Florian Hecker & John McCracken at Künstlerhaus KM- , Midway Contemporary Art

Link Künstlerhaus , Midway

Sparkling green lawn's invention a fashionable show of power by an aristocrat class whose wealth made superfluous their land's need for production. Wasted space a show of luxury wealth in a symbolic economics trickled down to a middle class who too wanted shows of their own version of middle class luxury in a suburban plot. And so too today Manhattan bank and corporate office enormous lobbies are left unimaginably empty in the highest rate real estate markets today in a show of symbolic violence, waste as power. And then so too is the empty gallery a flaunting of space value, of sited sound's physicality and weight; value transferred from the real estate it occupies, $/sqft, the equation bare, voids given presence and meaning through the land, harnessing the original form of wealth, or at least subsistence, by farming the capitalist value for itself in effigy to its own grandeur. Minimalist modes as theater to its own presence, the precarity of Hecker's audio opulence set the gallery on pins.

See too : Paul Cowan at Clifton Benevento , Seven Reeds at Overduin and Co.

Christian Flamm at dépendance

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What would a radical graphic design look like? a graphic design whose cultural unacceptability found refuge in a gallery system in service protecting the things that had no other place in culture, violent and terrorous things rather than the bearers of symbolically valuable objects laden with taste it has become. And everyone standing waiting, hoping for it to be the trojan horse sleeping, waiting for the unveil of its final form of real cultural worth and not an economic one, everyone wanting to believe it.

Ben Peterson at Ratio 3

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A figuration fuzzy, from the drift of memory, photographic genericism more closely resembling the thing remembered. Like the physical pieces, the individuated parts, of Peterson’s drawing’s surrealism. They become sculptures vaguely reminiscent. A betweenness from the tectonic rigidness of icons and its referential softness. On the cusp of function amorphously denied, in primitive imperfection, like cow tools. Impossible to place. Objects balanced on the tip of the tongue.

See too : Martine Bedin, Mai-Thu Perret at Fondation Speerstra , Jonas Wood at David Kordansky , “Atlas” at MOTINTERNATIONAL

Pierre Huyghe at Los Angeles County Museum of Art

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If even for a moment you let yourself become cynical or critical at all of Huyghe’s practice it dries and crumbles.  Huyghe’s work is premised on “magic,” the tiny miracles of a child’s account of things*, like children’s stories a magical world in which people with absurdity endeavor expeditions, parties called at whim, puppets, and videos a jumble, with fog and mirrors still magical as home science fairs, and bees on heads, and snow in Los Angeles, and coloring the dog's leg pink, the work as though made by an unjaded art students run gleefully aloof (moreover than Höller's terrors) and given the patina of serious greys at times pompous and overblown to an extreme, (A Journey That Wasn’t punishingly excessive) but wildly affective if you can enjoy the magic of Disneyland Paris, but doesn't stand up well to under the light of adult’s critical cynicism, so make your choice before forking over the $25 at wherever this heads next.

*A surrealism oddly in proximity to Bader’s in which objects become de-specific in their categorical order. Edges fuzzed - dogs in galleries, parties called at “whim” - that magnifies that strangeness of "objects" de-ordered by economic rationality, the manic fallout of Judd’s very specific box.

See too : Darren Bader at Andrew Kreps , Flat Neighbors at Rachel Uffner

Dorothy Iannone at Peres Projects

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It’s hard not to think of these in terms of what was to come later, this early work stripped of the later iconic cartoon sex of which the artworld’s allergy continually presented itself, that these early works are more pleasing, tasteful, and thus contemporary than the radically “uncomfortable” figures dressed in an unironic over-presence that still don’t get much play today.

See too : Judith Bernstein at Studio Voltaire.

“1989” at Barbara Weiss

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An inherent desire for stories is what builds the archetypes, synechdocal phrasing of complexity, and like 2008’s May ‘68 revival, we convert time into events and dates into myth, and “1989” becomes shorthand for badges of merit, symbolic bling worn as wreaths around necks, being “there” in 1989, when “the wall” fell, and any representation made then  is a representation of that time if even symptomatically.
The press release asks all manner of great questions, and never whether the art that it ostensibly promotes can answer them.

See too : Group Show at Centre Pompidou Metz

Manuel Gnam at Real Fine Arts

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The end too is romantic, romanticized, see it here with the neo-ruins of culture.
Gnam’s apocalypticism, a new PR sandwich board proclaiming end’s nigh, fits well the unaligned shadows conspiracy, hypothesizing culture’s drive towards death fueled by accelerationists manifesting it, and calling criticality a vestigial romance, quaint by capitalist standards in which market survival is criticality of the most dispersed, invisible and perfect hand culling future seed to bank civilization.
You could be cynical and say Gnam’s art is merely an aestheticization of this “the end” premised in the PR, sown as anxiety held over futures to be reaped as sales for its holistic remedy against unceartainty that this art will see you through with certainty, a marketing mechanism and perfect decor for post-apocalyptic party in Brooklyn - “Have Fun” - that like Ke$ha’s transcendence through capitalist self destruction, the exhibition mirrors culture’s urgency for us to destroy ourselves so it may extract it from us.
Perhaps the best part about this all is that like Sci-Fi, which all of the Gnam’s work is, providing at least a theater of excess, that like the image of the man dressed in an almost futuristic Kabuki theater, an over the top extrapolation of now into tomorrow, a fiction pleasing like the inherent comfort of ghost stories, sci-fi predicts its after styled to meet the demands of its maker today.

See too : Flame at 576 Morgan Ave Apt 3L Gallery 

Torbjørn Rødland at Henie-Onstad Kunstsenter

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The more overtly erotic of Rødland's tinge the others with innuendo, a suspicious perfume, making even chaste photographs fill with “content,” engorge on ripeness of its meaning. Touch, of all kinds, becomes charged with the sex of the inert.
As with Ethridge, the erotic exists in the uncomfortable voids that fashion photography - that it often looks like - lapses, the spaces that don’t fit into normalized categories, between normative systems, yet becoming. Filling an image with too much content, it becomes erotic, engorged, lacking the blank homogeneity of Movie Star beauty, and confusing the two with slightness - the deckled face of a girl, the black banana - posing problems for categorical restrictors like the MPAA for which Rødland presents a real European nightmare of divergent cultural normativity. Most of the photos are G or PG but feel PG-13, and while the penis is R it’s the sneakers on the otherwise nude man that really require Parental Guidance, gorge yourself upon them.


See too : Torbjørn Rødland at Kunstahall Stavanger , Lucy Skaer at Murray Guy , Sherrie Levine at Simon Lee

Ben Schumacher at Bortolami

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An exhibition as a proposal for an architecture, an exhibition preparatory, preliminary in its sketch, everything here is a “performance,” an inference for projection, the techno-materialism of Schumacher’s practice spun to threads, to the lines of schematics, doodles on photographs reneging the objects that once adorned his exhibitions in favor of the documentary plans, a conceptualism you assemble yourself like IKEA, components stretched thin to dissolution in the dilation of time as speeds approach ludicrous. Look at this documentation, without a thing to be seen anywhere. Schumacher no longer the contractor but the architect, setting up a chains of command as entrepreneur, the only way to increase speed is to oversee those who have been sourced, soon to be Schumacher the CEO.
Techo acceleration useful in limits fraying, swelling with hot-air, to loft itself out of exhibitionary containers and coursed to see itself in skyscrapers, fueled on the fumes of gaseous networks of friend-ibitions, accumulative and outsourced models of growth. If it can get off the ground.

Ben Schumacher at Musee d'art Contemporain de Lyon , David Douard at Johan Berggren , Simon Denny at Portikus

Jana Euler at Bonner Kunstverein

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Painters lagging behind the speed of digital distribution, the same paintings appear again, lapped in the circuit complete, back where began: CAD’s displaying them once again but different, an addition of a cruddy sculpture and sprinkled Emoticons intersecting icons into physical space, winking.
But so the same writ still applicable, Euler’s paintings set their content precariously, awaiting the avalanche of writers spewing to keep up with each’s “content”’s ostensible 10k words worth, a spring trap set of neurosis for writers afraid of images void of language, and requisite dealing with “content”’s representation as though it were a leak to be stuffed, holes to be filled in a system manically working to deluge reference in line, proboscises awaiting their aesthetic surgery at the hands of those who would wish to set everything straight, tasteful, and they instead wink, waiting to be dealt with.

See too : Jana Euler at Kunsthalle Zurich , Allison Katz at BFA Boatos , Annette Kelm at Gio Marconi

David Weiss at Swiss Institute

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You can see the mindset already rooted, the early works of one half a duo, the sardonic irony of life, Fischli and Weiss artwork always tempting fate with their abuse of ideals, their jesting the seriousness life requires, and becoming admittedly bourgeois artists awaiting the comeuppance they teased.
You can see it slightly here, the eroding flippancy at life, taking it unseriously easy -serial paintings of not-quite nondescript scenes - coming in the package of art, drawing prints paintings depicting, drawings and paintings of, 9 notebooks of preparatory sketches, practice, game-planning, for the later celebrated works, which through the committee's business-like approach to mass frivolity finally made it the most artless serious business.

See too : Peter Fischli and David Weiss at Sprüth Magers

Lucy Skaer at Murray Guy

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Material lozenges, like rubies collected in video games, become desirous objects for their blank fungibility, accruing value through a repetition proving the intention of its gestures. Charging touch with value. An artwork so satisfyingly soft-core materialist it feels libidinal. Pleasure in things bare and touching with erotic palpate, shaped and soothed and inlain in lascivious exhibitionism, lain with cleave exposed, flayed like slabs of meat butterflied onto floor's blonde butcher-block soaking pink juice from the flanks, the pleasure of it all raw, vacant, there, exposed - and pierced with navel’s jewel making nudity fill with meaning.

See too : Toma Abts at David Zwirner , Michael E. Smith at Lulu , Alicja Kwade at Kunstmuseum St. Gallen

Group Show at Centre Pompidou-Metz

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Exhibiting “1984-1999. The Decade” and who’s in and who’s out, so begins the jury process, the winnowing, fashioning, the adjudication of names into history, into the pages of books to be reproduced and taught. Like the texts behind glass, deprived of their use as anything but denotory specimens, the exhibition becomes artifacts of its information, a list of names, the procession of beauty's pageantry.

Artists: Richard Artschwager, Alex Bag, John Baldessari, Vanessa Beecroft, Sadie Benning, Bernadette Corporation, Kathryn Bigelow, Bless, Henry Bond, Angela Bulloch, David Byrne, Leos Carax, Maurizio Cattelan, Roman Cieslewicz, Larry Clark, Francis Ford Coppola, Stan Douglas, Marguerite Duras, Peter Farrelly, Peter Fend, Abel Ferrara, Marco Ferreri, Peter Fischli & David Weiss, General Idea, Liam Gillick, Jean-Luc Godard, Felix Gonzalez Torres, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Douglas Gordon, Dan Graham, Group Material, Herzog & De Meuron, Thomas Hirschhorn, Carsten Höller, Winnie Holzman, Jonathan Horowitz, Pierre Huyghe, IFP, Cameron Jamie, Bernard Joisten, Neil Jordan, Pierre Joseph, On Kawara, Mike Kelley, Abas Kiarostami, Karen Kilimnik, Takeshi Kitano, Rem Koolhaas, Harmony Korine, Stanley Kubrick, Peter Land, Louise Lawler, Ange Leccia, Marc Leckey, David Lynch, Robert Mapplethorpe, Chris Marker, Paul McCarthy, Allan McCollum, Anne-Marie Mieville, Nani Moretti, Matt Mullican, Jean Nouvel, Cady Noland, Philippe Parreno, Raymond Pettibon, Richard Prince, Rob Pruitt & Walter Early, Harold Ramis, Pipilotti Rist, David Robbins, Éric Rohmer, Ugo Rondinone, Allen Ruppersberg, Julia Scher, Collier Schorr, David Shrigley, Michael Smith, Sonic Youth, Ettore Sottsass, Steven Spielberg, Georgina Starr, Sturtevant, Philippe Thomas, Leslie Thornton, Wolfgang Tillmans, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Lars von Trier, Rosemarie Trockel, Tsai Ming-Liang, Jean-Luc Verna, Peter Weir, Christopher Williams, Wong Kar- wai, Rémy Zaugg, Robert Zemeckis, Heimo Zobernig

Paul Sharits at Fridericianum

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Interesting seeing Sharits more outré works that have been streamlined in mythos. I.e., the electric expressionism of hands and graceless feet, the appendixes smoothed from bodies of work, edited to geometric fit of iconographic film work. Sure, they’re a gauche attempts to illustrate the physicality of the filmic assaults irrupting an iridescence, onslaught visuality drawing only symbolizes, but their awkward ill-fit in art’s ever cleaner storage racks make their presence sitting outside it all the more important to against much of the tasteful sober conceptual “airtight” gloss of much of today, trying and failing.
Not even contained on Greene Naftali's representation of the artist.

Barbara Bloom at Gisela Capitain

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Scenic tableaus hyperbolize Fried’s theater, nature morte objects not only presupposing the viewer, but enact an uncanny world referring back to the “owner” of. Decor projects its owner formulated projection of themselves, any interior decor a statement made, we are watching but being watched in our assessments of its making to impress, fabricate, a psychology within them, and so Bloom presents domestic psychology to us as a surrogate, a replicant theater. Yet, the odd design decisions, like hovering chairs, have no answer, no owner to ask, no “decorator” and force the question upon the viewer, all but placing a pane as the fourth wall, hermeticisng and tinting this strange act of display in the grey light of Kubrick.

See too : Allan Mcullom at Petzel

Josephine Pryde at Arnolfini

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The instantaneous comfort of Pryde’s generalized image is the flip side to Pop’s surface, not its “style” but its mass consumability. Pop art and its current derivations so concerned with the look they forgot that style was merely the disposable package which delivered the "fun" it promised, artists tricked as though the image itself was desired, forgetting that medium was merely the massage for swallowing the masses, its opiate. People didn’t enjoy Lichtenstein they enjoyed comics, and within its soothing fantasy. Pryde uses Pop's function, the saccharine of instant recognition, variations on the common, whose comfort allow defenses dropped and desire for and easily expended, digested, disposable sweets, a populist bent to criticality, a vehicle of its own propaganda, a shutterstock imaging of normalized categories; if DISimages was the overproduction of shiny new image stock, Pryde delivers instead within the pre-existent of Trojan genres, in which the politics of aesthetics is - one hopes - redistributing the look, the sensibility, of touch.

Tam Ochiai at Team Gallery, Inc.

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Referential contingency in painting beside itself, the scrawled names of cities lived and died in by famed and nameless, Borges for instance, visited and left, referent diverting from its pictorial ground and thoughts discrepant between denotation and image.
It serving to use its referent in the same sweep that it negates its ability to mean, expended as sign, cashed in for surface effects, a meaningfully meaningless composition making amends with the cutesy carefree whimsy of its strokes, the passing of importance, passing importance.

Berlinde De Bruyckere at S.M.A.K.

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Francis Bacon in Apple design pallor, the material image of death. Torturing history to wrest meaning from referents, Anselm Kiefer found lead the go-to material for the weighty depiction of historic emotion, before killing it with its programmatic deployment ad nauseum, finally solved the alchemist’s puzzle, exchanging leaden trauma for gold. De Bruyckere finds too a material of contemporary nostalgia, like Greek temple's purity of whiteness, the unnaturally cold wax a paragon of cleanliness through its color bled out, lost.

Alicja Kwade at Kunstmuseum St. Gallen

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Of the early ellipsoids Buchloch in the beginning told Genzken, “You haven’t even understood Carl Andre yet.”

The concern is laughable today. Kwade with impudent glee buggers Andre, presenting him with a bastard of his old clown materialism, a cartoon of the world bent in plasticity, a clock ticking amplified to hyperbole, material categorically "pure" in more ways than one. To bend with a compulsive confabulation to materials, present a doubling of the world split into seen and understood. That what you see isn’t what you see, what you see is a fun-house, whose objects aren’t specific at all. If minimalism expunged all but its axiomatic constitutes, Kwade’s bowlderization replaces what was lost, a point minimalism never had.

See too : Puddle, Pothole, Portal at Sculpture Center , Nina Beier at David Roberts Art Foundation

“Lands’ End” at Bodega

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Bodega operating cooly for 5 years now and this the first CAD approved, one conspiratorially wonders if it’s with newfound Pryde.

The uncanny and abjection, and the various forms of it, from the saccharine of overripeness to detritus sticky resin stuck and mannequin wire children in floatsafe fashions, to the cold necrotic design of corporate cooperative, to place the mess against the continuing prophylacticizing of the world behind rubber corners, and all the seediness within it. A trending antagonism against clean whiteness, the final form of punk will be something with disgust no one wants at all.

David Duard at Johan Berggren , Flat Neighbors at Rachel Uffner , Cathy Wilkes at Tramway

Dan Finsel at Richard Telles

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Using the power of narrative to make nonsense palatable, rationalized - here a press release more interestingly “askew” than most. Its akin Mullican’s hypnosis as excuse or Rhoades stoner-arcana as imbuing mechanic or Matthew Barney’s phallocentric symbologies as justification for megalomanic libidinal Dalism, going all the way back to Broodthaers who used his own self-narrative-mythologizing as a reflective axe to the institution; Finsel’s method-acting a sort of Andrea Fraser psychoanalytic performance, a less direct Pamela Rosenkranz pyschonautics short-circuiting the reading of staight-edged art intent, making the heart shaped penis butt impaled on a rod appear pertinently ordered despite being anything but, an excuse for something just slightly weirder than most.

See too : S.O.A.P.Y. III at What Pipeline , Pamela Rosenkranz at Karma International

Markus Schinwald at Museum Leuven

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“What are the differences between looking at static objects and looking at moving bodies or fish in an aquarium?”
The invasive and impressive Lionfish placed not as ornament, a crime, instead its held at the staid reserve of object, a sober erection.

See too : Markus Schinwald at Wattis

Matthew Chambers at Zach Feuer, Praz-Delavallade

(link Zach Feuer Praz-Delavallade)

Whatever was the quaint fun of  Chamber’s shoddiness in past onslaughts has been strip-mined to the bedrock of materiality’s ability for monolith pleasantry.

Sanya Kantarovsky at Marc Foxx

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“‘Stylization’ is what is present in a work of art precisely when an artist does make the by no means inevitable distinction between matter and manner, theme and form. When that happens, when style and subject are so distinguished, that is, played off against each other, one can legitimately speak of subjects being treated (or mistreated) in a certain style.”(Sontag)

It would seem this sentence already feels antiquated, painting today prerequistely stylized with the past worn as its own sleeve. There isn’t a painting today not “stylized” with its own past instance, that doesn’t dress itself in it.  Kantarovsky doesn’t treat style as symbolic fashion to be worn, but merely the water one swims in today, the status quo for an art submerged in the redirection of flows of “content.”  That some could be mistaken for a Kai Althoff matters less than none, the difference is ideological, one cold one warm. Interesting now to see this show finding a child illustration-like pathos within it. The thin veil of the press release decoded with a simple substitution cipher, the enigma revealed:

“Surrounded by a chewy gelatinous sugar coating[...]Laden with [painting] history, [Kantarovsky] is burdened as well with the impossible task of conveying sweetness in a largely bitter and disenchanted world, a world overwhelmed with familiar pictures of unfamiliar people. Each [painting] packs a memory of itself, staining the tongue with streaks of saturated color, issuing a syrupy nostalgia for [?] itself—abated only by the hope that some still remain in the pack.”

David Altmejd at Musée D’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris

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Discounts for fairs, museums, etc. given to students are seen as a genial act but also a means of increasing the social reproduction of institutions, investing a future viewership with whatever message the institution implicitly contains, the discount given to students and not mere youth.
But so visibility is a form of capital that CAD wields, and thus exhibitions featured are lent a implicitly critical affirmation placed among the countless other exhibitions which becomes the great flattening ground of art history, a new means of historical acceptability. For instance this is Altmejd’s first exhibition featured whereas his orgiastic forebear Matthew Barney and contemporary Urs Fischer have both had none. One would perhaps relish the lapse in publicity for the powerhouses, and this implicit form of criticism (both choosing one over the other as well as the decibels of its contemporary voice leaving swaths unheard) is left obfuscated to anyone but those “in the know” about the artist’s individual critical acceptability. Interestingly much of CAD’s taste tendency’s of the scrappy mysterio-surreal materialist can be seen in the Altmjed’s work, even if no one likes him some people are about to start bumping into him.

See too : Group Show at Neue Alte Brucke , S.O.A.P.Y. III at What Pipeline , Chris Ofili at the New Museum , Dai Hanzhi 5000 artists at Witte de With

Willem de Rooij at Arnolfini

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Every bouquet is the package of “nature’s” beauty amped to steroidic artificiality by its mechanization under Capital’s fuel. Beauty produced by destroying natural significance given over to its industrialization. Flowers no longer natural rarities of amazing sensuality but disposable and instantaneous orgies. Of which De Rooij’s 95 variety bouquet is its endgame, numbers governing the bottom line (95 of any variety) over attunement to any individual heterogeneity of genus, species, taste, knowledge or sensitivity. It is to flowers what the frenzied visible of pornography is to sex; the natural giving way to industrial significance. Like 2.5 years of “Riots, Protest, Mourning and Commemoration” photographs, in their accumulation they speak not to individual situations but, through their ordering, instead render how a culture itself chooses to visualize and represent and thus define its concepts, and de Rooij within that, artificially cold, useful only for what can be conceptually extracted (produced) from it, by say a writer.

Group Show at Neue Alte Brücke

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Artists: Magnus Andersen, George Rippon, Anna Zacharoff, Julien Nguyen
Exhibition Title: Late European Decadence

Neue Alte Brücke set the trend that come full circle to be greet with their own franchise deemed International Style, and so if this doesn't look “fresh” it at least looks current, hegemonically so; possibly the most important thing today is that art look fine, just fine, without an excess of presence and an irony to cut its own heel, a bridge to the new old decadence.


See too : Transatlantic Transparency at Mathew

Michael E. Smith at Lulu

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Coming by way of Povera rather than its more normalized pop onslaught, contemporary surrealism a vital materialist adaptation to old modes.  Touching into the same desirous unconscious that packaged products diligently mine a libidinal desire from. It makes today’s surrealism feel "true" in that our access to its machinations is hidden.  Arranging its objects as if knowing something you don’t, organized by a logic you cannot see taste touch or smell, like a monoxide. Surrealism must obfuscate in order to mirror the commodic penchant for touching something sublingual inside us. Like orchids selected over millennia for their ability to drive the Apoideas to lust, products live and die and evolve for their ability to incite within us a desire, a fear, a feeling, a sale. A t-shirt inside a sunflower.

See too : Michael E. Smith at Susanne Hilberry , Flat Neighbors at Rachel Uffner , Yuji Agematsu at Artspeak , Anicka Yi at Cleveland Museum