“Ericka Beckman’s 1983 film You the Better, the central work in her solo show at Mary Boone, is in part a playfully literal take on the modernist trope of the game of chance, using the structure of the game to look at the social codes that bind us to the world. In the modernist imagination, chance overwrote the intentions of the individual artist, rendering meaning provocatively unstable or connecting the artwork to natural laws. Rather than align chance with nature or indeterminacy, You the Better frames it as part of the capitalist system of labor and contingency that relies on happenstance and emergency, survival and necessity, as much as on general laws of accumulation.”
