As a curatorial proposition, “Standard Operating Procedures,” is a kind of negative structuralism— seeing the SOP codes of business practice and web-identity construction as analogous to recent self-conscious studio maneuvers.

The press release of the exhibition at Blum & Poe describes a standard operating procedure as the programming of a business process that now extends to algorithmic web methods of subjectivity production and relationship building. It is insinuated that, as an artistic practice, an SOP involves the intentional leveling of subjectivity and a complicity with an automated method of construction. There is an attitudinal undercurrent to this proposition. Starting from the position of subject deferment opens up the terrain to the possibility of exceeding the corruption, and foreclosure of subjectivity, in the production of a super-self-conscious emergent artist.

Most indicative of Piper’s SOP umbrella is Carissa Rodriguez’s secrétaires sculptures titled Stay Schemin—raw and unflattering, boney fragments of what seems to be a gallery secretaryʼs work desk wall, with planes made of enlarged art magazine ads for artists that possibly shape some contours of her own identity. (Walter Smith)