Brendan Fowler at Richard Telles

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The point here could be an extremely literal material exchange, threads as digital stand-in, stitch count's dots per inch, like The Hunt of the Unicorn bespeaking SNES digital - you can order online digital photographs as woven tapestries  - but Fowler's joyous abandon in overloading material, to "tactility," more so than the crashed photos previous to which these are superior if similar, makes the point at least a physical fun, a materiality cartoonish, rendering digital real, a Wade Guyton even a mother could love.

See too : Anne Speier at Neue Alte Brücke

Juliette Blightman at Eden Eden, Karma International LA

(Eden Eden , Karma )

Penises, coitus, sleepers, planes, interior's rumpled sheets and clothes, a predilection for fabrics, drifting across subjects in Wolfgang Tillman's diaspora in Vuillard's bobo perfunctory.  The stasis held by the girl aloft, suspended, above pool, and the bathing orgy exemplify its two worlds colliding of innocence and sociality, the quiet purity prior stretching before the banging of sex.

“The Radiants” at Bortolami

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"The Radiants."

See too : Karl Holmqvist and Ei Arakawa at Overduin & Co. , Stefan Tcherepnin at Freedman Fitzpatrick

Leo Gabin at Elizabeth Dee

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It's easy to make fun of Gabin putting themselves out there as a band in so many photos with sunglasses and distressed jeans, in front of fashionably distressed paintings, but they are putting themselves out there, naked behind a front of the Pop posture lost in attrition to an artworld that claims interest outside it. Though I think this kind of stuff is more acceptable in the less image-neurotic Europe.
For the video at Dee, a question that will never be answered but continually asked is whether this "faithful" adaption of Korine's novel is of interest itself, or an excuse to lace together internet's already wildly great "found" footage (like insipid painting's thieved from so many painters) under some rational pretense of a "cover" to give it a rationality and making it mean something "more" than the libidinal enjoyment they had already previously contained, a video akin so many music videos; to which the answer is that it of course, cynically, doesn't matter because it's merely meant as the reflection of American culture in the sunglasses of these young men, Belgian to Bushwick. Korine's launching of conceptual black-holes worthy of Jordan Wolfson into mass culture was at least a Trojan horse worthy of its morally blinding spectacle, here its cover seems to have taken a step back into the mild mannerism of art. At least this kind of reprehensibility is enjoyable.

Goutam Ghosh at STANDARD (OSLO)

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Today’s PR asks the same questions as Raspet’s exhibition yesterday:  At what point is phenomenology or perception able to be described and codified by science’s formula for its reality. The key line here: “The spectrographer uses an instrument that separates light into a frequency spectrum and records the signal using a camera, whereas the jyotshi would first acknowledge the sensation of light then study how the perception of that would affect the behaviour of his body mind.” Raspet is the spectrographer, Ghosh the Jyotshi.  Science quick to label Jyotsh pseudoscience, but the question here is particularly pertinent: That though the two Cokes are scientific equivalents (in yesterday’s case its mirror), would they perform the same in the Pepsi Challenge? That a placebo pill, even when known as a placebo, proven again and again to be effective, can’t be called a placebo anymore. That for all science’s power through its highly choreographed means of removing human perception from its experimental evidence, has finally found itself at its strange liminal boundary where perception, so long skewered as the false facade to an objective reality, has become the reality now to be tested, and without good means to do so. Raspet the skeptic, Ghosh the agnostic. And so the paintings.

See too : Sean Raspet at Société

Sean Raspet at Société

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For all conceptual art’s fetish for bureaucratic language and dry instructions Raspet presents a shutout on their game by introducing a linguistic specificity from which art - whose amorphous problems produce vague words - could never compete. Less a Carey Young legalese, than a Weinerian instructional awkwardness, (“Matter caused to cease as it had”) producing, in its specific jargon, a scientific “great doubt” at the edge of understanding between phenomenology and experimental vs speculative understanding, of asking the sound of chiral cleaning chemicals clapping.
It could seem derivative aside from its deployment of a hyperbolic language within its pre-given forms of poetics if the questions asked weren't so stupidly designed to be answered. We can answer now the kōan, “What does the coke in a mirror taste like?” I, unfortunately, would like to know. The answer would require at least 3 papers expressing its at least 3 answers, and where are they Sean? I'm sure it is expensive, but surely someone would like to buy the world a synthesized enantiomerically opposite Coke.

See too : Goutam Ghosh at Standard Oslo , Sean Raspet at Jessica Silverman

Taslima Ahmed at Real Fine Arts

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Critics Picks were never meant to be reviews, and continually read more like Press Releases for artists ever-more disinterested in making coherent statements and instead showcasing their indifferent poetics. The gun reflects, like the other weaponry depicted in the show, an arbitrariness within the gloss of style, of symbols without recourse, wasted in a Wolfsonian breakdown of meaning exchanged for its gloss, “ecstasy” another meaningless word like a Calvin Klein’s Obsession, adornment to an object meant to connote through its amorphousness destroying specificity for affective branding.

Franz Erhard Walther at CAPC

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Like Beuys, Franz Erhard Walther adminsters the look of functional objects: well designed packages, exemplifying - stand in for - its protestant ethic, morality. Packages as stripped minimalist looks meant, through fetishistic “functional” design of today’s REI or Muji, to impress functionality as a nebulous holisticness. Functionality is today’s fetish in a world already post-apocalyptically Capitalist dog-eat-dog. So when you stand with your head in a bag with a stranger or docent, say in the middle of a large open floor of Weils, the bitterness of its awkwardness is understood as medicinal, good for you.

Gina Folly and Mandla Reuter at SALTS

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Loading up an image and now seeing Amazon's name above it. The url of its holding. One of the largest and most aggressively expansive global corporations hosting the artworld's archive of contemporary art images. A reminder at the top of every page of Capital's ability to exchange and extract value from everything, from things they have set up to need to know nothing about, just farming people's desire, meaningless to them. Ours is a subsidiary of Google.

 Edit: At the time of this writing CAD images, when clicked to full resolution, were hosted under a "http://s3.amazonaws.com/contemporaryartgroup/" url, designating their space on Amazon's hosting services. Items have since been redirected under a "http://images.cagrp.org/" url. The two are interchangeable.

Second update: It seems CAD has gone back to its hosting at "http://s3.amazonaws.com/contemporaryartgroup/" rendering the last update obsolete.

Third update: On April 24th, a month after this was first written, Amazon's quarterly earning report is released showing better than expected earnings and that its Web Services (AWS) division making 16.9% margins  (itself making 1.57 billion dollars alone in the first quarter) causing Amazon's stock prices to soar 15% ($59) making its CEO and main shareholder Jeff Bezos 5 Billion Dollars in a single day.

“This a Way” at White Flag Projects

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There was just recently an article in the New York Times about Klaus Bisenbach's NYC apartment containing nothing but a TV and bed, an extreme minimalism whose asceticness was a stand-in for the morality of its owner masking the privilege of its ability to have anything at once, and dispose of it after, owning the ability to make the world deliver whatever one needs, and an architectural design to embody that.

Darren Bader at Kölnischer Kunstverein

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The impish pranks of Bader's intentionally annoying conceptualism, takes the premise that if we're going to take seriously the idea of dead fire bricks arranged gravenly on floors, or water become tree, then too so we must accept with it its ideological twin, shrimp tossed in a foosball table or muffins arranged. To argue one way or the other the importance of bricks/floor vs shrimp/game is to already enter into Bader's standoff, and lose to the man brilliantly willing to lose everything to win.

See too : Darren Bader at Andrew Kreps

Ugo Rondinone at Krobath

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What pleasantry, how pleasant. Yet the serial nature of Rondionine's forces the works lightness into its mechanization, becoming dark through repetition, like the clouds of infinite jest covering something sad.

Nora Schultz at Reena Spaulings

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Through the 5 pages of her CAD archived exhibitions, the thread throughout is Schultz's awful materiality, predicated like the art student's mistake on the misuse of specific purposed objects sold by big box stores like Home Depot as though they were generic materials for the generic purposes of art and delivering objects with that uncomfortable look of misuse that seen here is made so abject.

David Musgrave at Marc Foxx

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Musgrave's Sisyphean punishment of grey labor would be a kind of Borgesian primeval absurdity if not for their market ability to make non-sense capitally equitable.
I can't tell if it's too bad or not.

Anne Speier at Neue Alte Brücke

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Scanner art, of Guyton\Walker, Stahl, et. al, assimilated images of a new found visual physicality ala mode. The ice cream weight of objects reproduced in spectacular resolution delivering a “realness” reserved for the plastic world of Advertising and Bouguereau. The eye’s intoxication in overload bordering on psychedelic.  As Speier's literal minded paintings juxtapose, this overload of retinal pleasure is a real version of the world’s cartoonification, reality stretched to meet its new digital overlords welcomed, the computer’s vision more real than our own, and everyone stressed, cracks, falling over laughing.

See too : "Puddle, pothole, portal" at Sculpture Center , Amanda Ross-Ho at Approach

“Pattern Drill” at Hacienda

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Another Saturday group show like Chelsea’s Proustian summers, listless weekends pose the question of whether one shouldn’t have something better to do than stroll through galleries of names. The group show's contextless fracture splintering into frames of ambiguous images scrolled through, visualize a surface of the exhibition, a style evoked through the dissolve of the individual. Like CAD’s August Review literalizing the summer’s dreamy remembrance of when things weren’t just lists of next year’s maybes. A new one posted already.

Nicolas Ceccaldi at Mathew

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In terms of the surveilled children’s toys of Ceccaldi’s past, this is it at its most literal. The big HAL-eye of an Orwellian god’s omniscience. The precarity of the wearables and our own survey of them felt fragile and impure, dirtying their weight with our unclean sight. This PR’s hamfisted Biblical rhetoric, blackened eyes, and spooky theater attempt some pagan significance but its toys themselves which speak so well addressing the latent culture and not the the Nightmare Factory branding it, perhaps brilliant in its overdoneness.


See too : "Puddle, pothole, portal" at Sculpture Center , Pentti Monkkonen at High Art , Danny McDonald at House of Gaga

Trevor Shimizu at Rowhouse Project

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Different than Josh Smith for whom production proves the product, Shimzu’s premised on paintings readymade product, that so long as it is painted, so long as it is painting, it is already done. Enjoying Shimzu’s poor materials because something is there, depicted, and that is enough, way more than most.

See too : Ann Craven at Comfort Moderne , Albert Oehlen at Skarstedt

Trisha Donnelly at Air de Paris

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Donnelly’s cultivation of myth, generator of legends, in her information’s stipulated lacking of documentation, PR, mutates quickly in time into boring myth, into anecdotes retold to oblivion: of a white horse and “Napoleonic garb,” mythic meme of which no photos exists, now documented as a blank white page on Kaplan’s website, or the ancient Buick with California plates unceremoniously parked in a Minnesota museum’s underground parking garage as gift to it, ultimately unaccepted as a work into its collection, a mistake if there ever was one, and shipped back to her, a Buick. Viewed from above the expanse of projects seems a willfully obscure self-promotional package (omens) of the artist as mythos but does nothing to dull the strange specificity of the individual objects themselves, which in documentation seem constructed to reveal less than nothing, the chimes muted.
But the silence which Donnelly surrounds her objects broken by two stellar MoMA talks, one on the 11th prismatic - a broken poem to make every Berlin press release cry - the other expounding her interest in objects curated, quickly showing her infatuation with objects more than posturing cool, but an ability to draw the otherworldly manner of objects into the world, even assigning Robert Rosenblum’s voice a color.

See too : Florian Hecker & John McCracken at Künstlerhaus KM-

Edit: It was Robert Rosenblum, not Harold Rosenburg...

Liz Craft at Jenny’s

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Drawing from work outsider, Craft’s staunch insider position in the LA scene while catering to the capital A inside (beginning to latch onto Germanic franchises) - are satellite to it, built from grass roots effort of garage startups and frontier ranches. That like the sculptures which exude a slight too-much-presence of desert psychedelia and weirdo jest for the tastefulness of the contemporary circuit they now enter, Craft’s haphazard theatricality is generally at least her own.

Vittorio Brodmann at Freedman Fitzpatrick

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Whereas for Kantarovsky style rests on the surface, forefronted and delivered, for Brodmann style is suspended  in the dispersed particles of its past participants, in the soup of its references, closing in on the liquify setting of its blender. Brodmann’s an “artist to watch,” dissolve of the darker edges of his earlier characters into its broth of tasteful painting, put less and less at risk with each show, exchanging the teenage characters for the pastel hues of adult refinement, and these are more refined but lose the uncomfortable sweat of its awkward adolescence heading off to market.

See too : Vittorio Brodmann at Gregor Staiger , Sanya Kantarovsky at Marc Foxx

Max Neuhaus at Alfonso Artiaco

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The velvet redundancy of installation shots. Within contemporary dispersion a pretension displaying requisite-part-of-the-club-ness, (euphemized: “ part of the conversation”) of a gallery system becoming an anachronism of old fashioned authentication, Here the invisibility of the works themselves present an overtly extravagant hyperbolization of its decorum framing images and sounds drawn to explicate another world entirely.

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

Yuki Okumura at Misako & Rosen

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The brilliance of Okomura’s Wiel’s Residency’s factory outsourced with children’s content beautiful in its ephemeral ease and imaging of pre-knowledge renditions of what was inside, loaded with imagastic metaphor in a baroque and dumb carnival, totally fun, now reaches the other romantic extreme of its emptiness in the trademark color “Cerebral Greyness” of 70’s conceptualism in waiting for Godot desolation, and a slightly off tone of the usual neutral language of its wall didactic.

Udo Lefin at Daniel Buchholz

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The vacancy of Lefin's subjects, their nominal ability to mean, is given a creedance through the diligence and specificity of Lefin's staggering insistence on them. A level of effort proving the antithesis of a Richter-like draining of meaningful subjects, instead the acute particularness of his dead subjects reanimates them, and poisonous, having too much content, distasteful.

Tom Humphreys at What Pipeline

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"Contentless” in that it acts as directives for the flows that can brought to it. Looking at a Humphries, like looking at Levine, occurs “in front of the surface of the print;” appropriated markers dispersing visual contact suspended by the information which precedes it, all the informational baggage flaunted by it’s visual void that the mind so adapted to monochromatic thought readily fills in. Its impossible to even see these without thinking about the system that distributes them, the Benedictian monks and organization of chapels all over the world. 

 See too : Group Show at Greene Naftali , Sherrie Levine at Simon Lee , Seven Reeds at Overduin and Co.

Karl Holmqvist and Ei Arakawa at Overduin & Co.

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At his Bard MFA Arakawa created and ran a bar in the concrete center of the summer program already known for parties, a means of reifying the all important social relations of schools and friends to its site of exchange, and in the several hundred exhibitions since Arakawa’s Friendibitions have become a means of rapidly dispersing the self into a ballyhooed network, burying the author for the friends he can raise. Holmqvists interest in redundancy and quasi-childlike carefree fit almost too well with with Arakawa’s quasi-spirituality and redundant-idealism exposing the bedrock of its child-like unstoppability, that like equating Bucky-balls (the most art over-referenced object of all time) to a Childhood playgrounds as well the mountainous Dolly Parton Nuclear Plant, its less about the objects themselves and more about just getting it filled with everyone linked in.


See too : Ben Shumacher at Bortolami , Stefan Tcherepnin at Freedman Fitzpatrick.html , Will Benedict at Bergen Kunsthalle

“Rainbow” at Queer Thoughts

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Finding spaces exterior the crystal vagueness of white nowhere is commendable, but the increased interest in “off spaces” another search for authenticity existing no place at home, but the press release narrative in the shadow of capital G Global affairs of a 50 billion dollar China backed new Central American canal bisecting a country and placing the artworks there “as as a proposal for an alternative means of exploiting personal resources” is staggering even for press release bombast standards and a odd form of symbolic colonialism, shipping artists in to expose them to the harsh light of Real Issues so that they may absorb it like sunshine, and use it as backdrops for their polyurethne objects and Hollywood inspired films whose own cultural wastelanding might be reflected in this film, acquiring a tan like the best work of all.

See too : "The Contract" as Essex Street. , 1989 at Barbara Weiss