John Miller Gallery

May 15, 2024

Born in 1954, Cleveland, OH, US
Lives and works between New York, NY, US and Berlin, DE
M.F.A. California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA, US
Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program, New York, NY, US
B.F.A., Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI, US

The work of John Miller, like Mike Kelley's or Jim Shaw's to a certain extent, ought to have waited for the end of the 1980s to find its proper place on the artistic scene, and the early years of the 1990s in order to benefit from a new context of understanding. Among such contemporaries as Kelley and Shaw, but also Tony Oursler and Stephen Prina, Miller indeed embodies a singular position for he brings about a synthesis of an ideologically committed critique of representation and a post-conceptual shift towards the "real". Using completely stereotyped genres (figurative painting, travel photography, landscape painting, and so on), Miller has been engaged since the end of the 1970s in a global critique of the function of the auteur and the resulting loss of the work of art's "aura". Yet this critique is only a means, serving a larger process of hollowing out the repressed aspect of the ideological aggregates of day-to-day vernacular late-capitalist American culture.