-career paintings are incinerated, their ashes later used to bake cookies. Through a similar act, Loaf transfigures the absence of material work into the gratification of consumable gelatin. While attendees may be left incapable of purchasing physical artifacts of Loaf’s practice, they are invited to ingest the jello shots. The act of consuming a Nandi Loaf Jell-O shot signals a performance of trust as the viewer volunteers to intake a substance of unknown contents, indirectly placing their confidence in the artist’s recipe.
The vanquishing of the art object throughout Loaf’s practice consistently highlights the staging inherent to the white cube, calling to mind the conceptualism of the 1960s-70s. Coyly aloof from market incentives, Loaf disrupts the vanguard of what it means to operate as an American artist under a period of unprecedented austerity, embodying self-awareness and complex contradiction over standard fare commercial viability. Though often physically absent from her own openings, Loaf’s presence is felt in the directives she gives to gallerists, organizing acts of “hyperparticipation” that invoke the creation of charged social spaces.
The Great Reset
The Great Reset: An Early Career Retrospective of Nandi Loaf and Martin Lang, is centered upon a restaging of Martin Lang’s Friday, Next Friday, Friday after Next, situationally altered to incorporate Nandi Loaf Jello Shots as the only accessible beverage. An oversized countdown clock and rented folding chairs encircle this tableau, inviting audience participation. In lieu of San Pellegrino, guests are invited to partake in flavorless Jello shots while audio emanates from two pendant speakers, reciting details of Nandi Loaf’s practice and collections. A dossier, with limited viewing sessions available upon request, houses more comprehensive documentation of Loaf’s oeuvre and collections, including a handful of discrete works and out-of-print ephemera. Lang’s bootleg Chagall, Martin Lang 2/2 (Nude 1909-10), further assists in destabilizing the show’s aura of minimalism, highlighting a fictive work of expressionism (and an artwork that legally insists upon its destruction outside of the United States), as the only definitively salable work.
In this particular moment there appears to be a resurgence of interest in modernist ideals of transcendence–a nostalgic longing for what some purport to be objective beauty. This desire to hierarchize craft over idea often manifests itself as an inherently patriarchal ideology, peddled almost exclusively by young men, many of whom are likely (and somewhat justifiably) reacting to the proliferation of overly didactic work throughout the past decade. In the words of someone complicit in such nostalgia, “it’s hard to care about art not caring about art.” But what is caring more about art other than continuing to push against its constraints? It seems the accusations of nostalgia only go one way, and many might claim traversing conceptual practice (in its purest [most disputed] form) is dated or exhausted.
Yet Nandi Loaf and Martin Lang seem to find ways to continually stretch the boundaries of artistic practice to its limits, and yes, of course, inevitably there are echoes and nods to the mid-century heyday of “idea art” but art is, at its core, a memetic game. There is an undeniable difference between derivative gestures of painterly reference and the continuum of situationally-derived works, in which every potential variable generates a fractal of possibility. The proponents of this undead modernist romanticism might deride these works as didactic, cynical, or lacking an aesthetic experience, but the embodied humor and wit in their orchestration requires a higher level of self-awareness for complete appreciation.
At the end of the day, the practices of Nandi Loaf and Martin Lang keep us wondering–about the role of the artist in implicating complacency within this system, in carving out what is next for “a world deep in the process of utterly dismantling itself.” We leave with more questions than answers, and this is what makes us want to continue being artists.
WORKS LIST
Monument Sign, 2015-2025
Self-adhesive vinyl on gallery exterior
Martin Lang
Friday, Next Friday, Friday after Next, etc., 2014-2025
Gallery table, rented chairs, countdown clock
Martin Lang
sublime prestige (3) performed : “sexy crystal” 50% 95% 0% 1x consistent,
concerto and interactive practice...a monologue, 2025
Artist playlist, gallery speakers
Nandi Loaf
jell•o shots compliments of the artist, 2025
Artist recipe prepared and facilitated by the curators
Nandi Loaf
Martin Lang 2/2 (Nude 1909-10), 2014
Oil on canvas
Martin Lang
“dossier,” 2025
Available upon request**
Nandi Loaf
ARTIST BIOS
MARTIN LANG
Martin Lang is an artist living and working in Columbia, South Carolina where he is an Assistant Professor and Program Chair of Studio Art at Columbia College. He received his Masters of Fine Arts in Transmedia Design from the University of Tennessee and his Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography from Webster University. Martin is a multi-disciplinary artist whose work and research are rooted in lens-based practices and have expanded to a focus on video and new media sculpture. His work explores themes of privilege and power, the artist as persona, design and branding, text and language, and ego and identity. Martin has exhibited nationally and internationally, with recent at Murray State University, Sharp Projects, the University of Dallas among others. He’s received a variety of grants and awards and has completed residencies with Arts Unfold in Toronto and with the Museumsquartier/Q21 in Vienna, Austria.
Martin also has a curatorial practice and he has curated exhibitions at Arcade Contemporary Art Projects, G-CADD and Atlanta Contemporary. He also established, directs and programs the gallery My Friend Sparksburg in Columbia, South Carolina.
NANDI LOAF
Nandi Loaf is an artist living and working in the 21st century. Loaf received her BFA from the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science of Art in 2014. Solo and duo exhibitions include Profil (Paris, FR), Sebastian Gladstone (Los Angeles, CA), and King’s Leap (New York, NY). Selected group shows include Shore (Vienna, AT), Jack Shainman Gallery (New York, NY), Weatherproof (Chicago, IL), and Kaje (New York, NY).
Exhibition curated by Brandon Bandy & Rachel Jackson