Jeremy Glogan at Jenny's

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Overhearing a child in a museum point at a Renoir and yell "it has special effects!" Often attempts to manufacture effects in painting beget a deployment of niche technique abused systematically to stand in for magic. Not always, its just sometimes hard to tell which. 

Past: Dozie Kanu

"And one of the joys of a vernacular functionalism is the endlessly alternative, the elsewise arrival at a similar solution. ... Kanu's project might be a similar mining of alternatives to an already existing solution: selling the artworld what it wants. "

"Art has no surprise, all subversion is already accepted. But furniture is a form with expectations and so allows for subversion. ...wonky, impractical, painful, these are the tools of the artist/designer. ... The old Indiana Jones slight of hand, exchanging heavy trash for gold. But Indy made that academic gaff, mistaking volume for weight, having never really held gold, didn't know the exchange rate. Then the temple collapses. 

"The dust forms a question for archeologists. And then how you felt about the temple to begin with."

Full: Dozie Kanu at Project Native Informant, Dozie Kanu at Performance Space

Michaela Eichwald at Reena Spaulings Fine Art

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"But Eichwald finds the edge, the moment before a Frankenthaler turns into a dog's sick. 

The neanderthal nappie merchants - Joe Bradley, Josh Smith, et al - attempted proving beyond doubt: paint just always looks good. But Eichwald makes one really sit in its question. "

The scatalalogical mess used to be a lot funner. It reified what the idiot savants of abstraction were spraying. Their nappies. Jackson Pollock from a different less sublimated orifice. "The brown rope that tethers us to earth." But grown tired of being forced to look into the toilet and see the sublime. Once, in the Schipol airport restroom hearing a man inside a stall groaning, "Bitte! Bitte!" Ha ha, too bad we weren't in germany, I would have liked to read the kritical text sprayed. 

See too: All Michaela Eichwald, Calvin Marcus at Clearing

Past: Merlin Carpenter

"Has a more vacuous flaccid and dead show ever been done? An exhibition so empty it's like looking at ocean’s abyss. Carpenter has always been capable of the self-flagellating gesture, but this, this is like selling your flesh to pay the guy who owns your soul for its postage to hell, and you’re walking around bleeding without a shirt. This show makes Zobernig look like an academic painter. Codax like he paints Sundays..."

"Carpenter knows this is dumb, and knows that we know he knows this is dumb. But us all gripping chins wondering on which floor precisely the middle finger is resting. Our cerebral assessments of navel's swirl that 5 years ago couldn't have been less interesting now return in way that feels apt to the political moment. Because we're exhausted. And perhaps what Carpenter is actually trading in is the feeling of exhaustion. Can you imagine being forced to explain these to someone? Explain politics now to someone?"

Read all posts tagged Merlin Carpenter

Past: B. Wurtz

"...the details aren't trivial. They are the attachments of care, sewing buttons to close coats around a warmth when another can't.  Wurtz's more homely space is all about knots tied, and buttons threaded, plastic bags hung to dry. They're dumb objects rescued by so much care like a responsibility shown for them."

"...no longer just trash clogging our excretory paths but hopes clogging our recycling. Headaches as evidence of anxiety at the hands of trash, of which the Wurtzian model provides a relief in seeing the objects cared for, not amassed in landfill graves but given the second life in carousels. Our aspirations finally lets them levitate, holding them off the ground, where they would become trash. Which they are suspended from."

"The American Gym Sock. Tied to teenage boys, normally repositories of filth, seed, and feet, normally locker room attire. a pubescent attire. Pimples and athletics, is here given a fastidious clean, highlighting its cotton and comfort, restoring purity, virginal phallus and receiver of course."



Full: Paul P., B. Wurtz at Cooper Cole, B. Wurtz at Lulu, “The Crack-Up” at Room East (B. Wurtz), B. Wurtz at Metro Pictures, B. Wurtz at Richard Telles & ICA LA

 Past: Kinke Kooi

"...like green leaf lettuce and frill and Kooi's superfluity - increases in a descriptive power only release further metaphor, an excess of reference, description becomes the watering can, flowering a loaded lettuce content, a power for suggestion, leaving you, pervert, with pesticides spread against tumescence."

Kinke Kooi at Lulu, Kinke Kooi at Lucas Hirsch

Past: John Armleder

"Everyone loves the smell of their own brand, and the miasmia wafts in with a laugh of its aesthetic impropriety. A fart joke. The bastardization of the proper. Stray paint and design faux-pas.  Paintings which look the way 'oopsie' sounds. Whether or not anyone else loves is it in relation to how deeply trapped they are with it. Flatulence aesthetics in the high speech."

read full: Group Show at David Kordansky, John Armleder at Fernand Léger Foundation