Nancy Lupo at Wallspace

(link)

The biographic trifecta Cooper, Yale, Skowhegan, the art heavily fortified, Soylent formulas, "understand that it is the body that controls the mind, the invisible world within the visible."
This "thing power" of objects. As the flower adapting with the bee, the pepper to the bird's digestion, the plump cherry to human tastes, object/products live and die on their adaptations to manipulate the consumer. Our environments manipulating and manipulated. Capitalist ecology presents a survival of the seductivest, reproduction as commodification, as generations and generations of objects live, thrive, die and evolve in the natural selection for products. Without sentience orchid petals become fleshy. The evolution towards sensual ergonomics, Lupo's objects flaunt their lure, fleshy chairs coated in smooth nutrition, nutrition as flesh, the seat for children, dazzled with food stuffs - plastic flesh of Ray's "Family Romance,"- flesh of the uncanny abject, the bodied object plating their sushi desire. Uncannily neither sexy nor comedic. Objects designed for the human. Not Hesse, but Gober's vessels for psychology, they become primordial life, objects exerting influence and reacting to us, unblinking.

See too : Olga Balema and Anne de Vries at Michael Thibault, "Flat Neighbors" at Rachel Uffner, Michael E. Smith at Lulu, Anicka Yi at Cleveland Museum of Art, Pamela Rosenkranz at Karma International

Amelie von Wulffen at Freedman Fitzpatrick

(link)

Working from comic books and Veggie Tales, von Wulfen's reactionary content not in the figurative - which has always survived as still merely a question of how to hang paint - but narrative painting. Taking care that we actually care what the cherubic nubbins like mangled erasers might be looking at, some lascivious and reactionary content. The work's out-of-dateness used as its cool, espousing traditionalist values.


Peter Wächtler at Reena Spaulings, Vittorio Brodmann at Freedman Fitzpatrick , Sanya Kantaraovksy at Marc Foxx

Oscar Tuazon at Le Consortium & Paradise Garage

(Le Consortium, Paradise Garage)

ELI5.
Oscar Tuazon likes building, and buildings, and the ways things get built. See, generally these things are so boring and ubiquitous, we don't notice them. These everyday things. So Tuazon uses all the tropes, er, common ways of making things, but assembles them in different ways that our brains aren't bored with, that allows you to recognize or see what your brain would normally be too bored to see. So you notice even the boring stuff. See Tuazon has a feti-, er, intense like for the protestant, er, blue-collar, or like see he appreciates the common job, son. The vernacular, er, that's why nothing is that spectacular, er, that interesting. The muted tones. It's a moral ethic, son. Have you ever seen Bruce Nauman's "Setting a good corner?" Of course not you're five. Right. Okay you know that show you like, the one that depicts stuff getting made, or like those dog-eared books you have with cross-sections, cut-intos, of like brick houses and steamships?  See Tuazon's sculptures are like that. You get to see everything, you notice the structure, you glean a moral appreciation for hard work. For the structure, son. Yes, son, endlessly romantic. Nostalgic for the past. No, much different than Donnie Judd. That's why he tore the garage, paradise, down, son, to stop the party.


See too : Tomma Abts at David Zwirner , Oscar Tuazon and Eli Hansen at Maccarone

On Kawara at the Guggenheim

(link)

The poetic in art is the sign's inability to complete its connection, conclude.  The painting's dates point to a specificity that immediately is lost in largess and unknown, a fissure, in the inability to circumscribe a date's entirety, or one man's marking of it. This distending distance between the signifier (the date) and its lost signified (the entirety of a day) is its affective pathos. The weight of this. Kawara's index hypothesizes its accumulation of time and date, one million years, eyeing a library of Babelinian proportions, to feel small in front of this vast empty expanse, sublimely romantic. The desire of viewers to find dates to which they can link "significance" eases the longing for the sign to conclude, to fill with meaning.  Like July 20, 1969, the moon landing's meaninglessness given to mean everything, the largest painting to date.


Trevor Paglen at Metro Pictures, John Baldessari at Marian Goodman, Alejandro Cesarco at Midway Contemporary Art, Mitchell Syrop at Croy Nielsen & Glenn Ligon at Regen Projects, Jason Dodge at Franco Noero , Sean Raspet at Jessica Silverman , Simon Starling at Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago

“Comforter” at Shanaynay

(link)

It would be great if there were a Kyōsai Kawanabe resurgence today, in the clean white setting of contemporary exhibition. That late 1800's traditional japanese painting looks more and more contemporary with time, apt to the surge of comics today. Starting to look futuristic.

See too : "Puddle, pothole, portal" at Sculpture Center, Dave Miko, Ned Vena, Antek Walczak at Algus Greenspon

Andy Coolquitt at Disjecta

(link)

Coolquitt's assertion of the tube (and tube forms) a sort of Rhoadesian maneuver, imbuing forms with aura through repeated insistence, exhibitionary marketing campaigns. For Rhoades the pearoefoam mocked the artist product (signatures) of artists hands. The Pollock drip-cum-glue reified as object/product.  Whereas Rhoades attempted dismantling the mythologizing of the artist genius to make its brand establishment happen in front of you, Coolquitt, in several exhibitions past, has already retaken ad nausea the process as a cute cleverness that absorbs anything into its ever encompassing fold. Everything makes sense as "The signature product" of the artist, a pareidolia of artistic significance, taking photos of boxes of tubes. In this exhibition water is deployed from tubes, logs people step on are tube, the artist himself a large tube. Eventually everything, however insipid, begins to look like, and therefore brilliantly become justified and even somehow significant as, an inane tube; call it tube theory.

Natalie Häusler at Supportico Lopez

link

The attempt at siting poetry with an "intimacy," a setting, ends up a theater, forced into forms of Bar stools presaging their tinder date. The most intimate object in the exhibition is the sound work, whose well recorded lisps and salivary sounds image their intimate parts. Rendering a more physical object in words and stutters than the art objects, in their blanket Berlin style, can compete with, the nakedness of sound, of the soundproof room it tries to build but only symbolically renders.

Paul Thek at Mai 36

(link)

Interestingly the PR connects Thek to Beuys. Both with art as components modular to a mythologizing practice. Beuys used the language of mass promotion, affinity for design, multiples and dissemination into pop culture. Thek used traditional art languages and singular (personal) view, always the sovereign work (however economical) and rarely making multiples save for a prototype children's toy. Bueys never seemed conflicted on the oily extraction of aura for himself. Thek instead appears endlessly conflicted about this romanticism, the formal beauty veering close to cliche, triteness, caroming off it, and this tension of when the bird would land is the force of the work, the paradox of being unable to land on the island of “special sweetness and purity” without immediately crushing it with the bludgeon of art, and so a lightness to leave the land alone.

Daniel Lefcourt at Blum & Poe

(link)

You could call it materiality porn. The deployment of new means depicting its picayune subject, the irrelevant accidents of masturbatory technique. Never a question of what to paint, but how to get it off. The PR tries to find the lost conception of a subject with the sonography of metaphor, putting us in the projectile sphere of imaging a ghost, the painter's "spill," imaged, cast and industrially reproduced. A cathedral-like requiem to the artist's petite mort, framed. Art villainy so in fashion.

See too :  Ned Vena at Société, Eric Wesley at Bortolami

Adriana Lara at Algus Greenspon

(link)

Not mere post-medium conditions - which remain converging into personal style's habitus - but post-identity: Artist's exhibitionist diaspora whose manufactured sign-confliction is its premise. Instead of objects pointing "towards" a content, it shows a network of objects whose sense lies in the uneasy relationships of its contents, the "signs that it employs."  A For-Hire stitching of an assemblage identity of its "employed": the "various sign systems as a kind of artistic material; letters, numbers, actors, brands, and cultures, are overlapped and overlaid as Lara creates her recombinant objects". The confounding of signs to be worn like badges toward identity subterfuge, fleeing identity, a new form of cool. Everybody's doing it:


 Goshka Macuga at Rüdiger Schöttle, Annette Kelm at Andrew Kreps, Darren Bader at Andrew Kreps,  Jana Euler at Kunsthalle Zurich, Kaspar Müller at Federico Vavassori

Group Show at David Kordansky

Everyone loves the smell of their own brand, and the miasmia of this "immersive installation" wafts in with a laugh of its aesthetic impropriety.  Like a fart joke. The bastardization of the proper. Stray paint and design faux-pas. Even the more tasteful tinged yellow by Armelder's power bomb of a painting. It's a gas. Paintings which look the way "oopsie" sounds. Whether or not anyone else loves is it in relation to how deeply trapped they are with it. Fart aesthetics in the high speech.


see too : John Armleder at Fernand Leger , Ida Ekblad at Herald St.

“The Sea” at Mu.ZEE

(link)

Museums spend capital to produce lavish publications, generously donated more and more -as seen here - to CAD's archives for the people's dissemination under CAD's hosting bill. Ignoring the ol' internet truism that if something is free the consumer is the product - and an economic system in which treading water is the survival baseline - the expensive creation of physical catalogs to service the exhibition promotion would seem a vestigial form yet to accelerate to the speed of today. The money/time/energy might be better invested making the museum's generous image host, CAD, a little less contextually barren, and begin taking time to assign the relevant image information to the images, to give credit to artists and not just photographers of artists, rather than the current system's shot in the dark of mouse hovering, and bringing it's viral distribution inline with the elegantly produced and inflammatory blowhard of yesteryear's lushly accosted catalogs.  CAD has - for better or worse - become the museum's catalog, and working with it to make these massive online exhibitions anything more than a sea of decontextualized images would be in everyone in power's favor, looking less like a gigantic e-flux announcement cast to sea, and finally get rid of the exorbitantly redundant 15 Bill Viola image stills.

see too : Gina Folly and Mandla Reuter at Salts , Dai Hanzhi 5000 Artists at Witte de With , "Pattern Drill" at Hacienda

Anna Franceschini at Kunstverein Düsseldorf

(link)

Isabelle Cornaro, Tamara Henderson, and, here, Anna Franceschini gathering a Tacita Dean like filmic fetish in Sturtevantian dumb sublimity. A dumbness that pervades, becoming transcendent. Franceschini's videos a formal comedy in the expectation of video - cinema condensing into Youtube's promise - that something need happen, and when the shirt finally gets its blowdry in the rose light of its theater, or the repetitive unclosed thought of shirts commotion, expecation ruptures laughable, sleeves flapping like punchlines.

See too : Isabelle Cornaro at Francesca Pia , Museum Leuven

Meyer Vaisman at Portikus

(link)

Vaiser's career prior to the decade long drop out - aside from the press fodder it nowinstigates - almost does not exist. The ballyhooed and myth-producing 2000 GBE exhibition fails to be found on the dealer's site. Images from the "promising protagonist" exist sporadically on dead blogs and cellphone photos. (The anticlimax of the heavily mythologized sculpture portending the artist's breakdown is its main attribute.) Without today's reemergence the career would essentially be invisible, a sort of BCAD ahistory. The overproducing omnipresence of today's competition for visibility outpacing the attention to small single jpegs littering the net.

And but so, we see here - despite Vaiser's touched-by-god-theistic returns - the work still up for the intention-ugly look of its era's pack's PrinceKoonsBickertonHalley ascension; snorting up the dollars cut from the tables that made them stars; up the deadpan look of marketable appropriation.

Mitchell Syrop at Croy Nielsen & Glenn Ligon at Regen Projects

(Croy Nielsen , Regen)

The artworld's relation to its signs can be confusing. Here one shouts its empty signs, a sound like empty metal struck, the other attempts to deplete its referent to nausea. Both a protest. Different relations to iconography. Both truisms, but of nowhere equal value. Cuffing these two exhibitions to each other to each eat the other, this is CAD at its curatorial finest.

see too : Mitchell Syrop at Midway Contemporary Art , John Baldessari at Marian Goodman

Luigi Ontani at Kayu & Rafaël Rozendaal at Postmasters

(Kayu , Postmasters)

The sinister and infantilizing carnivalism of Höller's slide's exemplifies the mask that is "fun" art. The haiku's use their light and airy tic-tac cutery to ironize their ennui in contemporary tones, a verse to its unfun. Ontani's garish ornation play to their lurid Orientalist appropriation. 60's pop-art that explained that fun already contained its co-option, never to be seen by art again, that art precludes fun, and a thousand art objects like tombstones to its purity.

see too :  Darren Bader at Kolnischer Kunstverein , Yuki Okumura at Misako & Rosen , Ugo Rondinone at Krobath , Pierre Huyghe at LACMA , Lily van der Stokker at Koenig & Clinton , Lily van der Stokker at Air de Paris

Alejandro Cesarco at Midway Contemporary Art

(link)

Cesarco's interest in the book lay in this very distance. The poetic is the rupture in the signifiers ability to conclude its meaning, a fissures for the breath of the subject, the gap in meaning.  Establishing the lineage of romanticist sublimity to Conceptual art's non sequitur. Like Gonzalez-Torres, Cesarco's distance (continually expanding and collapsing) between the signifier and its lost or depleting signified amends a weight to this gap, it itself representing an emotional distance. E.g. our suspension from high-def's physicality, touch of other's neck, flowers erotic, establishing the disconnect as the pathos.  The man with a cane considering the crashing of waves mirror the person rifling a Roni Horn catalog depicting a woman over years and seconds.
Cesarco's appendix projects a book the viewer constructs, provisional and incomplete. Like Heubler's project of the same name, the gaps in the construction force viewers fill of it, extracting it from us, “The story is a surface” projected by the thousand mottled points of reference, you standing before their rupture, poetic.


See too :  Jason Dodge at Franco Noero , Sean Raspet at Jessica Silverman , Simon Starling at Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago

Shana Moulton at Gregor Staiger

(link)

Moulton assuming the dress of pop advertorial address - here New Age stylings in lo-production training-video awkwardness - playing its advertising of people to themselves. It's an off-comedy in the vein of Mike Smith and David Robbins, self-deprecating humor at mass culture's consolidation and prepackaging of identity through its transference of an emotive link, here with a character, like laugh-tracks, to stand in for our own. No matter how bungling the address we desire the naive awe Moulton's character feels at "gloves." and Moulton's uses this to play against it a Rachel Rose like assemblage of effects, rupturing our affective link with it through its onlsaught of signs, tone, irony.  It's ultimate laugh is the empty-feeling that its humor ultimately lays bare.

see too : Rachel Rose at High Art , Petra Cortright at Société , Pipilotti Rist at Hauser & Wirth

“Work Hard” at Swiss Institute

(link)

"A group of civic-minded Swiss, established businessmen in the city, came together to assist their newly arrived countrymen with advice, jobs and money. In 1846, ninety-six supporting members formally organized as Swiss Benevolent Society of New York to carry on what they had started."

The Swiss Benevolent Society, still around today, eventually gave original housing to the Swiss Institute, made a home for them in their building for the elderly and indigent, the poor and needy, and therefor artists too, the SI's goal seeming artistically mirrored, giving their countrymen a leg up, a strictly Swiss affair, before being nerfed to today's PR: "provid[ing] a significant forum for contemporary cultural dialogue between Europe and the United States" paid for by mostly Swiss government and businesses - as well as contributions from a few American galleries who of course have artistic overlap, as is the case with Carron and 3 of the galleries providing him solo shows in the last years (though Carron already had a solo at SI in 2006), nothing new to the artworld's corporation/institution symbiosis - to supply and sustain a bastion of "European culture" in the heart of it, corporate art culture. "Dialogue" having become a sort of meaningless PR inkblot whose shape amorphous reflects and is culled by whatever the reader's personal investment, a Rorschach if there ever was one. The mildly conspiratorial air surrounding the Institute and always in vogue curators lay in the difficulty ascertaining where exactly the cart lies in relation to these hottly trotting artists often already appearing to be riding trains to market, questions of who delivering who.

Transcription of an 1862 benevolent meeting's minutes seem fitting:

Four applicants were sent to the Interior.

Three applicants were sent to Europe.

Seventeen and a half tons of coal have been given to 35 applicants.

Three thousand seven hundred and twenty pounds of bread have been distributed.

Nine applicants have received board and lodging.

No word on how many artists distributed.

see too : Chris Ofili at New Museum , Stefan Tcherepnin at Freedman Fitzpatrick

David Hartt at LAXART

(link)

Chris Kraus spent a book speculating where art belongs, and Hartt wagers a similar bet that its at the cusps, the liminal sites of production where thriving is reciprocal to collapsing  - "interstices" - siting its video depciting the limits of culture, (a video channel for each Siberia and Alaska's edges) within that endlessly theorized de-centered center of post-modern enterprise, the Bonaventure hotel, Jameson, Berger, Baudrillard et al. The symbolic gesture, heavy handed as it is and theorized to no end by the takeaway, recedes with the video's actual deft estrangement of the entirety of its enterprise. The documentation does no service to the weirdness of taking time out of your beautiful Los Angeles day to enter this both bustling and dying image of de-centered centered post-modern architecture, somewhere between mall and airport, and entering a now defunct, dead, flower shop, and see the video's imagery make the comparison almost ham-fistedly well between the these forms of death-in-life existence of the Russian left and American right (reversed in the documentation) centered at this supremely weird hotel.  The power less in the juxtaposition of its symbols, but the differing sensibilities of the founts, reflected en abyme as one revolves again and again through the doors of its manic brand semiotics of fractured capitalism, the video at its best when its toys with the tone of meaning, going from Levi's ad to generic cohort of stock images reflecting its jazz soundtrack. A revolving floor capitalist realist funhouse disavowing the usual white walled gallery "purity" by adopting the sale's floor as its code, and all the art fairs along the way, a capitalist gimmick that works really well.

See too : "Rainbow" at Queer Thoughts , David Hartt at Carnegie Museum of Art

Raimer Jochims at Jacky Strenz

(link)

That these, like their colors, don't really make sense, an indifference to fitting explicably well within contemporary grey flesh, like glass shard splinters or loose teeth's minor annoyance become ugly terror through small but repeated insistence.

Olga Balema, Anne de Vries at Michael Thibault

(link)

Bourgeois to Hesse, and here now again updated with the changes our bodies' experienced, reflected in today's mirror no longer inanimate lumps but vibrant in neo-materialism's adolescence, budding bulbous digital puddles which visage our cracked mugs as seen in reality's new digital expansion pack, our rocks vibrato.


See too : "Puddle, pothole, portal" at Sculpture Center , Cathy Wilkes at Tramway , Alicja Kwade at Kunstmuseum St. Gallen

Sascha Braunig at Foxy Production

(link)

The extant donning of, or, given: the "optical" has always been a means of breaking the fourth wall, over a Bayrle down optical watersheds scrambling one's retinas, blinking at the construction's winking, acknowledging the readymade biology of a viewer's eye's. Which, like trompe-l'œil, scenes in expectation of the viewer, pre-preparing its gamesmanship's inscrutable subject illuminated in a gassy light. Neatly packaged within the peephole of painting, the work await, reflecting, a viewer's head.


See too : Matthew Cerletty at Office Baroque

Jos de Gruyter and Harald Thys at Wattis

(link)

Taking up where Fischli + Weiss left off, Jos de Gruyter and Harald Thys continue the unchecked carefree edging comedic nihlism; already systematized into the production line it was always already fit into. "The sensation of boredom and nausea that the programs cause in me are experiential proof that I am not completely programmed," as the PR quotes.  The so slight tangent they provide to the moor of modern life - afternoons spent drawing trollies - meant as an acerbic aloofness, an "abuse of time," could be soothing to nervous bones, but also has already accepted the defeat expected, a Naumanian irony extended to the long view, a symptom soothing, anesthetic, numbing fun.

See too: David Weiss at Swiss Institute , Fischli and Weiss at Sprüth Mages

Tobias Madison at Francesca Pia

(link)

Since at least 2010 Madison's derivations of other's - Genzken's florid plinths or Strau's illumination thrift - made acceptable by their visual suasion. Delivering what was desired by happily taking the mantels from the standard bearers to wrap itself made for an aberrant tension of when Madison would if ever finally take the step into characterless unoriginality seen here.

John Baldessari at Marian Goodman

(link)

Baldessari's career spent on a dismantling mockery of art's formal givens, puppeteering its dumbified literal versions, removing the protective aura of seriousness so a skepticism could seep into it cracks, paving the way for today's boorish Pop conceptualism.
Here focused on dissonant image/text relations, including a PR that may or may not correspond the exhibition on view, leaves a viewer floundering to connect the basic formality of art: that the text relate. That we still find this Baldessarian gimmick relevant 800 exhibitions later, sometimes even comically worth it, even when unable to ascertain its intentionality, shows how strong this base impulse is ingrained.

See too : Heimo Zobernig at Indipendenza , Vern Blosum at Kunsthalle Bern , Mitchell Syrop at Midway Contemporary Art

“Another Normal Love” at Barbara Gross

(link)

In a weekend in which men's bodies exist at the fore of at least two religious holiday, it's nice a nice gesture for CAD to assert the female in its tertiary choice for religious practice.

Luc Tuymans at David Zwirner

(link)

Tuymans performed life-support on what Richter had tortured, trying to reinject the lifeblood of photograph painting: pathos. That the corpse is only slightly warmer is part of its misery.

See too : Herbert Brandl at Barbel Grasslin

Herbert Brandl at Bärbel Grässlin

(link)

The Germanic brushstroke. The fanned and smeared.  Brandt's earlier paintings joining Richter's always distinct two practices, abstraction and fan-brush, lead to mutual horror, revealing the lapse Richter himself couldn't even.  It's grotesque birthed from distinct characters never meant to breed has since given way to this exhibitions more normalized German-Austro-coldness, using style and deftness of brushwork as quotational and life-sucking means for its happy little waves and mountains, but no happy little trees unfortunately.

See too : Thomas Eggerer at Richard Telles

Raoul De Keyser at Inverleith House

(link)

The contemporary pervasiveness of gentle abstraction - the reanimation of modernism - leaves De Keyser awash in his own lineage's current genericscm, disentangled by his underdog aura, the underground, spotlight aversion "authentic": a "lifelong residence in the small East-Flanders town of Deinze."   Whereas today's re-visitation mines the signs of modernism as a conceptual rationale for its nicety, De Keyser's working from its origin instead presents its bent version, an awkwardness to its tropes, undermining its pleasantry with, when at its best, its own game, making it disobey its order, reminding us why we liked all those modernist paintings to begin with.

And see too : Zak Prekop at Shane Campbell , Ida Ekblad at Herald St. , Sanya Kantarovsky at Marc Foxx , Joanne Greenbaum at Crone , Albert Oehlen at Skarstedt

Heimo Zobernig at Indipendenza

(link)

It's important to note Zobernig's background coming from theater design. Objects which in their replicant mis-rememberance of archetypal painting instead limn its vague caricature, a consensual version, short-circuited to be art that already looks like art. Becoming stand-ins (theater sets) for the contemporary, or its "zombie" version.
In other words their extreme banality incites questioning, and exposes its stage to the skepticism wrought.
The inanity of such an operation might seem at the limits of humane interest, but Zobernig's magisterial ability to continually wrest insipid rabbits from contemporary hat irrupts a manic laughability at the depths of that hat.
The jewels in the rough here work because their showcasing of the exhibition around it proved that they were never needed to begin with.

Paul Cowan at Clifton Benevento , Margaret Lee at Team , Kaspar Müller at Federico Vavassori , Heimo Zobernig at Petzel, Krupp, MUDAM , Seven Reeds at Overduin and co.