Darja Bajagić, Aleksander Hardashnakov at Croy Nielsen

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The bruising capillaries, hematomas of color, of a Klossowski like softness, physical, drawing made objects, and across the cut-collage assemblage of cultural detritus as scrappy flags.  Both are pleasant uses of material, sans Bajagić's normally aggressive imagery reliant the work immediately resembles a Richard Hawkins effeminate attachmenting, with a bit more "edge," across from blushing brute frames, which have a sort of weak force that's nice.

Olga Balema at Croy Nielsen

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Materially this work is weird, interesting, the taught over-inflated carcass of rotting whale PVC fetishists, dead fish washed ashore and sexually lurid, the hyperreal of the package holding the bodily abject, but the installation of it exemplifies today’s occult handling of spatial composition, the feng shui arrangements that bespeak an other, or a spiritual warmth, weirding, and there exists an interesting conversation between Gedi Sibony (arguable harbinger of current compositional resurgence, possibly even of the curtain meme) and Kai Althoff in which the former kinda sorta admits the latter. These compositional strategies become a signal, attempting through odd/unusual placement to valorize objects, in the same way higher powers once commanded painters into corners, sculpture today arranges on a logic established/predicated on an otherness. To quote Carpenter yesterday, “non- allegorically allegorical “displays” I seek to confound these products into a hieroglyph.”
But the work is desirable, expect to see more of it. Buy now as it were.


See too: Olga Balema, Anne de Vries at Michael Thibault , Michael E Smith at Susanne Hilberry, Merlin Carpenter at MD72, David Douard at Johan Berggren,  Sophie Nys at Crac Alsace, “Puddle, pothole, portal” at Sculpture Center

Jutta Koether at Bortolami

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Certain art memes burn so quickly that in their aftermath a wasteland, the theoretical ground so well cleared that its almost like starting over, we have to look elsewhere from "Painting Beside Itself"s turf, or risk losing an artist to its rubric. I've got nothin.
But how striking it is now Koether's obvious forebear to the likes of Jana Euler and other’s loaded representation. Representation was always sort of beside itself, at least pointing elsewhere, but whereas for today’s puzzle painting exists as a kind of confounding delay of symbol's comprehension, Koether's over-saturation never seems a puzzle, but a hyperlink version, rerouting what we bring to it.

Jana Euler at Kunsthalle Zürich + Bonner Kunstverein,  Jesse Benson at Michael Benevento, Mathew Cerletty at Office Baroque

Merlin Carpenter at MD 72

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In the mist of Berlin's fashion for press released in Ashbery poetics, Carpenter plops a desiccant earnestness, to clear the fog and expose the mildew of this all growing old. Carpenter has always been master of framing houses of cards, where any breath of thought topples, the whole thing must be moved with care, but here instead contextualizes with a single vantage's solemnity so dry it may lack compassion for us (what Carpenter ex doesn't), but posits an agreeable proposition: we've read Marx wrong, a disservice to the auratic objects of capital arranged so commonly speculated upon as "anonymous." And so, "By combining the single works into non-allegorically allegorical “displays” I seek to confound these products into a hieroglyph" a description of most artworks today, asserting that we need a new language for it, and assembling arrangements of luxurious object as a mockery of it, art's attempting to totemize the objects of capital as an occult other, a mistake if there ever was one, and Carpenter has an essay forthcoming for that, and we'll all look forward to that.

Merlin Carpenter at Overduin & Co., Zak Kitnick at Rowhouse Projects, Mark Leckey at Haus Der Kunst + Kunsthalle Basel, Vincent Meessen, Thela Tendu at Kunsthalle Basel

Mark Leckey at Haus Der Kunst + Kunsthalle Basel

Haus Der Kunst, Kunsthalle Basel

Sanchez called Leckey a hack ( in the sense of what "artist John Kelsey discussed"), taking issue with Leckey's lecture's magisterial administration of an audience swooning: hypnotic affection that would one day be called a Ted Talk or manipulating an audience. Thing was Leckey had always been trading in affects. It was like his thing. Taking cue from that other realm that predicated itself upon it, commerce, entertainment, advertising that was constructing the world and the commodities, objects, films, and talismans that produce it, and, Leckey, attempting to build the work from it. Fiorrici Made Me Hardcore - Leckey's seminal origin - is only and entirely affect, a semblance of surface run like warm oil over your grey orbital, and in the 15 years since a practice built of discerning this surface force, kin Sturtevant and Trisha Donnelly among others, giving birth to today's youthful irrevant abuse of it seen in the New Museum's Surround Audience and even badly by all those anonymous materialists speculated upon. What, at the moment, separates Leckey from his progeny's use of affect is attention to it, amassing at the very least an index of it, and interest examined, and not necessarily just exploiting it.


See too : Venice v Triennial , Mark Leckey at Wiels, Trisha Donnelly at Air de Paris, Zak Kitnick at Rowhouse, Sturtevant at Moma, &Thaddeus Ropac 

Haegue Yang at dépendance

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Yang’s shopping spree installationism, artist who package commodities as their signature, replaced by packaged objects, not dispersed through space, but singular, souvenirs a bit more decor apropos.

See too : Amy Lien & Enzo Camacho at 47 Canal , Darren Bader at Andrew Kreps

Venice vs Triennial

Venice, Triennial

Cold adult sobriety vs hothouse youth. The difference is generational. 10 years ago avenues to visibility were tightly controlled by finance beholden gatekeepers pedigreed and willing to bestow public accreditation to neophytes in line, behaving to a system; Today youth of the post-net are really post image-democratization, a time in which all images come preloaded with mass audientential capabilities, and accredited publications (with expensive paper real-estate) are matched by cheap raw visibility's fungible version, exchangeable with any world (fashion, commerce, literature) equally, the gold standard of different disciplines. Views now actually equatable with dollars, concretizing vague importance of public attendance numbers with dollar signs. This isn't that the New Museum is going full populist, but rather that it must manage now a cultural idea of art that they present back to it. The Bienniale, a pretty much artworld only affair, must conform to an artworld's image of itself, reserved and tasteful, and look how staid most of it in comparison is. And the preponderance of the Triennal exhibition's viral capable art that flowed through the net alongside it is as symptomatic of cultural changes in art as it is the new liquid spirit. Old guards' approval no longer perquisite to fame, Artists can produce visibility organically, through, it turns out, interesting images and so if the Teletubbies look through you, disinterested in your presence, chalk it up to art that isn't predicated on Fried's theater attending to the viewer's presence, but the populist behind it, and so this new art, frighteningly enough, is actually kind of entertaining.


See too Chris Ofili at New Museum, Seven Reeds at Overduin and Co.

Lisa Holzer at Rowing

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As we were saying the frame can crystallize anything, and here it shrinkwraps the new physicality of the real and digital hyper-real, a sort of confounding Lucie Stahlness rendered. Irrupt a new physicality into space. Strike while the newness is new. But more interesting is the bit of text at top that seem like someone actually trying to reach out, like the new real might actually be speaking, trying to communicate.

So see too : "Eat Abstractedly" at Mary Mary , Lisa Holzer at Emanuel Layr , Anne Speier at Neue Alte Brücke

Tyson Reeder at Office Baroque

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An interesting choice that "in his words, Tyson is 'temporarily suspending the burden of art history...'" A bold move to call time-out on history. A caesura of criticism, a tenative cease-fire from the shelling of critical damnation that these await. Reeder has always teased hippie-hipsterdom, sometimes even well, and this pause used not to let loose, but get sweatpants bloated comfy in gentle unassuming corporate abstraction, probably the most radical gesture left in art as a new category of "painting" not even Josh Smith would envy, to make art fit for Starbucks, if the rules hadn't been called off. Dear, Albert Oehlen. What say you?

See too: Zak Prekop at Shane Campbell , Joanne Greenbaum at Crone, Merlin Carpenter at Overduin and Co. , Albert Oehlen at Skarstedt , Trevor Shimzu at Rowhouse

Kaoru Arima at Misako & Rosen

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Brutalization of the human visage an ever occurring painting theme. Since early modernism human features bludgeoned to bloom bruise bouquets, or apply rictus like geometries, portraits of a stroke. On and on painters rushing to do injustice to portraits.  It became a joke so safe it could be featured in children’s movies, and so you've got potatoes exclaiming, “Hey look at me, I’m Picasso." These aren’t Bacon, for whom, as Deleuze saw through so quickly, the face was subregister to the thing-head, the meat slab head. Here, the face is more figurative idea, an outline, a Jawlensky like framework for which to hang wanton libidinal paint.  A Martin Creed portrait mistake that continues long past the child crying for it to stop, I mean he’s already dead. And but so the joke so played out, that today our countenance used as a rack for paint is a small irony. We find its horror almost playful, cute, even interesting, a learned tolerance for pain.

See too : Heather Guertin at Brennan & Griffin , Joanne Greenbaum at Crone , 

Raoul De Keyser at Inverleith House

“Eat Abstractedly” at Mary Mary

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Photography is in a good place right now, pre-packaged in a liquid asset - no matter how banal (say, Jakschik) or garishly putrid (Gordon) the work becomes subject, concept. All work equalized under the format and coherent, any artistic dissonance mediated by the format. In the diaspora of images available today, any practice is coherent in comparison. The image package. The predetermined object, say even a chair, a format, allows an immediate relation to, a lozenge for swallowing. The slight remove allowing its crystalline vessel. A photo of anything, a feed of it.

See sculpture too : Paris de Noche" at Night Gallery and as well : Annette Kelm at Gio Marconi , Torbjørn Rødland at Henie-Onstad Kunstsenter, Torbjørn Rødland at Kunsthall Stavanger

Andreas Slominski at Thaddaeus Ropac

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When speaking about Slominski’s slipperiness, or trap lain for viewers, we refer to a difficulty in choosing frames to enter the work. The uncertainty requires our critical apparatus realigned. Making “sense” of Slominski’s exhibtionary past pulls apart like string cheese, the objects readily peel divergent threaded reference, until we have handfuls of palmed cheese chasing an artist trying to stay one step ahead in luring the viewer to a mire lost in. The will-o-wisp Slominski not above pulling the rug, or laying slick fluids. Tread carefully. Read the signs.


See too : Adriana Lara at Algus Greenspon

Vincent Meessen, Thela Tendu at Kunsthalle Basel

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"Meessen acts as both artist and curator of what is the largest show of Tendu’s abstractions to date in a kind of exhibition-within-the-exhibition.""All of these serve as a visual and conceptual backdrop for a selection of 1930s paintings by the little-known Congolese painter Thela Tendu" of which documentation for this show almost ignores. If you squint you might see them serving as backdrop to Meessen's sculptural masonry. Runic spells drawn on the floor, artist's today use history, signs and objects as incantations, seances to empower images having lost meaning in a culture awash with them. Objects today are displacers, deferring to some construct outside itself, an auratic other, occult, awash with meaning.

"...it took Tendu nearly a century longer to garner any major institutional attention at all. And in Tendu’s case, it only happened thanks to the initiative of another artist."

Venice: Thea Djordjadze at The Arsenale

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Little leg syndrome, the flat and thin things from that time, the late 00's, Gedi Sibony, Ian Khaer, Dike Blair, Sosnowska, Pumhösl, Djordjadze, et al., everyone having these fragile objects carefully held on stilts and legs, over rugs, levitating things off the floor and potted plants in Broodthaer's resurging mis-en-scene faux Décors. Everyone invested in tableaus, of feng-shui industrial animism. Fried's theaters run though home decor staging's emptiness. Morphing into today's "speculative materials." Reinvesting in the material sited. Djordjadze's thin legged fragility looked, after the conquest of Ikea, libidinal. Reestablishing fragility in industrial forms we all wanted so bad. Petite arrangements of decor.

Venice: Céleste Boursier-Mougenot at The French Pavilion

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How romantic is this. This is like Arte Povera gentrified by clean white Apple design, the Apple Ad of art. Cue music.

See too : Marc Camille Chaimowicz at Galerie Neu

Venice: Victor Man at The Central Pavilion

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Jana Euler, Mathew Cerletty, etc. the overt affect of Man’s brooding tinctures in the hieroglyphs of a new puzzle form of painting, the explicit clarity of subjects, revealed flatly, become illustrations of a mysterioized subject withheld. The more overt the “subject,” the harder we fall into its promise of illustrating something, meaning. Man taking the hewn in stone rigidity of Piero Della Francseco’s stilted figures to place them in night glazed sinister. The black patinas concretizing the dark affects of pre-renaissance painting mysticism, ideals of math and Christianity ordered by divine principle. Man’s, and other’s, equally full frontal subject explicit wishing too for some divine mystery.

See too : Matthew Cerletty at Office Baroque , Jana Euler at Kunsthalle Zurich

Venice: Marlene Dumas at The Central Pavilion

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Dumas always risked becoming a materials fetishist, and here the variations on a theme seem exceedingly formal production,painting profs dream. Burdened by the image, treat it as token.  Is there real difference between these and Ann Craven besides a technical interest. Today, no longer painting, but a speed of working triumphs. This why painting dots so in fashion, we desire to become printers of our authorship. Production gaining important through its mass. Warhol's serial skulls mechanically mocked death, these ones are nice, pleasant even, fine.
These are pretty good.

see too : Ann Craven at Confort Moderne

Venice: Gedi Sibony at The Arsenale

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The small pleasure of Sibony's found paintings is their modernist uncanny within vernacular abstraction. That those uncaring, underpaid to blot out corporate logos for truck's resale, might - through dumb luck or undiscovered brilliance - have painted something fine. Their unartful reason a pleasantly fresh breeze of non-art. Dumb hamfisted inelegance, brilliant.  That brushstrokes without art intention always look best, and these just made to cover, to stop beer from selling itself, so painting could.

These "paintings" are easy to mock - the enterprise if you don't believe falls quickly into pastiche - and the can still being kicked down the line from the last bland Greene-Naftali ex - definitely Sibony and his objet trouvé animism with the least finesse, most bumbling, but saleable.


see too : Yuji Agematsu at Artspeak , Zak Kitnick at Rowhouse Project , "Seven Reeds" at Overduin and Co.

Biennale

Past:

Simon Denny


Pamela Rosenkranz

Zak Kitnick at Rowhouse Project

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Kitnick in the wasteland of a collapsing distinction between commodities and art. Hamilton Beach trading in the same nebulous affects of today's semio-surrealism. The reptilian effects of consumer language, our love for art becomes indistinguishable from our love of products. The product, kin art, become its packaging: images as totems for desire. The objects conjure a semio-construct, and we do battle with a hypnotic ghost manifested. The affect is the object. Basically the point is Hamilton Beach, et al. have entered the field playing high level game of avant-garde animism that art is trying to catch up to, conjuring spectres of occult need. I'm not convinced speculative realism has anything helpful to offer art (philosophy another question) that couldn't be deduced from some post-baudrillard semio-construction that seems to have gotten away from us, playing upon us. Not from the objects themselves but a symptom of a market ecology. I don't even know what this packaged object is, but I desire it, a unique piece of trash.

See too Michael E. Smith at Lulu , Sophie Nys at Crac Alsace , "Paris de Noche" at Night Gallery , Pentti Monkkonen at High Art , Yuji Agematsu at Artspeak

Group Show at Meyer Riegger

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We'll just list some decent work in this exhib: Mauser's crushed can Kobros, Saâdane Afif's baroque citational posters, Salvo's pre-Nicolas Party awkward, Posenenske's tableaus, Armleder's power-farts, etc.
But can we talk about that Miriam Cahn painting. Jesus. Attaining that magic otherness of "outsider" artists without actually being so. Soft horror, childlike and maternal. A crepuscular thumb indeterminate. The marks seem to stand more for actions than depiction, as in a face constructed of movements against it, but way less theatrical than Bacon. of the horror of our features removed, of the loss of the container, flesh. Such gentle, tender, violence.

Nicolas Party at Gregor Staiger , Miriam Cahn at Jocelyn Wolff , Group Show at David Kordasky

Jesse Benson at Michael Benevento

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Whereas Jonas Wood highlights the rendered pressed through the grate of subjectivity (expression), Benson's accuracy in strategic non-expression, like Celmins or Sturtevant, the lack thereof (of expression), neutering the subjective, the closer it can be to being without qualities, is its psychedelic quality. The paintings warble in closeness to a reality that they fail to produce. The black object marks it with a wink, a game. The mistakes are its value. Banal and iridescent.


and so see too: Jonas Wood at David Kordansky , Mathew Cerletty at Office Baroque , Jana Euler at Kunsthalle Zürich

Greer Lankton at Between Bridges

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The doll presupposes its animation, and these, decommissioned, await life mausoleic. Toys surveilled so under the guise of conservations eternal life they may never play again. Perhaps this why every Lankton press release reflects back on the past, to times of vivid scenes of famous friends spirited, Lankton's and other's photographs of the dolls from that time seem so much more interesting than them behind glass today, photography an elegiac art, these now dead bodies.

See too : Greer Lankton at Participant Inc , Nicolas Ceccaldi at Mathew

Sophie Nys at Crac Alsace

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Some of the best writings on aggregators and CAD, in their estimation of “super-speed” replacing “what had been a process of legitimation, attributable to particular institutions or critical bodies, now becomes a process of simple visibility, attributable to the media apparatus itself” fails to account for the now redundancy of the gallery itself as a primeval form of property wealth lending credence to work that should (if speed is all powerful) be being usurped by the even more immediately immediate Instagram and direct sales and artist websites, that CAD could be curating. Though some argue this transition is happening. Even if CAD obviously still believe in some form gallery/name/institutional pedigree necessary to value the object (which the likes of Ian Rosen and a few intrepid green and orbital galleries has proven themselves pre-legitimated enough to circumvent this proprietary requirement) this truly site-less approach hasn’t manifested itself. In fact sited documentation seems to be on the rise, and emphasized to dramatic effect, highlighting the gallery’s architectural ticks, absurdly so. That Berlin’s Tanya Leighton gallery, of which Sanchez highlights, despite performing the neutral painted grey floors and glowing white walls, is one of the more architecturally memorable galleries. All around images of the object’s site, the installation shot, generally outnumber if not replace entirely the image of the object, even to the detriment of understanding the object. The site as the producer of the art object’s “aura” was established in different way by Boris Groys take on Benjaminian aura in “Art in the Age of Biopolitics” in referring to documentations (in terms of artifacts of conceptual art) need for the site. “A close reading of Benjamin's text makes clear that the aura only originates by virtue of the modern technology of reproduction - that is to say, it emerges in the same moment as it gets lost. And it emerges for the same reason for which it gets lost.” Artists recently beginning using their power to torture the aura power of the site to bend it and its loss to their will: Jay Chung & Q Takeki Maeda. The surrealist vernacular of most contemporary is predicated on this aura for its totems, its mysterioizing, its unknowability, this distance between the object and the viewer. Sontag: "Distance seems built into the very experience of looking at photographs..."

TL;DR: Documentation highlighting architectural ticks is in, the aura of today's surrealist art is predicated on it.

See too : Jay Chung & Q Takeki Maeda at 356 Mission , "The Sea" at Mu.ZEE , "Flat Neighbors" at Rachel Uffner , Ian Rosen at Kristina Kite

Taryn Simon at Jeu de Paume

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Taryn Simon provides a small service, cataloging objects that would disappear otherwise, infographics of a border's filter. A sample of the water rejected. This small function separating her from Trevor Paglen whose similar I-spy photograph's depiction relish their obfuscation. (Simon's photographs at least illustrate their subject even if they tell us nothing.) Both premised on a sort of Christopher Williams structuralism, they await the text to reveal the image. Paglen's photos ultimately rely on this distance for their affect. Simon's on their forensic premise, lending creedance to even the theatrical images over-extravagant camp. All of it Poetically separated from understanding, the poetic-conceptual On Kawara effect.

Lastly, The schmaltzy, ham-fisted, and absurd trope of "conceptual" photographers presenting large blank and spectacular images of space photography can die anytime now. Everyone at this point understands it's not about cosmic blankness and existential pondering, and everything to do with printing money. Lutz Bacher already did it better.

See too : On Kawara at the Guggenheim, Trevor Paglen at Metro Pictures, Thomas Ruff at S.M.A.K., Florian Maier-Aichen at 303 Gallery, Thomas Demand at Avlskarl

“The Lulennial: A Slight Gestuary” at Lulu

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The slight gesture a contemporary variant in lineage with the objet de vertu, extravagant ornaments who meekness was their spectacle - the supplicant's eggs crusted with jewels containing vessels and the time - and in which today old precious metals traded for preciousness. A Tuttelesque romanticism for the little things, to tiny knots, and the curve of a hand repeated. To the senitmental weight of string. Both contain their paradox, of the tiny object as spectacle, and the trinket as sublime. A fragile a-collectibility in imminently collectable packages, made for its document, the package of photography that delivers it.

See too : Single Moms at Vilma Gold

Magnus Andersen at Neue Alte Brücke & Dorothy Iannone at Air de Paris

It's impossible to measure earnestness. Time de-ironizes and jest is made serious by attention. Saying one is more authentic, or by comparing hierarchically these two is a set-up for defeat. You could say (with a long enough timeline) "the necessities of circumstance turn to virtue." Andersen knows that to survive is to triumph. And so with defeat you must accept its march into visibility. Andersen even got a theme-song for his parade. You can like one more than the other, but you can't say no to it, and like Darren Bader, the one willing to destroy something is the one who controls it, to paraphrase Dune. Thus Andersen straps a bomb to his chest walks into the vault of images, which we his visual hostages, on a long enough timeline, learn to love, and pied man leading children to their deaths.


See too: Darren Bader at Kölnischer Kunstverein, Dorothy Iannone at Peres Projects, Group Show at Neue Alte Brücke

“The Violet Crab” at DRAF

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This exhibition is a proposition. That art should be more like cabaret, a category optimistically defined as a risque entertainment that absorbs and harbors the fringes of culture, an ideal art that would dissolve lip-service to post-modernity still aggressively holding on to the autonomous work. It's like championing spaghetti to replace diamonds.  We would have to give up the authorial subject for the carnival. A radical happening transferring art to artifacts of a scene, and the entrepreneur as author. Maybe.
Satirizing the rules of production in the present isn't that difficult, even the mildest flatulence breaks gallery decorum. Turning the house topsy-turvy, the curatorial address of throwing it all in and letting god sort 'em out with song and dance.

Mandla Reuter at Kunstverein Braunschweig

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Gallery interventionism, rearrangement to estrange the viewer from it. Setting a moral drama's stage, the viewers the figurants of its abandoned set, asking for the heightened attention to the space directed by Reuter. Attempting to alienate it, the gallery and our experience walking through, to forget the name of the thing one sees. We encounter the experience prior to the objects. Like Irwin phenomologic parables, or Turrel's temples to it, a moral lesson in experiential self-awareness packaged in a fun house arrangement. A Fun house in which perception is amplified through ascetic rather than psychedelic means. The critique of a "capitalist-realist adaptation of art to the experience economy" could be leveled at it, but its much more modernist than that.

Aware of our surroundings too : Gina Folly and Mandla Reuter at SALTS

Fredrik Vaerslev at Centre d’Art Contemporain Passerelle

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Theft. Blankness. Everything in the exhibition is "found," you’ve got Heimo’s appropriation of its fostering institution’s identity graphics printed on Mosset’s beige pyramid repetition, indeterminate vacuous stripes, and any of the number people who accumulate smudges, all across the canvas, each in a quadrant to Vaerslev’s abstraction. There is no trap set, no one is going to “read into” these, only conceptual fracture of others moves loaded onto a canvas to re-package it as virtual corporate franchising, "surpass[ing] the restricted area allowed to abstract art in the program of modernity" everything stolen and printed. A race to the bottom in derivative deflection en abyme. Not so much preferring not to, mass producing it.

Seven Reeds at Overduin and Co., Group Show at Greene Naftali, Flame at 576 Morgan Ave Apt 3L,