Nicola Tyson at Nathalie Obadia

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Calling something arbitrary abstraction is stupid so don't.  Abstraction itself is, and the rationalization of it breeds generic monsters and graduate theses.  Instead swing hard blindly. Tyson's paintings are wildly hit and miss, swinging so hard that a whiff is ugly overpowering, but a good one can really be something. I don't want to sound like a formalist here, but its really that teal that just smells so strongly of DIY bathroom decor, but that red is so sexy and those fingers like latex hotdogs.

Linder at dépendance

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Aside from Linder's more explicit deconstructions of advertorial gaze, its basic formal tool of blasting an object onto another, virtual imposition, like Orozco's cat tins on watermelons, a sort of conceptual slapstick in the mistreatment of subject, a surrealism so primitive its feels like powerful comedy.

“New Needs” at Haus Wittmann

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Another Sunday on CAD. Address, keystroke, and scroll with hopes suspended over the small void before true boredom. Stop-gap info-fill. Click. Click. Horror vacuii a widespread contemporary affliction, replaced and transferred, and what's going on in the contemporary art world has pages refreshed with dopamine gambles. Imagine gunshots. Click. Roulette's small rush hoping for red interest, exciting, opening an exhibition to spend time, to see our name, transactions, dice rolled against real time ticker on the field of cultural production. Imagine violence. So play it cool. The gentility of another polite art kindly acquiescing to an architecture pleasant. Decorum so thorough its Austrian. Imagine Michael Haneke directing someone to suffocate his love with a pillow. Another Sunday group show on CAD, a beautiful day pouring in through Austrian architecture and webpages.

Marte Eknæs, Sean Raspet at Room East

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Fincher turned the Calculation of Negligence into nihilistic mantra for millions of angst ridden boys, finding solace for their jade in a new schizo-sado-masculinity, solace in a brutality ending in terrorist fantasies of high-rises burning. It felt like relief. The main character's lavish condo exploding from a gas leak was ostensibly the best thing that ever happened to him. The non-accident we later learn is a symptom stemming from the very repressive bourgeois lifestyle it destroys. That the terrorist act was itself an expression of late-capitalist detachment, the same thing that Baudrillard would later claim in his "The Spirit of Terrorism" that capitalism expressed a sort of auto-terrorism, boredom itself bringing the towers down. The Pop success of both at least clarifies the latent cultural desire we have for the fantasy of watching the world burn so long as they are sublimated (make us able to believe we would never actually desire to see them enacted) through the filters of acceptable and neutering forms, pop-film or philosophy, and here art.

Anyway Eknaes and Raspet set the gallery on pins and needles, priming it for any disaster always unknown, anything because everything looks pretty spooky.

But we desire it.


See too: Sean Raspet at Société and Sean Raspet at Jessica Silverman

Andrea Fraser at Museum der Moderne

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Fraser's kingdom to the firmly theorized ground of Institutional Critique is a problem. Though deservedly royalty of this particular genre, her bannership of - what has always appeared to be a very philosophically neat game - is the whitewashing of her messy, and messed, relationship to it. Fraser hasn't really been a good catholic in the halls of theory, despite her endless use of it. For all the calculated and brilliant and clear work and writing the artist has done, the more irreducible and psychological aspects of her practice is often left off in service to a sort of tidy moralizing theory that has become IC's legacy and leaving off the weird latent part of Fraser's wager of oneself as an institution and reflect, and this hall of mirrors has always left Fraser in tears, or naked.  The coldness of the tears isn't so much a gaming of representation performed, but hysteric postion from a dumb expected of course come true, a real catch-22 resultant attempts to reconcile competing desires incompatible. "Why Does Fred Sandback's Work Make Me Cry?" almost explicitly iterates this dissonance with two competing halves, an essay great because the tension between the two aren't reconciled, and leaves a giant gaping hole for IC's neat exterior, and contains no tidy moralizing, however moral a character. Fraser's work is more like a mental tentacle distributing its distress.

Michaël Borremans at Dallas Museum of Art

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Here the flesh returns to painting as Borremans' waxy version attempting to reestablish a corporeality that Tuymans, Richter, Sasnal paints our distance from. Borremans reconnects the body to its threat. Like early scenes in horror films - prior first blood - Borremans' forebode body-violence by situating it it within disorientating relations, establishing it as flesh. The body is imparted the possibility of being threatened. Borremans' realism exists to position the body capable of bodily "abstraction," (violence) the subtle wavering of flesh constructed by painter using brushstrokes to threaten hurt. Like Guston's plodding version establishing the act of drawing a painting, a Borremans painting loosens (abstracts) to threaten the body what could be done, coming apart with the fragile blow of a stroke. If the trope of horror-films was to die after sex, it was because the carnality established the body as fragile, human, meat; sex filled the character with blood for the destruction to come. I don't watch a lot of horror, but my guess is that there is another equal trope of putting body through some kind of medical examination, or equal expose, a moment to rub lotion into its skin, soften them. Borremans paintings are like that, trying to regain ground lost by those Germans who would coldly render it by giving its corpse (painting and body) back its blood.
Borremans treads dangerously close to the Gottfried Helnwein, a disserving though important relation, it exists as what Borremans is not but could be, treads close to, kitsch-horror. Making Borremans relation with an uncomfortable line plainly silly by having the line already crossed and staked and surveyed by an artist with all the bright lights showing, Hollywood actors writing favorable copy. It's unfortunate for Borremans having the third act of the horror show already known.

And see too: Luc Tuymans at David Zwirner, Andro Wekua at Sprüth Magers, Thomas Eggerer at Richard Telles, Kaoru Arima at Misako Rosen

Emanuel Rossetti at Karma International

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The occult practices of another pagan-materialist presenting our experience as ritual, estranging us in an entertaining moment of alterity, bizarro-real, in which in moral hopes we must realign ourselves to its products, our experience of it, recognition delayed, and the static charge of our disorientation in finding an identification to hold onto, objects which connote but don't mean.  This type of work has been formalized, and this exhibition looks great, I respond positively to its aesthetic.

An interesting difference, with Trisha Donnelly there is nothing there, her objects are stubbornly dumb, unreciprocal, and a believer in Donnelly attempting conviction of any aesthetic "magic" has nothing, forced to "believe." With this Rossetti there is gesture and form and feng shui to talk about, just a difference.

Hans-Christian Lotz at Christian Andersen

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Cross breeding the techno-erudite with the new organo-wastes' bio-assemblage.
A strain of SimonDennyBenSchumacherYujiAgematsuOlgaBelamaDavidDuordMichaelESmithNancyLupoTimursiQin connocotion.
Something abusrdly erotic about organic waster smeared metal.  The eroticism of Arnold with his face torn, hulking muscle revealing clean hard innard, our cyborg wishes, for hulking organo-flesh covering liquid hard skeletons, this weekend's boxoffice providing statiscal enumeration evidentiary of our latent cultural desire.


Ben Schumacher at Musee d’art contemporain de Lyon, David Douard at Johan Berggren, Simon Denny at Portikus, Nancy Lupo at Wallspace, Michael E Smith at Lulu, Yuji Agematsu at Real Fine Arts

“Mirror Effect” at The Box

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The subject reappears, ourselves in the mirror as figuration returns, not in the fractured manicism of Harrison, but as body assembled goo. The goo, is what we're after now, we become more and more concerned with the fate of our meat as we fear the world dissolve under the image, our churches to reflect us again.
Like recent videos treatment of human subject as a virtual punching bag, cartoonifying and mocking it, sculpture focuses on the presence of it. In a paternal oddity for Father's day, a return to the authorial subject dealing with these issues since the 70's, Paul McCarthy more recent "Life-Cast" presented collapse of the two, a literal objectification of the body, clean inhuman and perfect, covered in goo.

See too: Cathy Wilkes at Tramway, Andro Wekua at Spruth Mages, Group Show at le-1

Rivane Neuenschwander at Tanya Bonakdar

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The trope of conceptual art is the semantic rupture between signifier and signified, a loss in meaning becoming is pathos.  Each Neuenshwander work comes with a set of conceptual instructions documenting this translation. e.g:

Fear of fear (dengue fever), a series of photographs taken with a pinhole camera depicting a person dressed in the guise of a dengue mosquito traveling through the streets of the artist’s hometown, Belo Horizonte, Brazil. Recalling carnival costumes worn in Brazilian villages, the image of the mosquito may inspire dread as Brazil currently combats a sharp rise in dengue fever cases due to people hoarding water (the insects’ breeding ground) in the wake of a severe draught in the south eastern part of the country. Traveling through Belo Horizonte’s tourist sites, parks and peripheral neighborhoods...

 A "misunderstanding" of tone, forcing a culture's vibrance to speak about its malady, affords a rupture, an irony of Foster-Wallacian sadness of a culture, colliding opposite symbols apposite, losing their signifieds (vibrancy championing death, and death mocked childishly); a loss at the heart of most Neuenshwander work, and trope of much permutation-conceptualism, signs run through culture in pre-packaged ways to make it "speak" of that culture.
Interestingly this work isn't even shown in CAD's documentation of the show, it seems it needn't be either, the signs merely becoming metonyms for this extended narrative, each object a blank abstraction until limned by the text.

And see too: On Kawara at the Guggenheim

Nina Beier at Kunstverein Hamburg

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The small charge psychedelia of Beier's surrealism is the world become reproducible, a world capable of being reproduced in an unccanny distance between real and its surrealist cartoonifaction. Objects under glass become image, virtual, water and glass become exchangeable, able to print the world, translated, tiled, clicked, and dragged, falsified like currency. Magrittean prophecy rung true.

Alicja Kwade at Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, Amanda Ross-Ho at the Approach, Nina Beier at David Roberts Art Foundation

Karin Sander at Barbara Gross

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The cold taxonomy of Conceptual tendencies, affinity for the bureaucratic accounting Sander places onto the living world renders it uncanny, the thing displayed, removed from the world of its functionability to become an object seen, torn from the world to wilt under our watch. The reductive ordering of natural object to an extraneous criteria, the faintly fascistic transgression we find naughty, fun.

And so see too: Darren Bader at Andrew Kreps & Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cathy Wilkes at Tramway, Willem de Rooij at Arnolfini

Günther Förg at Barbel Graesslin

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The eponymous "relief" of the exhibition comes from the work's insipid blankness as "fundamentally soothing to nervous system" - as David Foster Wallace once reasoned his recurrent reading of a particular column of Cosmo magazine - a subscription to the infantilizing soothe of a overloaded system proffered paralysis, a shutdown, the catatonic aphasia of Reality TV, celebrity tabloids, and now paintings, in which the real is replaced with its dummy version, relief from problems by a warm and swollen balloon replacement, the real replaced with a sex with an inflatable on Ambien, fundamentally soothing, just like these painting.

Renaud Jerez at William Arnold

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Kai Althoff at Barbara Gladstone


Rudolph Stingel


Ian Kiaer at Lulu


Wolfgang Laib at MoMA

See too: Karla Black at Raffaella Cortese

“No Joke” at Tanya Leighton

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Humor as Trojan delivery vehicle, its content entering us sub-defenses allowing incongruity recognized to bubble forth in laughter, put forth as palliative to the surrealist contemporary, and cartoons which act as Icons for the human dispossessed of their reality's physicality, this show could be thought of as more than just a list of Kantarovsky's references.

See too:  Sanya Kantarovsky at Marc Foxx, "Puddle, pothole, portal" at Sculpture Center, Allison Katz at BFA Boatos, Sean Landers at Friedrich Petzel, Pentti Monkkonen at High Art+Jonathan Viner

hobbypopMUSEUM at Vilma Gold

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Nicolas Ceccaldi at Project Native Informant

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After an early homerun hit of Ceccaldi's surveillance child-things, we've had at least two bunts and now this walk from an artist that was rookie of the year not so long ago.

Nicolas Ceccaldi at Mathew

Keith Edmier at Friedrich Petzel

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Edmier's towering sentimentality of subject, amplified by its conceptual gesturing (a lone print pulled, orchid's homage, studio ruin's chapel, a press release exhaustingly expounding its cyclical references) makes for a grandmotherly saccharine sweetness, astringent, artwork overipe, propped just prior its rolling over rotting and etching our teeth in caustic overbearingness, the art equivalent to an overbearing mother, sentimentality tortured to its sado-masochistic extreme, its breaking point, its pathos.

And so see too: On Kawara at Guggenheim , Paul Thek at Mai 36

Pentti Monkkonen at Jonathan Viner

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Monkkonen's quotational action-figure use of product forms, graffitoed delivery vans as allegories of painting, a more precisely modern take on Vermeer's, and then the walled faces dimensionality exaggerating their form, containers of subject's latent toy childhood, but here finally now Monkkonen taking the step to make totally flat bland branded paintings, actually producing, and no longer mocking, product. And adding a merry song so we can feel the irony of another once happy artist succumbed to the needs of the market, making flat, blank fungible artwork, like enacting a Vaerslev like production line on your own brand. We could have chalked this one up quietly to a polite cash-out of symbo-cred, but then CAD posts its embarrassment sedimenting as unrescindable history, ouch.

Pentti Monkkonen at High Art, Fredrik Vaerslev at Centre d’Art Contemporain Passerelle, Zak Kitnick at Clearing, "Paris de Noche" at Night Gallery

Talia Chetrit at Sies + Hoke

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The particular fabric of business suits and the explictness of world's origin selfies' rawness makes for an interesting fetishistic photography.

Katja Novitskova at Kunsthalle Lissabon

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And so a Post_genzken assemblies of latent forms, picked from the rubble of culture's meaning. Juxtapositions of surreal cultures, perma-wet newts draped over soft curves, lures, draw out the erotic bulbous content of two ergonomics, maternal and futuristic, formal erotics as design. Sex sells but make it latent for babies, and a generation later, adults questioning their attraction to PVC and silicone. Like reefs' sexual economics, generations of attraction breed the most sensual and beautiful creatures which design now too playing libidinal forms, like car interior's handles looking evermore like dildos, the attention here toward the fetishistic bits of a culture's attraction. A bassinet that looks undistinguishable from a sex toy, and so what does this say about culture.


From a long thread continued: Nancy Lupo at Wallspace, Goshka Macuga at Rüdiger Schöttle, Anicka Yi at Cleveland Museum of Art, Transformer Station, Olga Balema at Croy Nielsen, David Lieske at MUMOK, "Flat Neighbors" at Rachel Uffner

Renzo Martens and The Institute for Human Activities at Fons Welters

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The fathomless villainy and flippancy with which Marten's conjured evil out of hats of kindness in Enjoy Poverty - in the end making us almost delight in the ability to manifest evil with ease and invert altruism to encompass its antithesis in a way even Ayn Rand never could - made him a nefarious star so dark that he himself, the handsomest bad boy on the block, competing with Wolfson for a mire of intentionality, couldn't handle it. And so in another reversal - not quite as spectacular as those that made Enjoy Poverty - Martens attempts a "gentrification" of the plantation wound he once salted. Like Tim Rollins and KOS the power of art as therapy expressive as well the as the monetary redirection it produces is used as a moral sword brandished, and good for everyone. But after Marten's toppling the altruism of everyone else he sets himself up here for the same, and you could use Marten's own premises, you could, say, recall the segment explaining horror sells better than happiness, and present the grimaces here, and raise your eyebrows high, you could and but who really wants to be that bad of a guy.

“SOAPY IV” at Grand Century

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The least interesting S.O.A.P.Y. ex to date, members splintering to go on to make their own more interesting projects, "IV inflates the action to absurd heights, but it ultimately rings hollow thanks to a story that hits the same basic beat as the first three entries in the franchise."
What had been the dumb game as an escape mechanism from the claustrophobia of art's social rules, ironizing before born to birth something odd, has devolved into histrionics reserved for video games and manga done by high-school stage designers. Franz west's hammy objects exaggerated as power totems (a doubling down on their already self-annealing lumpen) set in a mis-en-scene vibrating back at us our disbelief. The opalescent Ambergris connecting it all Matthew Barney and his self-ceremonials (and video game set in the real) as a hysterically naive version, containing - like so much work today - its negation within it, a camp theater, in which it never mattered to begin with whether you believed it. Camp neuters the concept of earnestness, falsifying its question, and this is one of the cores of after-net variety, a post gen-x "authentic" invalidated, pop as a legitimate mode and teletubbies in police uniforms causes little disjunction, or even read as absurb, from those reared alongside Family Guy non-sequitur, and this ex's pastiche of a pastiche isn't as interesting as the excuse made for it, like, this could actually be fun.

"National Gallery" at Grand Century , “S.O.A.P.Y. III” at What Pipeline , Magnus Andersen at Neue Alte Brüke & Dorothy Iannone at Air de Paris

Yuji Agematsu at Real Fine Arts

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Like Tetsumi Kudo's radioactive ecology, or Thek's plexi-flesh, Agematsu's warm materials of human cast-offs are reanimated by the frames surrounding them. Agematsu's delicate compositions as ecosystems, precious, a sentimental morality resituating the natural to include microplastics dissolved into heavy saturation islands in the great pacific beverage, and the bacteria wrought. Like Duord embodying the filth of packaging, in a Roth like repetition of the abject, ironically returning it to the cellophane, packaged clean self. The package which holds desire, holding the excrement of it, bears witness to the beauty of Butterfly collections of petri dish human waste, packaged.


See too : Yuji Agematsu at Artspeak, Michael E. Smith at Lulu , David Douard at Johan Berggren

Gareth Moore at La Loge

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Arrangement tableaus, primary feature of art today, an installationism's arranging maximalist attitude over-packed with Wurtzian assemblies and contraptions, and trinkets so lovable it seems like a full-on flea market of estranged toys, awaiting their performative activation, art as a bazaar. Beuys, West, Cointet, Arakawa, Tcherepnin.

See too: Franz Erhard Walther at CAPC

David Lieske at MUMOK

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In the wastelanding of the sign, the fallout of it post-Harrison-vs-Genzken nova let's say, Lieske was of the first of the cargo cults reassembling the totems of meaning in the desert of it, picking detritus. The issue was resolved not by necessarily by making objects mean again - which they couldn't, its hard to make an empty bottle mean in arid land - but by situating objects so that they looked to mean, they connoted meaning despite inscrutable blankness, hieroglyphs. What was important was exuding the affect of meaningful objects, regardless of whether there was any and it didn't matter anyway was what we were all beginning to pick up on and what the commercial world had known for decades (that you can create "meaning" at will with attitude, aura) which while Lieske pondering whether this was a problem was suddenly flooded and drown by more ephebic artists already having decided for him it wasn't and now this is the water we live in, a flooded terrain of objects imbued, over-saturated "meaning." If so much art looks like Broodthaers today, it is because Broodthaers was of the first invested in the situational arrangements of the display as a credence to meaning, institutional or otherwise.

And so see before, after Lieske's theatrical resignation from the artworld, his return came with press release of defeated reasoning, his realization of commercial exchange as the granting entity of his work's import rather than any institutional legitimization, "The decision of what constitutes a work of art is determined, in the end, by purchase transactions and not, as previously thought, by reproductions in art magazines or similar, none of which have any definitions giving powers anymore," or so the gold standard, exchange, was the actual backing of the symbolic value of his works, and thus the creator of meaning since everything was inscrutable anyways, and thus Lieske was then offering re-arrangements of his objects to try and sell, or make them "mean," once again. Something like in a flood, the empty bottle floats above.


And see too, Zak Kitnick at CLEARING & Rowhouse Project, Sophie Nys at Crac Alsace, Flat Neighbors at Rachel Uffner,

Zak Kitnick at Clearing

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The hieroglyphs of contemporary art products, are in effect an attempt at estrangement from the commodities that comprise them. Like Prince or Levine the doubling effects a remove, and now the genericism of product photography replaces it in anonymous otherness, printed steely to metal, meant to evoke the distance from the world felt. Cold, numb anhedonia to the pleasure afforded, nature's bounty and the newest product manufactured for connoisseurship's symbolic violence, sad, and the fact that Kitnick continues to pump these very heavy weights out again and again and again attaching an intention-dumb press release indifference to it not even, like, trying anymore is part of the emotive plea, Kitnick seems like real tired from bearing so much ennui.

Merlin Carpenter at MD72, Zak Kitnick at Rowhouse, Sophie Nys at Crac Alsace, Merlin Carpenter at Overduin and Co.