Aldo Mondino at Eden Eden & Isabella Bortolozzi

(Eden Eden, Isabella Bortolozzi)

Son, see this is an example of... it's like, you know how we're at those estate sales, or perhaps the awful Ikea your Grandmother enjoys taking you to that you seem to enjoy despite your father's preemptive educationals against incognizance. The one's when we're there you ask me what some strange item that your still fresh mind cannot categorize yet has still somehow aesthetically enchanted your young eye? See these are, in a sense, like that. But instead of your father being there to answer that the object in question is a designed-to-look-designed apple corer made by hands your age, or a mediocre lithograph, or a sextant, imagine instead... The ones where we look for chairs like the ones depicted in the glossy and shadow-less reproductions on unnecessarily heavy bond that woman that your father works keeps on that insipid glass table which book she scolded you for touching? Yes, Son, Eeemes, E. Long E. No, Son, no. That will be the day. Your father just repairs and resells the chairs. Son. No son, don't say that. Son, Eames chairs are representations of the bourgoi- The last nail in the coffin of craft towards the industrialization of representation supplanting the - Look the art - Son you know your father has always preferred the unauthoritative use of Quaker- We're middle cla-  Look this is all beside the point. ... No, educated poor, son, we're not poor. Look happiness is- Son. Son the art. Take a step back and look at the art. It posits a godless world son. Imagine a world where the question cannot be answered of what the thing is. Son, imagine a world where no can tell you what something is, no benevolent over-watch granting the bedwarm comfort of knowing, son. No son. Yes, they do look like something familiar don't they. This is the comfort of everything prefixed with the word "Pop-" Pop-music, pop-culture, pop-art. It's about comfort. These, they seem innocuous, but they illustrate the possibility of horror, of the cold arid land pre-rational humans, pre-language, pre-comfort. You see the more categories the artist can position the object between, the more confusing what the object is, the more successful. The object will exist at the tip of the tongue. It will inhabit its representation, but it will not be it. It will replace what looks like comfort with something cold. Yes it might look "neat" son, the in-technical word you chose, it may describe its familiar and affable surface that it uses, but this is just the shell that your still young mind places around it to justify, to hold back the cold dark thing of uncertainty that it wishes to place deep inside you, because it's not that.

Laura Owens at Capitain Petzel

(link)

Owens' signage always outsized its frame, the punk ethos of a fuck-all - without its blackened stylistic trappings - the sloths and cutsey beginnings were unbearably outlandishly brazen. The frame of Owens' painting adopts the virtual frame of the scalable, of billboards, icons and signage, painting as the translatable images of that much stronger visual culture of media, advertsinging, and the friendly ostenses of its grab to visually accost. What hides behind the nicety is an insidiousness of attentional assault.

See too  “International Laundry 2″ at Parisa Kind , Amanda Ross-Ho at The Approach, Mark Handforth at Kayne Griffin Corcoran ,

“Marlborough Lights” at Marlborough Broome Street

(link)

An exhibition around an incidental theme, light bulbs, no worse than assembling categorically of any other material, say paint, here at least leaves the objects alone without attempting subsuming them under a thematization, arbitrary, the arbitrariness at least acknowledged.

see too : “Fin de Siècle” at Swiss Institute

Veit Laurent Kurz and Stefan Tcherepnin at What Pipeline

(link)

Tcherepnin one of the first to finally complete the lap, Neue Alte Brucke, Real Fine Arts, Freedman Fitzpatrick, and finishing with What Pipline, visiting all the locations of the Franchise on a blockbuster tour of all the satellites that can promote it, and CAD there to eagerly document each stop on the way to the finish.

and so see too: Stefan Tcherepnin at Real Fine Arts, Stefan Tcherepnin at Freedman Fitzpatrick

Will Benedict at Bortolami

(link)

The best thing you can say about Benedict's is that they are scary, misleading objects, projecting a symptomatic spread of virus like conditions of these things all over the block. These look the way having a cold feels. Unremediable institutionalization. If Krebber performed everyone fears of social market with a guileless smile, Bendict is that fear, unsmiling.  The apostate entrepreneur. Not preferring not too, but mass producing it.

See too: Group Show at Greene Naftali , Tom Humphreys at What Pipeline , Karl Holmqvist and Ei Arakawa at Overduin & Co. , Will Benedict at Bergen Kunsthall , Fredrik Vaerslev at Centre d’Art Contemporain Passerelle ,

"Animal Photographers" at Acud Projectraum

(link)

"We don’t need other worlds; we need a mirror." the denouement of a research crew accepting their failure, driven to complete breakdown by the anthropomorphised reflection of themselves in the infinitely strange creature they fail to comprehend, lost in their own reflections. 

 "Animal photographers" too find themselves in paradox, the other always exists as a reflection of those who look, an exercise to place themselves in relation, to find their place. The animal functions as a mirror, with it the fear/certainty that we are no different from them, trying to place ourselves in our use of them as a mirror.

Stanley Whitney at Karma

(link)

Whitney toys with arbitrariness. Caroming off the totally indiscrimant to float in some nether zone of baroque frivolousness that feels odd. Opposing Gunther Forg's true flippancy, Whitney's seem instead pre-programmed to maintain a flat-footed aloofness, an askewness that seems herr to much of continually strafing and blunt painters of today, Joe Bradley, Josh Smith, etc. a willful deafness.

“Friday, July 24, 2015″ at Essex Street

(link)

In this episode Forrest pens a love letter. The love letter is open letter, made public PR, an address sung upon the highest mountain top found: the LES exhibition, and then posted on his own factory of the visible, but addendums abound at pains to make clear that it was CAD's board of directors choosing to announce the letter and not Forrest, because that would be like weird, and but who is going to tell their boss their love wasn't worthy, and but who wants to be a critic of a love letter anyway, particularly when people's literal lives and loves are at stake, not us, the letter is undeniably sweet. Jealous singles swell. So from our team to yours we all wish you and yours a happy outcome.

But so the most interesting reveal in this episode that for all CAD's fears of nepotism, CAWD actually wrote the review for Puppies Puppies back in March, back when it was quickly becoming an expectation for Puppies Puppies next solo to be featured on CAD, one of the extremely few penned early in anticipation for its eventual coming, PP an obvious CAD favorite, before knowing anything about the love revealed here. So here's hoping it comes.

Sarah Ortmeyer at Bodega

(link)

Taking Ruff's indictment against photographic representation, Ortmeyer's opposes the anonymous objects of Ruff's DMV photographics with a more mythologic subject, a cultural signifier to whom our attraction is unbounded, orbiting a celestial beauty, a man of so much weight that his image begins to accrete its own reality shell, Beckham the cultural image extended so that we do know "him," the satin-soft shell casing of his unbirthed self, Beckham the silky hard image vs the soft subject inside.


See too : On Kawara at the Guggenheim , Thomas Ruff at S.M.A.K.

Rob Pruitt at MOCAD

(link)

Pruitt's insecure teenage aestheticism. The high school unknown of the instructor's measure of quality, the criteria vague, the grades a mystery, and the student in fear unknowing "good," knows only that enough will be enough decides instead to produce "enough," the fearful attempt to avoid the qualitative mess of "good" by supplanting the factual criteria of enough: measured, quantified, and no one can say the student didn't put in enough, its right there in it, even alongside his mates more masterful aesthetics, the student not knowing the criteria was "good" was inside him all along, its that kind of movie, and everyone feels empathy for the kid whose insecurity shines so bright, its got a kind of pathos, and teacher smiles paternally, stating Yes, Pruitt, That's enough.


see too : Rob Pruitt at Gavin Brown

“The Unknown Masterpiece” at Meyer Kainer

(link)

The unknown masterpiece it's true, one of these paintings probably is a masterpiece, we just don't know which one yet as these powerful painters stand await at the white gates of history to learn their draw in it.

Michael E. Smith at Sculpture Center

(link)

It's a cliche at this point to say that Smith makes the mundane object estranged. And in a sea of so many surrealists currently operating, less than helpful. Estrangement is today's go-to strategy. Whereas for Kiaer and many other this is a compositional strategy, totemizing the mundane through specific arrangement which feels odd, Smith's is individuated, each object set off so that we can no longer "know" the sculpture, eroding a complete vision, and opening a distrust. A psychological sliver. We cannot know the object, its relation to other objects is broken, either categorically (there is no category to place the object within, surrealist) or psychologically (the unknown threat). The rocking chair I project from the two elegant bones still in contact with the substrate of the real is not the same as the one in your head. This unknown destabilizing of our ability to conceptualize the objects in equitable terms to exchange with another -both objects and other people - (eroding the material semio-substrate with which our exchange is based) breaching a distrust, is its sinister quality.

This is an estrangement of our concept of the object from its material version, this distance is the psychological shivers.


See too : Michael E Smith at Lulu, Michael E. Smith at Susanne Hilberry , Ian Kiaer at Lulu , Olga Balema at Croy Nielsen , Sophie Nys at Crac Alsace

Group Show at Emanuel Layr

(link)

Another group exhibition's anthropomorphic objects, the animism arranged to slough meaning off the waxy image surface. Objects Curated to displace their center, their aboutness, diverting it to dissolve and we looking around, feel a presence, the object juiced to mean. The dumb object speaks in the noise of the viewer reflected.
"Hearing the echo / Of your own blood in the shell but picturing / The ocean is what I meant by"*

*Ben Lerner

see too: Ian Kiaer at Lulu , “Seven Reeds” at Overduin & Co.

Philippe Parreno at Park Avenue Armory

(link)

Estranging experience, a radical redefining of the exhibition ritual, recontextualizing the social, what RA really brought over from the experience economy was an entertainment system, and it is fun, this is fun blockbuster art, and that is important, that could be theorized and conceptualized, a value-added for museums that could adopt its populist modes to adorn their lobbies with an outreach program of social fantasy that critical demographics could more than happily accept as art.

Co-curated by Hans-Ulrich Obrist and Alex Poots, with consulting curator Tom Eccles.


And see too: Philippe Parreno at Esther Schipper

Till Megerle at Kunstverein Freiburg

(link)

A simple means, the paired photographs suspends its object between two documents, a spot the difference game that delays the singular and elegiac moment in photography of death's recognition, and forced to live in a dualistic undeath, the artist's family. The last sentence doesn't translate so bad from German: "The mode of documentary photography accesses one of the most personal topics, while art considers it in a precise distance."

1 Year

November 3rd, 2009 in Announcements (2) Comments

Thank you to all of our readers for a staggeringly successful first year. Contemporary Art Writing Daily’s growth has exceeded our wildest hopes.

We are constantly looking to improve the site, so if you’d like to give us a birthday present, send some feedback or suggestions to contact@artwritingdaily.com. How can we improve the way the site works? What sorts of shows are underrepresented? Overrepresented? Is there content apart from exhibitions you’d like to see included? How do you feel about Contemporary Art Writing Daily? We’d love to hear your thoughts and ideas. Thanks again.

Ian Kiaer at Lulu

(link)

Kiaer's fetishism - in which objects gain authority through compositional attention, finickyness as gospel (think Fried's theater and the "arrangements" of minimalism's staging of viewership doubled w/ awareness of this expectation), the vestigial dust detritus and bits, remnants totemized by a self-aware anticipation of the viewer, and arranged for them - is probably the best argument against speculatory theories. The arrangements anticipate the viewer, appear as though inhabited, sentient by the specificity of their arrangement, a logic which cannot be seen but inferred, winking, and attributed to the Wizard of Oz, an intelligent design from some immanent spectre, but really just a smokeless mirror and us believing again in ghosts. The mirror reveals something way more interesting than that. A paraphilia in which the actual objects are substituted by an administration of attention.


Michael E Smith at Lulu, Michael E. Smith at Susanne Hilberry, Zak Kitnick at Clearing, Renaud Jerez at William Arnold

“Ancient Carriers” at Markus Lüttgen

(link)

The "Medievalist forms," as the PR describes it, is comfort of traditional values, the cultural vogue for returns to the "natural" generally signified by distress brown packaging in store. Nostalgia. And the works here dredging the cultural forms of it, Viet Laurent Kurz's Apple meets Pottery Barn coral-techno reliquaries, Schulze's primtivism, Rolle's handcrafts, and then Mr. Andersen's unplaceable antiquity, a brilliant grotesque of nostalgia's vivid hipster version, remedying our fantasy for the earnest past with its destroyed version.

see too: Magnus Andersen at Neue Alte Brücke & Dorothy Iannone at Air de Paris , "Soapy IV" at Grand Century, "What We Know" at Roberta

Paola Pivi at Emmanuel Perrotin

(link)

Difficult discerning difference between Pivi's surrealist juxtapositions and Darren Bader's, - horses and towers vs Borscht and omlettes - Pivi's more dramatic, climatically absurd, and the drama infers a "point" (i.e. comfort of "meaning"), a melodrama resolution that Bader's flat-footed bumbling never pretenses, or pretends, because we know its not true, both ultimately about taunting the eternal darkness oncoming.


See too: Darren Bader at Kölnischer Kunstverein, Darren Bader at Andrew Kreps

Rachel Harrison at Regen Projects

(link)

After the semio-manic fallout of Harrison's signage-implosion we're suddenly supposed to believe in the selfie-sticks mean?

“International Laundry 2″ at Parisa Kind

(link)

In art, all violence becomes symbolic violence, tearing paintings, cursing, showing tits and blood, is an acting out within the proscribed realm of one's own room owned by the hands feeding you, in the bed you've made. Art by its form neuters rebellion to the rebellious act. Aggression in neat little packages, and the louder artists yell the greater the distance between the two parties. The 4th wall's glass thickens and frosts, and no amount of angst, even a level requiring black eyeliner, has ever bridged the divide. This paradox of affect is one of art's central tenets. You just can't yell loud enough. (It works better in text, as Clerk Fluid attests, because we let you into our home.) But so this is why Christoph von Weyhe's paintings look so good in this room of everyone shouting.

“What We Know” at Roberta

(link)

Nostalgia is powerful. Invoking a sentimentality for the past to manipulate present mood. Self-awareness of transience, ephemeral, and pre-accepted as coping mechanism, substituting the present as the past behind pink glass. It grows more and more to be tool of marketing, using feelings for what once was to purchase its salve in the present. Replacing the moribund today with a hind-sighted "golden-age." Pre-yellowed to remove the jagged sharpness of the new. Nostalgia is a terrifying hole, hard to discern from a trap, and this show is like full of it.

See too:  Moyra Davey at Institute of Contemporary Art, Daniel Dewar and Grégory Gicquel at Micheline Szwajcer, Group Show at Neue Alte Brücke

Group Show at Éric Hussenot

(link)

This exhibition is like a dismantled fragments of a horror fantasy film, posters, miniatures, storyboards, props and stills. The new desire of art to keep pace with culture.

Simon Dybbroe Møller at Francesca Minini

(link)

Dybbroe Møller's impregnated modernism, the dead objects and asubjective brushstrokes looking neat as ever but holding latent cultural baggage, objects not quite themselves but holding another. The directness of the objects visibility skewed by their overlay conceptual trojanism, peeling translucent onion skins of cultural overlays.

See too: Simon Starling at Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago

“THEM” at Schinkel Pavilion

(link)

That the exhibition design of an exhibition of women dealing with the subject/body/uncanny/meat titled THEM after a film about a home invasion of others, is reminiscent of the scene from A Clockwork Orange in which Alex murders a woman in her home with a penis is weird, is a weird choice.

See too:  Katja Novitskova at Kunsthalle Lissabon

Group Show at Salle Principale

Look at this object. The packaging - the design, the arrangement - is the object, the affective manipulation of its viewer: the object above all connotes. Connotes intention and therefore meaning. The documentation encircles and presents it.
The department store toy, the action figure, the doll, creates the perfect projectable potential in children. Wrapped in its vacuumed plastic embryo the object is untouchable, unmodifiable blankness allowed to be filled with all the wild imagination the child can expel.  It creates a hole for the projection of its potential, fun or meaning, exhausting it immediately: opened, the toy has completed its life-cycle's transaction and can be burned. The art object must be an inexhaustable hole, an affectation of the toy never opened. Like the toy manufacturer who ultimately wins by having privatized access to figurant object, the artwork privatizes its "meaning," it "means" nothing outside of the inflection of its affect. Circulates its sign within the sign structures of art, it looks like art, like it means something.

Camilla Wills at Gaudel de Stampa

(link)

Perhaps since Genzken's blowout Venice Pavilion, exhibitions have come to look, become acceptable to look, like fashion proposals for department store windows, exhibitions as trendbooks predicting the future of displays eventually culturally dispersed to haybail-nightclub aesthetic in the windows of H+M, Urban Outfitters, et al.  I don't speak french but the accompanying text probably mentions Broodthaers at least several dozen times, a refrain to critically pass as embodying the system its meant to critique by posing it the international style of art to self-eviscerate, but instead just looks really super great and I want to buy something.

David Lieske at MUMOK, Zak Kitnick at CLEARING

"Rio" at Office Baroque

The press release really did a good job of saying it all.
Something to be said, in terms of an international conceptual art period, about the name Office Baroque. Functions well.

And so Quarterly has finally come to pass.

As the water tinges red, accumulating imitators who with ease replicate its system, seeking a piece of its pie, provide competition threatening CAD's monopoly of art world visibility, it evolves new systems, a new hustle to keep it at the forefront of this fragile new visibility-ecosystem of attention.

And so what form does the new extension take but an anabolic enhanced CV, the literalization of artist pedigree. CAD's system still clinging to the mass feed, a linear flow of artist accumulative practice, ignoring the "web" for a singular fount, flow, mainlining the image. CAD has professed disinterest in criticism as part of its institution, and the hegemonic power of the visible remains its brilliant main structure. An accumulative method which monopolizes the territory art stands on: documentation. Control the field of making visible. The only way to beat CAD now is to be faster than it. Other "features" promoted by competing websites has nothing on the completest vision of CAD as the arbitrator of the artworld's visibility.

Perusing the first of the 3, the speed of finding patterns in an artist practice becomes infinitely faster, and here we see the importance of Arakawa's body doing something, anything, an action to conjure the documentation.


See too: "The Sea" at Mu.Zee, Gina Folly and Mandla Reuter at SALTS,  “Dai Hanzhi: 5000 Artists” at Witte de With

Neïl Beloufa at Balice Hertling

(link)

It's the distance between the thing and Beloufa's ruinous plastic version, showing light through its facade of Sci-Fi film, Reality video, and trade show beauty. Belfoufa's distilled tropes and cliches we have come to culturally love in the fun cardboard playtime version of; enjoyability in the mastery of lubricating forms of cultural massage, mediums of libidinal and candied fun.  We watch the sci-fi without the baggage of plot or anything really, just the wet surface of cold sci-fi, the gloss of display systems and fetish for the warm succulent life.

And see too: Timur Si-Qin at Carl Kostyál , Zak Kitnick at Clearing

“Popular Images” at Karma

(link)

"Popular images" is a perfect name. While appropriation dealt with images specific, today's hand-me-down version diffuses appropriation as a genericism, the culturally dispersed vagueness, accumulated echos in the gunked corners of visibility that we usually wash off our eyes, the hyper-distilled image of all the generic shit we see.
This inhabitation of the generic is meant as a critical doubling, to embody the other in clean assimilation of a replicant criticality, inverted where the ostensibly artistic human desires the borg-like reproductive body of capital info-machines. This doubling is expected as opposition to its takeover, but it may betray a latent desire to welcome the new overlords, to see the body destructed, and offer aid to the enemy. Like us and our reproductive master.

2 more versions of this show to come.

Peter Coffin at Herald St

(link)

Along with Mungo Thompson, Coffin surfing the mid-late 00's vogue for pop inflected conceptual art, cultural forms stressed into 70's reflexive systems. The artists wanted to be cultural pranksters, using the devices of conceptual art's powerful navel strip-mining on the world at large who might finally be made to care about art's tools. But they didn't and so found refuge in the lobbies of museums to friendlify their interiors with symbols the common-man would recognize, but with the value added of a wall-text able to explain why they didn't, and justifying educational budgets, the oldest, blandest, trick in the book.

Loretta Fahrenholz at Midway Contemporary Art

(link)

Ditch Plains was as a success as one can have, preceded by its perfect promo-stills replicating across the art-network in a self-generating promo campaign. The stills reproduced so well, and functioned so perfectly to manifest desire for a summer blockbuster (still in theaters 2 years later) difficult to separate its expectation from arrival, but Plains fulfilled perfect the blockbuster function of libidinal fun for our eschatological drives, a post-apocalypse film-trailer, functioning itself as an ad, a future, fragmented images distending to project a unfolding and manifest a desire now for more.
 It's two years later now and it seems like still no one has had anything interesting to say about the film despite the massive press because like any blockbuster it has more to do with our cultural desires than any thing the film is "about," - which brilliantly Fahrenholz's film isn't - just black bodied apocalypse hip-hop and us who desire it.


See too: Frances Scholz at Tif Sigfrids