“Atlas” at MOTINTERNATIONAL

(link)

Unlike the Condo-esque pastiche of the orange and green portrait’s 3rd-generation faux-primitivism, the other painting in the show, Meert’s flesh and blue portrait grapples with a whole other cultural primitivism of a blue-eyed westerner: the elementary portrait painted in unlearned directness of first attempts to render. That these unlearned portraits reveals, like a repressed artifact floating to the surface of the pool: a western collective-unconscious ideal of person. Like the Vitruvian man fit into rational containers, everyone’s shitty first portraits draw a sort of hidden standard, a boyhood's normative primitivism revealing unconscious ideals.

Alexander Ross at David Nolan



The painting’s physicality found in its detail's quasi-digital scaling, rendering topography as a haptic plasticity reminding you of your face's more rubbery bits. Ross’s lumpen portraits are reminiscent of the original Smiley Face™ created to keep workers happy, a smiling complacency of un-revolving ideals, assuaging masses.

See too: Heather Guertin at Brennan & Griffin.

Oscar Tuazon and Eli Hansen at Maccarone



The brutalist bravado of Tuazon meeting the campy stoner pastiche of Hansen’s psuedo-psychedelia makes for an imprecision of tone like Prince’s appropriation of the rural’s common tire planters, hard to disentangle celebration from sarcasm, like the joke of this exhibition’s endless column of toilet water. What was brilliantly found common ground in previous co-exhibtions, containing the specificity of both’s affective attachments, as in duct taped glassware, becomes in this exhibition dulled in its conflicting auras, mixed-metaphors of irony meeting its antithesis, of the deft masculine erections mocked by its sidelined dropout equivalent, found a meeting point in the threshold of blue-collar car craft aesthetics.

Paul Cowan at Clifton Benevento



Continuing the thread: But so how does one deal with monochromes who over-perform the narrative theatricality inherent to its minimalist theater, dissolving the beholden position to supplant it with its own, the comedy of mimes painting, (mimes painted these) deflating the modernist is-what-it-is with a whoopee cushion like laugh. Unlike the “autonomous” gentle monochromes whose “contentless” portability transfers their contextually-fungible aura, perfectly tradable vessels for commodity markets; Cowan’s content fractures with its removal from its over theater, bringing its artifactual baggage along. Cowan’s monochromes do not behave in their silent assertion of their living quarters, but ruin the air with musty aura of its mime punchline, silent but deadly.

See: Seven Reeds at Overduin and Co.

Pentti Monkkonen at High Art



Monkkonen's box-trucks literalize the metaphor: painting as commodity vessels in transit. What were rectangular become parallel grams sent for accelerating markets. The vessels are moving fast, the trucks skull cab and silver toothed grill portend their too-fast-too-young market crash. The flow of brand. Graffiti, produce, logos, brushstrokes, artistic identities all competing for recognition.  Like many interested in the cheap plastic promise of fantastical playthings, it is found perfectly in the toy-form’s commodic pleasure whose projectable fantasy's complete dissolve of use-value mirrors art’s ostensible own. That like childhood figures of action, producing their jism all over town to heroic ends, painting an identity placed over a muscular blank, the vessel, creating a subject.


 See too: S.O.A.P.Y III at What Pipeline ; Mathis Altmann at Freedman Fitzpatrick

Shirana Shahbazi at Kunsthalle Bern



Do something to it, then do something more. Like many “young” photographers today Shahbazi works at estrangement of the mass commons of archetypal/cliche cultural images. Shahabazis format and frames shift both between and within exhibitions, here the “roadtrip,” which having something done, and then something a little more, shift in their continual detachment from the real, until rendered neuter, until we feel them not at all, becoming something so overly familiar as to become foreign, crumbling its content to be mocked by the clownish aggro of intensely hued walls’ overbearing presence, a means vacillating between a self-flagellation for the photos sentimental printed nostalgia and an ironic overlay of cheer, laughter for the slaughter of content. That as the PR mentions these could be anyone’s instagram photos, the new banal spectacular, the dissolution of experience within the grand illusion of the individual for the cloud, a generic humanism.

See too: Annette Kelm at Gio Marconi

Markus Schinwald at Wattis



Since the press release ignores mentioning it, Schinwald has assembled chair legs to look like strippers dancing around poles. Though similar work was shown at the Freud Museum, so perhaps the guy with the cigar isn’t always a dick. Either way it’s Tom Otterness level of comedy in an Oldenburg style of sculptural punnery, lipstick rockets and cherry licking. It’s camp, but camp so buried in a cultural miasma of conservative taste it’s not really all that fun, not really fun at all.

“Seven Reeds” at Overduin & Co.

(link)

As others have extrapolated, Kassay’s silver market stardom was, in the style of ancient plated mirrors, an object of vanity for the rich, giving them back exactly what was loved most, their surroundings, their homes, their empire and visage. To prove the point the more well silvered even reached higher prices. The theory serves as a parable to distinguish the vanity of the rich from the more philosophically noble raisons of the art world, and that Kassay’s shift to monochromes, however derivative, was a welcome advancement past vain ideals.
Yet the monochrome itself is a flattery of the viewer. In its minimalist mode it highlights the theater of its surrounding, as Fried described minimalism almost half a century ago:

“theatrical because, to begin with, it is concerned with the actual circumstances in which the beholder encounters literalist work. Morris makes this explicit. Whereas in previous art ‘what is to be had from the work is located strictly within [it],’ the experience of literalist art is of an object in a situation - one that, virtually by definition, includes the beholder.”

Or to quote the infamous monochrome brand of Codax: “ another aspect of monochrome paintings is that they function somewhat like a mirror. They are essentially blanks. With little evidence of the hand that made them, it’s harder to attribute subjectivity to them than with most other art, so people are confronted with themselves a bit more.”
That monochrome or minimalist modes are themselves a vanity object, in which the viewer is flattered for all the intelligence that they can project into the blank objects. Serving to imbue their surrounding, gallery or living spaces with the auratic privilege of “art.” Lacking even Imi Knoebel’s color-content, the works drabness serves to disperse content and reinforce it as its surroundings, its space and viewer on the stage before it, like totems of whatever ideals they allow to be contained. That so much gentle painting today rather than a production of content, merely acts as directives for the flow of content and persons that come to it, trickling through it.

See too: Merlin Carpenter at Overduin & Co.

Jesse Fleming at 356 Mission



Whereas Paul Pfeiffer’s frozen basketball players represented the interior ecstasy of the players before the audience, Fleming’s film works outward into its receiving audience mirrored in its screens. And like Doug Aitken’s use of commercial-production’s affective means as the product itself, Fleming’s immaculate visual spectacle produces a seductive and blinding spell, absorbing its religious imagery into the enrapture of theater. The PR interview names this visual-trance by the psychology term “Flow” in which one is “fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity,” the activity here of its viewing. Yet the full involvement of the quad-channel jumbotron here does more to dislocate the viewer entirely from the it with the hypnosis of its virtual replacement, a dislocating amnesia, like 356 Mission’s other film spectacular, Sturtevant’s FINITE/INFINITE, in its grinding visual takeover of the viewer. But whereas Sturtevant’s film continually ejected the viewer every 11 seconds from its theatrical suspension, Fleming’s virtual supplanting of a continuous and unending “flow” might find its ultimate potential of enraptured viewership in the eponymous fictional film of Infinite Jest, a deadly and ultimate terror.

Nina Beier at David Roberts Art Foundation

(link)

20th century Surrealism couldn’t have predicted how surreal the 21st would actually become. Like the floor on view here, the new virtuality of surface makes Magritte’s paintings a reality, a drag and drop physicality positioning images into the real. That we now live submerged in dreamscapes, that this why art today is so much surrealist theater, Marxist or otherwise, that more and more it mirrors the world in which we live. “Trapped in an ambiguous position between an object and the representation of that object;” like so many surrealist crimescenes, who spilled the vegetables, the engaged tubes pouring in through the window.

Stefan Tcherepnin at Real Fine Arts



Stefan Tcherepnin finally rid his Berlin support group-exhibitionary nest spreads wings solo in a blair-witch-style cookie-monster theater, a fill of sticks, shadows and monsters, including another Real Fine release expressing neurosis over artistic network, “Echoing [...] a classic about hypocrisy as a function of assimilation and artistic progression into the orders of social spheres, ST shows an ambivalent means for internalizing both productive and sometimes abject and shadowy qualities in the artistic search for representation.”
Like Liden’s filling of Spauling with X-mas trees, stuffing the gallery with an overload of non-communicative content, a gag for identification, artistic and gallery, Tcherepnin’s “content” is a means of delaying of identity, of presenting content that, in its deafness, refuses to settle, Tcherepnin’s hideous stick assemblages and kidstuff appropriations are like an punchless joke not meant to sit well, a long-winded shaggy dog story like the video on view.

See too: Stefan Tcherepnin at Freedman Fitzpatrick, Single Moms at Vilma Gold, Morag Keil at Real Fine Arts.

Keiichi Tanaami at NANZUKA



The visual assault of these falling somewhere between Lari Pittman and Ed Roth. A Yakuza tattoo or A Fiona Rae orgy of style, uncomfortable in its over stylization. An irruption of subliminal psychedelic terror, mocking visual space in its demolition of it. A type of work pertinent in the age of overwhelming information, when looking at these  feels a lot like opening one’s e-mail.  A pleasure of the frenzy tinged in a sinking darkness. Holding some kind of abject unconscionable terror, sculptural nightmares.
The Frenzy of the visible, a hardcore visual. A violence of information.

Also, what is with artists of this generation and Mickey Mouse, with artist’s childhoods rendered so prominently mid-career.

Petra Cortright at Société



Like many today, Cortright deals with a subject whose new identity is expressed through the grate of the digital realm’s corporate packaging, pressed through ready-found effects and constructs for personalization.
Whereas others construct a stand-in (avatars) for the self - Atkin’s mask, Wolfson’s “Shylock” or punk, Stark’s ready-made avatars, or Trecartin's identity ad nauseum; Cortright's rejection of the third person instead uses the ubiqutious pseudo-self that most conform online, creating a sort of Sherman like paradox of inseparable artist/performer.
And while most of the digital-existentialists stand to thematize and problematize the new identities, those operating from internet modes seem not only indifferent to the skepticism of its promise, but also content with the play in the sandbox and to occasionally bring some of the found network detritus back into the gallery. It becomes a sort of Naumanian axiom of, as an artist whatever I do in the studio is art; updated as whatever an internet artist does on the internet must be art. The difference is that today, everyone has this studio, and privileging the play of those who call themselves artists as somehow more self-aware or capable is a crumbling distinction. Taking pieces and artifacts of the internet into the gallery for its scrutinizing pleasure seems to miss the vast sea operating right now. At worst used by theorists to form a rational order, or theories of internet based upon these examples.
The allure of internet-platformed art comes again implicitly with the ideal of a merging of art and virtual-life. It is a throwback in the form of neo-60’s-happenings, performed on the new-found democratic platform of the a global everything-available network where finally everyone can see. But as Youtube’s “censorship” of Cortright’s early video shows, most of the internet cares nothing for art's particular interests and detournments. At a certain point the artworld has to acknowledge that merging of art and life can't be premised on the insertion of what it owns as art into life, but respecting what is outside of it, that as Youtube made clear, making no distinction between spam and art spam.

See too: Ed Atkins at Serpentine Gallery , Rachel Rose at High Art

David Lamelas at Kunsthalle Basel



An interesting comparison between Bruce Nauman ubiquity and Lamelas left off the grid. Both with early awkward sculptures, a switch to video/film, lines on floors, mediumless. Both were ahead of their time, and yet today there is at any  moment at least one Bruce Nauman video playing somewhere in the world, 24/7, while Lamelas equally deadpan institutionally-reflexive esoterica remains firmly on the fringes. Perhaps that Nuaman’s crystalline crippling of intention and meaning was more immediately reproducible and apparent than the subtlety of Lamelas critical loose threading, creating loose threads. The institutional promotion could be attributed to Nauman’s hegemonic influence, the permeating embedded self-skeptics, an influence so complete as to be invisible, but perhaps Lamelas’s productive outward criticism of media givens would have left us all better off.

“Fin de Siècle” at Swiss Institute



Sometimes it's nice to just look at some chairs. The theatrical staging neuters the aura of their historical import, instead placed in a stage as characters among themselves. A Studio 54 crime scene whose acerbic mocking of cultural fashions erodes solemnity, able to see them as objects again, mostly as the awkward objects they are. Sometimes it's nice to just look at some chairs.

Amanda Ross-Ho at The Approach

(link)

Scale doesn't render well in reproduction, and the shifting relations of scale to the viewer seem mostly lost. The bobby pins and scalpels further enlarged than the white wine, against un-enlarged umbrellas; discordant scales for an unnerving sound.

The “crime scene” - as the PR describes the exhibition - filled with clues as symbols, objects rendered as signs, impressing a (crtl+T) click-and-drag virtuality to the space they inhabit. They become inhuman in their enlargement, no longer calibrated to bodily comfort but instead a fun-house manicism, of the world made slapstick, the clowning gotten carried away to mocking humanism and expressing willful laughter over its needs, forcing themselves upon you by bludgeoning distance with the brute force of size. This glove at distance looks the size of the one on on your hand. The shifts in scale reassert their indifference towards yours. Unlike Mark Manders whose subtle percentage scale shifts produce an uncanny uncertainty, Ross-Ho’s objects have totally left the human world, expressing none of the sentimentality of Gober, but rather a cold aggressive plasticity of its information.
Like the masks central to this exhibition, human emotion is traded for its systematic expression, reduced to sundial rythmn’s clockwork, the phases of the moon, inhuman.

See too: Daniel Dewar and Grégory Gicquel at Micheline Szwajcer 

Ida Ekblad at Herald St.



Having just mentioned painters hands lost in the turning of printing presses painting, here Ekblad arrives making what appear as, though cannot be certified by bombastic press release’s purple prose, monoprint paintings.

Like spaghetti fallen out of pockets in embarrassment - What was once the artist’s distinct color-forms clearly delineated and arranged, what was composed, has been melted into a miasma of stringy faux-naive fuck-all mess, of neophyte graffiti dusting, of everything crumbling. Previous work’s rational ordered pleasure traded for the irrationality of the abject, anal expulsive, as orders fail and worms grow into the corpse and a dried-scab cartoon characters appear to mock your desire for some return to good taste. Their illogic is a horror. Of course half the fun is learning to love it, this next step of gross painting.
Like Josh Smith it was the brash confidence of signatory strokes that held together their flimsy palmed aesthetic. Now the brash confidence of just showing these, currently standing heads above the others racing to re-abjectify abstraction, Smith, Eichwald, Buthe, Sittg etc. etc.

See too: Zak Prekop at Shane Campbell , Aaron Curry at Michael Werner

José Rojas at Vilma Gold





See too: "Flat Neighbors" at Rachel Uffner

Zak Prekop at Shane Campbell

(link)

The preponderance of overly tasteful paintings today is, in one sense, critically justified through its “reexamination” of modernism, particularly looking towards the forgotten’s more decorative tendencies, Delauney, Munch, Jawlensky, Hantai. And, coming out the mid-late 2000’s “indexicality” boom, in which every brushstroke was quotation and the artist’s hands removed for the theft - lost in the revolution of printmaking as painting - painting today still carries viewers' heads echoing this skepticism, and thus benefits: what was once derivative and gentle is now critical. It helps if you can carry this baggage out of your school.
The most interesting thing about Prekop’s paintings is the desire for the return of his hands, while looking not. The paintings do offer a little more in person, a use of transparency of linen, puzzles of layers, etc. In reproduction the visual unfolding of it’s making - the steps of what might-be but don’t-look-like a screenprint - are lost, the cleverness gone and the predominance of its nice-design packages is all one is left with, just how unbelievably tasteful these paintings today are.

Single Moms at Vilma Gold



According to the statement issued, the origin story was: Single Moms feeling, if not “disabled,” at least having “problems getting by” and so with a few phone calls got the band together making “plans to produce and possibly trade certain self manufactured commodities.” Set against stories of princes who choose to live as paupers, it takes on a altruistic hint of mission from god to raise enough money to save their orphan souls from eviction.
Interesting because it premises everything that came before as not commodities, that these new works under the group’s name were “beautiful home goods,” whereas whatever came before, under their individual selves, were neither. These plucky entrepreneurs, saw opportunity by entering, only now, into free markets as freeing them, meaning their not-commodity-objects could continue being so because these were for sale instead. That they weren’t selling out. Or, that they were selling out so as not to have to sell out.
An interesting trick to free yourself from the demands of cultural production for those of market production, reminiscent of S.O.A.P.Y.’s magick trick. Though an interestingly impossible distinction between luxury goods and art.  See too, Ooga Booga and Paradise Garage's Sweatshop among countless others.
Interesting because they look less like “beautiful home goods” and more like piles of contemporary art tropes. Interestingly even less so than the worded lamps, singing paintings, among other objects for which these artists are known. Interestingly being shown in a gallery setting. Interesting because like so much art today attaching little doodads to retail display systems it is hard to distinguish between desire for commodity and the desire for art.

See too : “S.O.A.P.Y. III” at What Pipeline

Timur Si-Qin at Carl Kostyál

(link)

The new techno-conceptual. A Bernadette parasitizing of corporate campaigns, here in Abercrombie rather than Levi’s brands. Throwing in the tropes of today's high-tech trade show’s baroque eye-candy, they of course look great, they were made to.
Acting out a mis-en-scene installation displaying the display systems themselves, it presents today’s shopping experience as yesterday's pagan rituals, the work’s ostensible entomopathogenic function serves to force its host, the luxury goods system, to self-expose.
This is the Koonsian fantasy of the gallery, that objects put under its disenchanting light will perform a sort of auto-dissection. That the clean myth-body sex of its advertorial objects act as critique rather than a mere transference of its subject’s fetish to the work itself, acting as pagan materialist totems, like shooting bullets through medieval armor. As the PR states the exhibition is the “the mindless mirror,” that though literal and obvious - like the real use of such means - overt hamfistedness never lessens the affect, however stupid, like the hominidae skulls they contain, on the cusp of becoming something human.


See too: Ben Schumacher at Musee d’art contemporain de Lyon, Simon Denny at Portikus, Pamela Rosenkranz at Karma International

“Post-Speculation, Act I” at P!

After the brouhaha over the Whitney’s protest adieus, and questions of motives and publicity, arguing for and against, and the unfortunately off scheduling of HOWDOYOUSAYAMINAFRICAN’s work, highly dependent on one's ability to return to the Whitney again and again, against noise and signals of cultural commentators returning each others pings in competing domains of airtime, opinion, hearts and mind, though delivering some fine examples of art criticism over said work and protests etc. etc. and so to finally cut the volume, turn off the lights and play the video is like most refreshing of all.

Henry Flynt at Audio Visual Arts

For Bourdieu, Flynt was an example having committed the artworld’s “one unforgivable transgression” for “refusing to play the game, to challenge in accordance with the rules, i.e. artistically, their authors call into question not a way of playing the game, but the game itself and the belief which supports it. “
A 1964 issue of the village voice reports on Flynt, among others, protesting a Stockhausen performance passing out a “stylishly designed” leaflet warning that:

Aristocratic European Art has had a monstrous success in forcing veneration of itself on all the world, especially in the imperialist period. Everywhere that Bach, Beethoven, Bruckner, and Stockhausen are huckstered as 'Music of the Masters," white aristocratic European supremacy has triumphed. Its greatest success is in North America, whose rulers take the Art of West Europe's rulers as their own.

And in Flynt’s own words that Stockhausen "received patronage from the ruling classes, [...] a lackey of the aristocrats." Though he would have preferred to picket Leonard Bernstein.

Flynt was, obviously, ahead of his time.
A time when he was mainly a musician - and in opposition to the general consensus of those sharing his marxist ideals - urged a return to “unpretentious” musical styles. Styles popular among the subaltern classes as an expression of solidarity with them, releasing albums spanning from aleatory to “hillbilly blues” with subtle Indian influences, and writing numerous philosophical treatises, before returning to the Artworld in the 80’s with a less radical more marketable gallery-ideas continually seeming on the cusp of breakthrough, though never getting it.

And so, now showing his absurdist fortune-cookies whose opaque comedy-drama is well described by the PR: ‘aim at something pithy but miss. (They are cracked.)” “elicit images synesthetically” “a derailed headspace [...] offered as an esthetic experience.” Operating by negating for a moment a logical thought, like placing a brick wall in your head. If only Flynt would continue with his populist ideals, give up the aristocracy of art, express a solidarity with the people and open a twitter account.

Andro Wekua at Sprüth Magers



As other artists predict the digital euphemizing of the body, Wekua’s re-tensions corporeality, hanging by threads of Narcissus's new glass pond. It’s both a romanticization of the body’s haptic analog in space - space that Wekua is so good at making uneasy - and, in young women’s endangerment, a slasher-flick mockery of it, the body.
Wekua re-updating the same threatening social moralism of horror movies and fairy tales, though the girl in the other room now riding triumphant over what originally made her a meal.

The spooky-ghost paintings are bad, acting as installation markers, nowhere near as stellar as Cathy Wilkes iron-dense versions.

See too : Cathy Wilkes at Tramway

Jana Euler at Kunsthalle Zürich

(link)

Unlike Kelm, or Cerletty whose expanding clue-board subjects serve towards conceptual opacity, Euler’s divergent subject maze, as the Press Release and Isabelle Graw’s breathless writing on the artist attest, is premised on the allure of its referential breadcrumbs baiting the viewer/reviewer down long winding paths of explication. We do not enter pictorial space so much as unpack its surface display. Self-awareness in symbiosis to the organs-without-body of art consecration -  subtly highlighted in Graw’s admission to her own place within Euler’s network - is clever, smart. But that though the game is sometimes fun, often the explication is berating.


See too: Annette Kelm at Gio Marconi, Matthew Cerletty at Office Baroque.

Daniel Dewar and Grégory Gicquel at Micheline Szwajcer



Pottery Barn and Eddie Bauer catalogs function in their emotive repackaging of idyllic mythos into the objects it sells, the same packaging of Boutoux’s PR here, imbuing wool thick with nostalgic ideals of romantic farm visions, warmth’s magic armor against the coldness of capital.  Describing this doubling-nostalgia as Amanda Ross-Ho in a Pottery Barn suit would fail to acknowledge Robert Gober’s influence on all three and the remaking itself an affective trope. But whereas Ross-Ho’s scaling produces a sort of hippie signage as terror, or Gober’s cat litter as a story unto itself, the sweaters, toilet basins, and foot-jugs never best the nostalgia of craft that suffuses it.

Goshka Macuga at Rüdiger Schöttle



The hipster too was a semionaut; whose careful balance of fashion’s signs were an additive and appropriative construction of appearance and identity, a careful facade of references, and so the concurrent rise of Rachel Harrison makes symptomatic sense for its ability to thematize semio-collapse short-circuits in a way that was jokey, pranksterish and light relief against undeconstructable-tuber confusion of “the real” having really ascended into code that both Harrison and Hipsters were obviously responding. But artists now live it, take for granted the serial construction of references fashioning artistic identity whose appropriations need make little sense, that juxtaposition is enough capable of producing all the double-binds, oxymorons, and paradoxes that the artworld prefers in a the-more-the-merrier type campaign, creating perfect mires filled with loads of interpretive juice whose glossy surface reflected the world well.

Dan Graham at Greene Naftali



The banal-sinister that Graham early perfected still looking fresh despite its omni-influence over several generations as market diverse as Liam Gillick to Sam Pulitzer. A proto "relational" project whose difference was Graham’s work belied the corporate-style insidiousness of its MET rooftop friendliness, that Graham has always been, if not indifferent, at least analytically impersonal towards his subject matter, texts elucidating all the problems of its fun, punk, of the videos so comfortably viewed here, instead of letting its proponents speak for it, giving texts like “Punk as Propaganda” or “Rock my Religion” becoming a trope in its own right, in which opaque installations promote the texts that come with it.
The strangest of the whole thing is how similar Greene Naftali newly all in glass has begun to look like the corporate-pastiche of the art it houses.