Margaret Harrison at Silberkuppe



The justifiable reaction to Ken Johnson’s review of Michelle Grabner currently lighting up social networks is an interesting contrast to Margaret Harrison’s didactic outrage on paper over actual glaring societal problems. The Johnson fiasco unfolds in real-time, a parody of New York male critic explaining a woman’s as fit only for parody, as if to prove transgressive the assertion of the domestic, giving talking points to the pundits sprung into the web of interaction; whereas the already-explained nature of Harrison’s texts beget little interest, at least on my feeds, both pointing to the glaring rift that feminism has for a while now been seeking to fill.

The less overt drawings are the more interesting in their subtle freudian fingering of advertorial tropes, of women pinned up to lemons, or in sandwiches portrayed as literal meat, mere garnish to tasty consumption.

Simon Starling at Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago



Starling’s “Metamorphology” is histories' mirroring reenactment in symbolic fashions. (i.e.: take a car whose production was off-shored, Starling then buys the imported car in its original country and returns/exports the car back to its new origin where he replaces its facade to have the car mimic the flag of its new country before hanging it on a gallery wall like a painting...  Or raising a ship from the sea-floor to feed it to itself so it sinks again. Or, balancing marble chunks whose sizes are respective their price differential.) A structural/contextual tautology repeatable in an interminable number of ways, the baseline tropes of today’s neo-conceptual art deadpan.
The artworks feel logical in their ouroboric repetition but contain a tautological inability to be reasoned with. Tautologies make sense, but state nothing, equating a silence as poetry. They become koan-like emblems of the histories it condenses like cliff notes, glazing history subservient to it’s poetic reenactment.
Of course man/woman’s need for new images and storytelling, but this is total curator bait begging for a catalog essay by those who can’t wait to pour hearts out over globalization, outsourcing, imperialism, and poetry etc. etc. by globally ambiguous curators loving the relief of talking about history as opposed to art. Probably the same essay everyone is reading in all the photo documentation, over and over.

related: Jason Dodge at Franco Noero

Marc Camille Chaimowicz at Galerie Neu



It would be unfair to bring up Portlandia’s mocking “Put a bird on it” since the spectacle here envelopes a real space, with real birds, not merely a clever documentation winking a la Gambaroff’s cats. The real trick was inviting others to take part in the party shining through the romanticism of it all with the black light of cynicism, Liden’s subtle mockery of public-housing insistence, and Pernice’s can’t-be-bothered urban blight objects, casting the whole thing as a dystopian present which, like the invasive tropical-green parrots of Brussels whose color is dissonant to their blight, the urban apocalypse is at least beautiful.

Christopher Williams at MoMA



MoMA finally succumbing to its role mass incarcerating tourists - its expanding culture-industrial complex finally warranting destruction of neighborly competition to further house its prisoner-patrons - yet, MoMA, still desiring relevancy to the system, art, whose name it bears and not merely to the throngs from which it happily accepts 25$, delivers the academic-respectable retrospective of Kapital p Photography godhead, Christopher Williams.
Walking through the space it’s a nice gesture but hard to see the decades’ work or installation subtlety amongst the brambles of families asking themselves aloud, literally “When do we get to see Matisse?” the Frenchman whose tickets are timed before you can even get in line and so the Williams show acts as a sort of slumbering-area for the masses awaiting the carnivale nearby. The punchline to this whole joke, is that there is no punchline at all, the wall texts have been eliminated, and so people stumble through blind, somnambulist mass searching for their trip but nothing does and awake to find themselves in line for Matisse. Whether because they are completely acclimated to the lie of photography or too tired to care who knows, but MoMA needs to stop doing these shows here for anyone who wants to actually see.

Annette Kelm at Gio Marconi



We’re good enough artists today, that we know how it works. Knowing that intentions and value are gained in the circumscribing of a practice, the ability to theorize it, Kelm’s slow expansion (as well as undermining) of her “subject,” produces a knowing game: a continual delaying of the limnable parameters of her practice, producing photographs as hangnails eliding easy assimilation into a theory of the work, impeding understandable relations between the photographs, leaving scrutiny of the photographs themselves which give nothing but a blankness of intention, a formal dumbness.

Like Michele Abeles, or Roe Ethridge, it’s toying with, tickling, photographic ontology, Kelm’s backdrops often “touching” the picture plane, become it, blurring photography with adverts and print, full-frontal compositions suspending a viewer from entering photographic space, forced to look at the surface, the Greenbergian flatness of the photo.
This precocious meta-knowing of the game of art produces a Brechtian alienation or a Godardian-like game that, in the context of its time (Godard's), felt deeply inhuman, ironic, proto-hipster in its frivolous mockery of aesthetic ideals, as Pauline Kael mentions in her review of Godard’s “Band of Outsiders,” but as in time everything fell further towards its level grew to become, somehow presciently, deeply human. My computer’s dictionary even spell-checks Godardian at this point.

Silke Otto-Knapp at Galerie der Stadt Schwaz



Like the recent use of Hilma af Klint as fashion, her totems of spirituality becoming themselves symbol-patterns printed on dresses and totes worn as cultural baggage, Otto-Knapp shortcuts this droste-abyme of cultural appropriation immediately placing its icons onto its own tasteful dresses before being recirculated dancing in front of/into paintings, reinserted back into its aura. An aware circulation of aura in the contemporary brand system, re-uping Munchian mannerism for 21st century management. At what point are spirituality and the quasi-mystical retainable through the deadening pragmatics of contemporary art, in which symbols are vaporized in a Kelley Walker-esque reproduction line, and at what point is it able to retain its “irrational” function standing in opposition to the immediate rational vampire of functionary markets.

Jean-Luc Moulène at Miguel Abreu



The inflated masks while brilliant, aren’t all that interesting to look at. Their dull plasticity on the goo-gloss of grey enamel floors looking cheap in comparison to the copper pieces’ more-than-just-the-color-of money hanging behind them, beauty’s patina masking the cultural currency, the thick chunks forged of the symbolic-mine. And in the other what-used-to-be-gallery-entire is now the back showroom for a single artwork in what has become the brokerage of conceptual power-art, wasting space like it’s L.A.
Moulène seems best when his objects are bordering banal, like DIA’s huge clown-tent missile; unexpectedly mixing power, glitz, and ugliness in equally estranging components, a tumor of confoundment more than the skull-balloon on view here, though Moulène's commitment to the head-subject is interesting.
It would be hard to not acknowledge the kinship to the younger Michael E. Smith, both using what appear to be skull chips in pairs, both recycling refuse into mysterio-objects denying explanation’s assuaging.

See too: Michael E. Smith at Susanne Hilberry

Mitchell Syrop at Midway Contemporary Art



A Baldessari-like dissonance of image and text, placing Ruscha non-sequiturs in the grey palette of conceptualism to be less self-ironizing, like the 80's ads it mimics. “Watch it. Think it.” The barrage of advertorial propaganda berates in hollow declarative, the nonsense of the advertorial address. An obfuscation highlighting that all advertising is obfuscation. That despite enticement into reading its premise all language slips, but like the lifting of too heavy weight we become stronger at the reading of advertising nonsense. Like the yearbook photos we get acclimated to the alienating distance created by once familiar subjects.

Jim Shaw at Metro Pictures



Like everyone’s surrealist hopes and dreams, there’s an implicit premise of speaking truth, reveal the latent subject, the myths of a culture embedded in the juxtaposition of subjects, making us each an interpreter of dreams. The political and religious narratives assembled are ostensibly satire, putting them at one end of the political spectrum but establishing any sense or evidence in the Fantasia-mire ends up reasoning the Farrah Fawcett wig atop a tank. Pop was always about Freudian dreams, now it’s literalized. Get out your talking cures.

Yuji Agematsu at Artspeak



The vital-materialism that undergirds this work is premised on a quasi-spiritual belief of an essential warmth of used materials, as if waste and trash contained some quality that shrink-wrapped plungers from Walmart don’t, which is sort of true but also the great lie of Capitalism, as if these objects spontaneously-manifested on store shelves, as if Apple laptops weren't assembled by sweating hands of low wage workers from materials of rare earth, mined in darkness by slaves paid even less. Laptops don’t look dirty, but they are the waste of the same system that installs factory suicide nets.

Mike Kelley at Skarstedt

Ron Terada at Catriona Jeffries



Like Richter’s cold representation, Terada’s re-presentation, painting, of Goldstein’s bio is hollowing, emptying, left with the bones of pathos emerged from the evacutation of Goldstein’s overt romanticism. The doubling splits the experience between finding yourself engaged reading Goldstein’s text and remembering that you are looking at paintings of the text, once removed. The overlay of contextual flippage - reminiscent of Levine/Lawler’s invitations to “their” presentation of a ballet that wasn’t - never attempts to become the Quixote, but often finds the two text-surfaces collapsing to touch, as when Goldstein speaks of appropriation, or the necessitude of 2-d paintings for artworld seriousness which we find ourselves looking at, we find the projects merging, reflected in the other, an appropriated subject that begins talking back, almost self-aware, as if Goldstein himself was aware that the personality that preceded him would one day warrant this, this Kosuth like defining of contextual baggage.

Tomma Abts at David Zwirner

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Abts’s indifference to Artworld concerns is a triumph of deafness, a Morandi-like hermeticism, buckling-down to the same task endlessly, slowly, stubbornly insisting on the cobwebbed autonomy of painting long ago cut and bled out. That despite Zwirner’s PR qualifying Abts as “continuously explor[ing] the activity of painting,” and not simply “painting” like a Neanderthal, Abts is a painter, and, since we’ve long forgotten how to speak about “dumb” painting, everyone instead argues why these aren’t, and speak of an “emotional rationality” and “anything but expressionist,” spreading pesticides against the fear of the subject reappearing like selves in the mirror.

The pleasure of Abts’s paintings is that of origami, or well constructed puzzle, like setting a good corner in New Mexico pasture, the blankness of a Morandi, solving simply its own internal puzzling, like shaker furniture, a clever construction in a protestant like satisfaction of a few-frills job completed.

Rob Pruitt at Gavin Brown



No one is ever going to stop Rob Pruitt. You can’t evict the returned prodigal son, that would be too.... ironic, like being stuck in an Alanis Morisette song, stuck in the 90’s with a teenage artist that just turned 50, 50, and still kicking holes in the drywall and smoking ciggies in rebellion (to what?) and getting the couch sandy, and we put up with the loud music in hopes he’ll eventually grow wings and grow up and make something of interest. But he’s got the loudest soundsystem on the bloc, screaming, and a lot of cool people like to ride in the irony of his obviousness mistaken for interest. The Pepsi style of corporate “throwbacks” - doodling on notebook cover “paintings” - couldn’t even be called nostalgic it’s such an empty gesture, runaway on the cheap high-school amphetamines of vampiring of his studio assistants, the young people that make these, mining their 90’s childhoods for Pruitt’s empty laugh, and what’s mistaken for dumb is actually sinister, that no matter how old Pruitt or his schtick gets, he’s like “That’s what I love about High-school kids, I get older, they stay the same age.”

Jason Dodge at Franco Noero



Poetics in hyperbole, artworks like prose written in dorm rooms, like Ono’s instructions, like a koan, “like using tweezers to pull diamonds out of your girlfriend’s tear ducts.” Like a poem.
Heating pocket items to body temp artificially, warm string blocking a doorway, the exterior entering the interior, the items to remove fingers assembled in the average numbers of fingers, 10, transference, our childish innocence, items on a found grocery list bought in repetition several times in different places, like candies in a infinite pile you can take dispersing, like a disco dancer as stand in for lover, like a sink running forever down a drain.
Poetic: the disjuncture in a logical statement, fissures before coming full circle, in "making sense," the gap acting like a discovered lapse in the real’s rationality, when there never was one to begin with.

Thomas Zipp at Guido W. Baudach



With Ebola’s threat hanging, this exhibition/performance’s opportune relevance allows a transference into dummy vessels, a real situation, the drama-schmaltz less hammy in the wake of calls to close borders and level 3 suits and “unprotected man seen assisting ebola patient.” The melodrama here gets a bit of actual blood to make the fright-night death-in-life of Resusci Anne, Dante-reading, and art-standards house band seem pertinent.  Not that any of this was intentional, Zipps interest in exposing a shared dreamtime, more akin to building a rorschach of its culture's symbols and tropes.

Bill Lynch at White Columns



Flitting between trite sentimentalism of Japanese romantic stylings and outright greatness, or between early Laura Owens and Peter Doig visual-static, the work’s defiling of painting’s spatial logic, a breakdown of “arrangement,” common to many afflicted with “outsider” status, gives them an uneasy presence, a space where things do not sit well, sway in sort a of visual seasickness.
Not meaning to idealize the dead into glory, some of the paintings are bad, but the plates, and porcelain at night with black ghosts and odd fox, and alizarin-aura books, and black dogs in rotted fields like van Gogh in crude oil, in their odd flighty directness are a language, like children’s drawings, that obey some methodology that is it’s own and impossible to reproduce.  A “unfinished-too-soon” pleasure.
But with “outsider” artists we immediately believe it, that there is no gimmick or meta-gamesmanship, but believe that these are perfectly honest, earnest, miraculous paintings, as if untouched by human crappiness, whether or not its true and which we can’t know, and probably less to do with Ann Craven and more to do with James Ensor.

Paul Lee at Maccarone



This trope of a thing attached on the canvas - shrimps, soupcans, stickers, etc.. - the pre-ordered packaging of current-discourse. Assemblage-readymade-chic: the go-to symbol of fractured meaning in late-capital, Harrison semio-neurosis, manifold course nebulousness of a gee-shucks consider-the-lobster-type mire.
But for all Lee’s noodling in the bogs of contemporary tropes, there’s a repressed nostalgia interned in the postmodern-chic, hinting an emotional resonance in the tacky theater carpets. Reminiscent of Richard Hawkins stapled boys, or Fecteau’s early shoeboxes, and sometimes stepping on the toes of Tom Burr; and of course FGT - A pathos embedded in the minimalist-chic, disco heavens dancing over the corpse of autonomy's box.
Lee all about towel's touch. Cinema and the faces drawn in the dark through touch, felt over carpet cinema.
Lovelorn, the word we're looking for.

Ken Okiishi at Mathew



Okiishi’s interest in “internet-networks” should come preloaded with the knowledge that relevancy in the instant availability of the digital panopticon red water requires constant change, adapt or be obsolete, things lose whatever luster they had quick, and though not every exhibition is required to be a hit, everyone is immediately aware of a bunt. And we’re seeing vapid television programming again.

See also: Nick Mauss and Ken Okiishi at Mendes Wood DM

Jenny Holzer at Cheim & Reid



The Truisms were always a form of censorship, cliches to terminate thought. Speaking at you, unhearing, they acted as gag, a policing in “sensible” thinking. 2004, in wake of wars, Holzer’s newfound “silence” could be an act of protest, an act of being too sad to tell, a fear of laughing for never being able to stop,* an aphasia through trauma, or tempting psycho-analysis of painting’s historical inability to speak, the repression of flatness and tautologic “it is what it is” existentials. That seems to be what they want, why else would they look “Malevich;” as if to chide painting for its apolitic, for its not speaking.
Interesting though, to see a painting speak. Particularly in such directness, as not an art game, of such violence, of a painting saying: “You can see some marks because of belting even now.”

* "I, for one, don’t, and not because I am depressed, but because I find this historical period largely so laughable that were I to start laughing I am afraid I would not be able to stop. I remember how when high on marijuana my ex-girlfriend would giggle virtually at everything on and on. I never had this kind of extended laughter on the few instances I smoked pot. Yet I am sure that were I to start laughing in my normal state of consciousness, my laughter would certainly surpass hers. As for her, there was no danger of her starting laughing and not managing to stop, dying of it: she did not find present-day societies that laughable. All I ask of this world to which I have already given several books is that it become less laughable, so that I would be able to laugh again without dying of it—and that it does this soon, before my somberness becomes second nature. This era has made me somber not only through all the barbarisms and genocides it has perpetuated, but also through being so laughable. Even in this period of the utmost sadness for an Arab in general, and an Iraqi in specific, I fear dying of laughter more than of melancholic suicide, and thus I am more prone to let down my guard when it comes to being sad than to laughing at laughable phenomena."

-Jalal Toufic, “If you prick us, do we not bleed?”

“Flat Neighbors” at Rachel Uffner



Assemblage surrealism 2.0
The fallout of semiotic manicism/collapse/supernova* of the 00’s assemblage, Harrison, Genzken, Pernice et al, the exploding of Unmonumental’s detritus, left the next generation picking cultural rubble. A post-apocalyptic cargo-cult, artists, still wanting to believe, began to reassemble totems of cultural meaning. Staedelschulites rehashing a form of ready-made-marxist-surrealism, societie's tchotchkies made to “speak” the tongues of the Invisible Hand, worship of gods who must be crazy. Post-Lieske - the real rabble of Neue Alte Brucke, Pro-Choice, etc. - Ceccaldi, Yngve Holen and everyone else - rearranging/collaging/juxtaposing the signs of capital as some sort of anti-altar to them - the whole mandala phenomenon, tableaus of cultural artifacts, seen again and again and again on the rugs of art fairs everywhere - finally hitting bedrock in the strip-mine of Darren Bader just arranging capital’s objects on the floor.

But so look see, at Rachel Uffner, as the next generation assembles, re-erect, no longer a strange spiritualism in letting the markets speak their hallucinations, but primordial constructions in its own. Still highly surrealist in its mashing of lobster- biology with tele-electronics in the continuously re-imagined sphere of bio-tech. Future's frogs in glass housing shan't live alone. The Bivalve shell rises, the new theory of design, Rough and smooth, coarse and erotic. The oyster like a hand made to hold the Apple product, what a perfect symbol for our biomechanical cybernetics. The limits of the hard body turning over into soft. Look at us evolve to our newfound worlds underwater. Do we really think a PowerRanger would own Elad Lassry?.

*so caught up in this chaos of signs and surface effects, it's
precisely because it's so serious about space: In a time when space
and image lose their distinction, and the old, ideal distance
between viewer and object is always already filled up and
occupied by a thousand communications, sculpture, too, finds
ways of making itself multi-surfaced and schizo-temporal. In
order to re-occupy our contemporary no-space, it trades in its
timeless pose for a temporary one, or for a manic series of
apearances. - Kelsey on Harrison’s semio-manicism.

Jason Rhoades at David Zwirner



These things are starting to yellow, sadly, and wilt. The peas no longer green. Remember when they looked brilliant? Remember when it delivered this jewel? Bless you Rhoades, if only for that.

Nathan Hylden at Misako & Rosen



The most important thing today is it look like contemporary art. That none mistake it as other.
Hylden’s contingent indexical, or indexically contingent, whatever, a lexical strategy, as long as those words are used in context of cold clean conceptual look, the lookbook of contemporaneity, the fallout of the GuytonWalkerPriceSmith crescendo 10 years ago now already, when all the neo-cold-minimalists started running around, Cheyney Thompson, Quaytman, et al. and Hylden too, Orchard’s death and the rise of Abreu. And everyone was talking about conceptual painting strategies and forgetting about Frank Stella and Bernard Frieze, because it looked different, and discovered new words to go along with it, Laura Owens in a new suit, a new techno-irruption of some new neo-liberatory strategy, hands off technical perfection, as if to say it was beyond the artist; as if all witnessing the new evacuation of embarrassing subjectivity at the hands of capitalist artistic production, which we were, and every one of them finally with hands free to greet it.

Tony Greene at Schindler House MAK Center



Whether or not we find Tony Greene’s work of interest, we first know that other artists like it, Opie Hawkins Bamber Majoli, as presented Whibi+MAK.  What is interesting is that it took the injection of 4 artist’s socio-credibillity to get his post-humous career turning over.  A benign-nepotism proving, further than Codax or any social-interventionist project, that it really is circles and names and symbolic capital that makes things visible, suddenly appearing before us on both coasts, memorabilia of a scene in time. How could we ever know if we like it, or instead spread as the word, like the doctrinal histories projected 12 feet high in dark classrooms, things made to matter through visibility’s influence, and then you know, and then you are common.

Frances Stark at Daniel Buchholz and Daniel Buchloz



Stark’s teenage formality distinct Matthew Brannon’s hypochondriac bourgeois, her posters and videos, though clean, contain a level of humanist existential goo. Stark drawing from DIY-punk ethos letting it all hang out the canvas, a gesture towards admitting the cultural disposability of art practice based in images today that stands over the face of the Deep, Instagram. Artists can’t get over it, blasted in an unstoppable deluge of culture daily. With so many “dealing with it,” detourning it into art, as if that was meaningful, launching conventional artist weapons in atomized age, Stark’s insistence in the forms cheapness itself, its mixtape assemblage of a disposable music video, affirms her as one of the few who actually get it.

Rachel Rose at High Art



Another render-stentialist fresh out Columbia somewhere between Trecartin and Atkins. So infatuated in the surface exhibiting the plasticity of a world in higher-definition than our own. The video is endlessly manipulative, bending in blitzkrieg assault of sudden weather, like phone phreaking surface effects of our emotive connection, they play like enchantments into us ecstatically, eroding any affective links with what is seen, hyper numbing, leaving the viewer estranged, cold as the real is endlessly manipulated like weather you can turn on and off.

see also: Ed Atkins - Render-stentialists

Heather Guertin at Brennan & Griffin 



Lightly, post-1919 Alexei Jawlensky heads rise like a video artifacts to the surface of Today’s painting, reworking the artifacts of its scanned history, a ghost encountered, like flies to the surface of soup, parodizing searched authenticity - according to the PR. No one is a painter today but instead a “an artist who engages with painting.” Dreadfully unrefined to actually be a painter. Don't touch the stuff. “Appropriating historical imagery" soon to be required in every didactic as the vessels fill with yesteryears refuse, with flies. A lightness to ensure that everything looks like paint, and not painting. A structure of faces to give reason to paint, to make it seem reasonable, excuse the brushstrokes, they're aren't mine, I saw a ghost of myself returning to modernism to begin again. These paintings are nice.

John Armleder at Fernand Léger Foundation

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Armleder the center node between Mike Kelley’s playful aesthetic abuse in Broodthaers institutional mocking mis-en-scene, the potted plants to prove it, an assault on taste in a “bad painting”-cum-“Bad interior design installation.” A good Armleder show leaves you feeling molested. It’s the lightness with which Armleder creates aesthetic tragedies that is his gift. The stretched ratio of the vinyl, a guitar next to a minimalist painting, a couch, it’s all so .... plain. The banality of evil, the plainness of aesthetic abjection.

William Pope.L at Catherine Bastide



Since our friendly American artist gave up performance, its been objects self-mocking and the context that presents them. I walked into a giant bisected penis in Chicago, the cut slathered in a dry scab of ketchup. Less the crude directness, Pope.L’s comedy in their refusal of expectations, a mastery of not-quite-speaking-it-aloud or abstracted to the point of loss, losing the punchline for the trees, waiting for the forbidden thoughts eruption in nervous dissonance, alluding endlessly to color, grey people, beige milk, speaking every other color but but the one we’re awaiting, allowing the distending of what-is-not-yet-said to inflate like a giant white elephant under the table, a goodbadandugly standoff of who is going to say it first.
Then the press release just goes and says it.

Allison Katz at BFA Boatos



Yet another Painting Press acknowledging the persevering artist’s insistence of painting’s “possible field” in spite of its obsolescence. An irritating sentiment when one could instead irrigate the barren field, or harvest dirt, perhaps ground for pigments, however you want to use the metaphor before it changes to Painting is like an “overripe” fruit. Whatever painting is, its barren and unpalatable until you learn to like it. The acquired taste here is the awkward flat-footeded™ go-to in painting with meta-winking-nonsensical subject, a designer sensibility of outdated fashions, intentional international. I mean that Monkey painting is just awful, like something from a 70’s Tommy Bahama travel brochure, tiger-fur speedo on its way. A confabulation of sensibilities, cliches of 70’s colors in 90’s photoshop-neophism, everything lightly repugnant, repulsive, overwrought; Accruing a semblance of a thread through the passing motifs that surface, developing a topology, the adsoprtion of badpainting cop-out disaffection when you could ask the cops to leave, you’re an adult and this is your home, decorate it however.

Allan McCollum at Petzel



So McCollum continues his endless objects, repeating one singular idea. 31 billion hopeless object, higher than peak population, the good schoolboy bringing enough to share, no two snowflakes alike.
A strange market, even distribution amongst population and they would be valueless, without rarity in their uniqueness, but a collector’s majority stake, hoarding wealth like diamonds, irradiating gold, that old Dr.No trick, a governed population, produces power. McCollum still playing in the 1980’s 8bits when today whole new versions of crypto-wealth premised on staggering permutations of bits, 128, and the mining of time in numbers larger than the mass of a universe. This looks comparatively Kinkade quaint. A cold humanism, depressing individuality. The endgame summated in the center of far sides's black/white sea innumerate, an individual, a penguin, singing, “I gotta be me, Oh I just gotta be me.”

Lily van der Stokker at Koenig & Clinton



Van der Stokker's Lisa Frank feminism posits an ironic fuck-all to neurotic questioning of gender paranoia's possibility of existing as a stereotype, of pink; e.g. “Parenting the non-girlie girl,” “Loving Pink for Boys, Haiting it for Girls,” “Pink and Blue,” “Toemageddon 2011,” “In Praise of Pink Polish,” “When did girls start wearing pink” “Saving our Daughter from an Army of Princesses,” and “What’s the Problem with Pink Anyway?” A baseline existential question: how am I not myself? I can be who I want to be, but will everyone know that I am being who I want to be? recursive mise-en-abyme into self’s abyss. Van der Stokker ironizes it into its caricature laughability at the same time embraces it. A “best regards” to all those current existential crises. Its mockery’s expense of others cruel in its flippancy.

See also : Lily van der Stokker at Air de Paris