Lili Dujourie at Mu.ZEE & S.M.A.K.

(Mu.Zee, S.M.A.K.)

Dujourie, like a less sarcastic Zobernig. If minimalism's primary structures were so reduced to their axiom as to become iconic, Dujourie's polishes outs an object unspecific, un-iconic, hard to hang language on something so rounded, making for strange viewing experience of objects so general they become difficult to articulate, defintion fleets quickly away, conceptually formless but having the look of art objects.


See too : Group Show at Salle Principale, “The Crack-Up” at Room East

John Miller, Dominik Sittig at Nagel Draxler

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The PR would have one believe its difficult apprehending a similarity to these two artists who really both seem to be keepers of the sewer. Miller's are the populist abject to Sittig's paint bile blowouts. Miller's mines the cultural detritus of things we would have sooner forgotten, how awfully the spectacle of game shows has spoiled and molded, Sittig draws out the sewage from the drain of abstraction, and expression gone wrong, both standing in the darkening mire of ugly culture, both about learning to love disgust.


See too: Ida Ekblad at Herald St. , Group Show at David Kordansky

Cathy Wilkes at Kunstmuseum Linz

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Wilkes' installations had once been filled with glass, mannequins, and modern contrivances which tempered the more mystic undertones, placing its occult firmly in the present, a very contemporary sculpture, fashionably on time, and ahead of those artists quickly following with so much figurative-assemblage that now Wilkes is ominously in retrograde from, drawing to the past of Segal/Keinholz/Bourgoise, a primitive figuration foreboding, that, if Wilkes continues the clairvoyance, this pre-modern desolation may actually be the future.


See too: David Lieske at MUMOK, Cathy Wilkes at Tramway

“La Chose” at Contemporary Art Centre la synagogue de Delme

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You lay a thing atop another thing and it is placed next to another thing among other things all housed together and joined with a larger grouping of these same things inside a context of things that is distinct but interrelated to a much larger conglomeration all within one large thing that is afloat and spinning and among many many many other things, so many things.

Jan Fabre at M HKA

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If no longer a style, your common Artworld artist is intended to develop something distinguishing their career from others that look just like it, a sort of personal subjective measure called "sensibility," whereas Fabre has none. Fabre will do anything. If there is a sensibility it is something closer to Hollywood rendition of zaniness, the "working man" using all the tricks in the books to close in on some idea of what ostensibly wacky artists do opposed to the tasteful remove come to prominence from the artworld for artists and typified by the CAD roster international style. But, Fabre's over-plethora of identifiers, its wackiness, rather than achieving some profoundly great outsider status, paradoxically ends up looking like the art that underpins its different means, modes as mannequins dressed up differently to look different but the same. Its foreboding omen to all the young artists today engaging in this sort of cultural performativity, iconized by the last New Museum Triennial, in which artists seemingly engaged in some escape from art to culture, possibly aren't really at all. 

See too: Venice Biennale vs  New Museum Triennial

Jay Chung and Q Takeki Maeda at Francesca Pia

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It's becoming a problem that our daily consumption of media is predicated on exhibitions depicted in blankness, which as CAD becomes a more powerful form of reproduction and knowledge that, as Sanchez might be right in proclaiming, visibility replaces and trumps thought legitimization, we need be aware that this "visibility" isn't actually all that transparent, since most of this exhibition cannot be seen, this documentation barely exhibits, that the infinite visibility of inter-webbed artscenes has an acute case of glaucoma for those on the sidelines witnessing its transactions while precluding it from critique. And why should we be given that right anway? Is CAD mere Curriculum Vitae promotion. Issues of interest for Jay Chung and Q Takeki Maeda, artists for whom the excising of all but a few remnants generated a enormous look of power.

See too: Willem de Rooij at Le Consortium, Jay Chung & Q Takeki Maeda at 356 Mission, John Skoog at MUMOK, And so Quarterly has finally come to pass.

Brian Calvin at Le Consortium

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Is the ubiquity of installation views today (over the very obsolete taste for images of the paintings cropped of which here there are presented none) merely today's fashion, or is it a use of its authority. Wasting space is form of symbolic violence, of power, and the empty whiteness surrounding paintings today is the latent frame replacing yesteryear gilt to showcase its images held in power and wealth, the symbolic wealth of the museum, or the hundreds of dollars per square foot of galleries, that any gold leaf would be understood to be redundant.


See too:
Sophie Nys at Crac Alsace, Florian Hecker & John McCracken at Künstlerhaus KM- , Midway Contemporary Art, Lois Weinberger at Kunsthalle Mainz, “Being Thing” at Centre International d’Arte et du Paysage & Treignac Projet, “About Face” at Kayne Griffin

Willem de Rooij at Le Consortium

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Like Cage, for whom silence released a flood of sound, for de Rooij from the magistration of blankness comes an outpouring of reference. Cognition loathes a vacuum and in noise organizes pattern and meaning. Finds pleasure in such sterility totemized. De Rooij's is the cold grammar of industry.


See too, Willem de Rooij at Arnolfini , “Seven Reeds” at Overduin & Co., Merlin Carpenter at MD 72, David Lieske at MUMOK

Jacqueline Humphries at Carnegie Museum of Art

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The thin distinction of Humphries from the song and dance of all those other silver abstractionists is that the well worn jazz hands of "expression" aren't, for Humphries, totally choreographed yet by Dr. Frankenstein. While the corpse may have its fluids replaced in technicolor to be paraded around in chromes and newfangled chemiluminescence, it's the activation of this new deployment of means, materials, not just silver paint but making the silver paint shine like candied yams. Painting a vehicle to showcase silver paint, for trippy material fetish. This song and dance is actually a visual pleasure of a long dead corpse embalmed really well.

See too: Albert Oehlen at New Museum, Raoul De Keyser at Inverleith House

Keiichi Tanaami at Nanzuka

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Carved specificity gives them the monumental quality of signs, of icons without referent, a sort of totemic obscurity, less culturally reflexive than Pop art, and all the more hallucinatory for it.

See too, “Puddle, pothole, portal” at Sculpture Center ,

“Old News (again)” at CNEAI

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The switch to individual artists curating issues of old news has really given new life to the project.
Artists railing against a format generally leads to interest, organizing and presenting the feed that influence their lives in way that is less artistic than it is expositional. Even against all odds Beshty put down his reflexive mirror to use his hand to assemble something.
Old news is a good thing, I enjoy reading it.

How Companies Learn Your Secrets

 Take a fictional Target shopper named Jenny Ward, who is 23, lives in Atlanta and in March bought cocoa-butter lotion, a purse large enough to double as a diaper bag, zinc and magnesium supplements and a bright blue rug. There’s, say, an 87 percent chance that she’s pregnant and that her delivery date is sometime in late August. What’s more, because of the data attached to her Guest ID number, Target knows how to trigger Jenny’s habits. They know that if she receives a coupon via e-mail, it will most likely cue her to buy online. They know that if she receives an ad in the mail on Friday, she frequently uses it on a weekend trip to the store. And they know that if they reward her with a printed receipt that entitles her to a free cup of Starbucks coffee, she’ll use it when she comes back again.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.html

How Microbes Defend and Define Us

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/13/science/13micro.html

“Sirens” at Christian Andersen

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Wolfson made clear that Irony could be weaponized. And here a CSI spoof becomes Sirens' lure, showcasing the world as a way-more-than-directionless cast of characters flailing at even the start of existential questions, obliviousness becoming a goofball existentialism, Caddyshack meets Nausea, and the wait for Godot replaced by a boneheaded stonerism, the absurdity cranked to 11 on a world that reflects not bleakness, but the barren stupidity of Hollywood cliche. When a character - in a spark of clarity - decides to de-mire themselves from the bog of their helplessness, "change the world," the plan ultimately involves selling mermaid meat to the rich. Hopes dashed, and meaning becomes a jumbled mess that ultimately catalyses the apathy it depicts, and the plot is obviously lost to a the gaseous settling of I'm-not-even-able-to-mean into the cracks of everything, interspersed with a few solid jokes. It's just a prank, Bro, and non-sequitur the major currency of comedy today.
As David Robbins becomes evermore relevant, the problem of artists moving closer to mainstream forms is that one enters into direct competition with people who are professionals at it. And this risk of wild amateurism in comparison makes risk averse artist shy. Artists obviously do something different. The metaphysical pondering of the mermaid is probably the highlight of the short, and the jokiest question becomes the most pertinent for art, "How can you move into the future riding a dinosaur?"

Eva Kotatkova at Bohnice Psychiatric Hospital

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A series of vignettes whose psychiatric setting makes them appears as delusions fantastical to the grim reality they take place in.

John Skoog at MUMOK

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Excerpts are the perfect embodiment of the visibility machine's viral power, "a process of simple visibility." One hand, We haven't actually experienced the work and are thus unable to critique, while the other hand takes the pamphlet of press, the implicit statement that the exhibition has worth, strung up along with the name of a museum, featured on CAD. Visibility outpacing thought we aren't able to think, just that we know its accreditation, and spread unthinkable, given in to feeds of publicity. And thus both hands are bound, to the publicity machine misplaced as exhibitions, bent over the computer screen, and we take it.

Sarah Charlesworth at New Museum

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Stripped of their container, context, the images mutate amoeba-like. They abstract, branching to grasp reference, a fluid in search of conceptual container, they become Rorschach blots, meaningless shapes drawing meaning from the viewer who wishes to name them, and from the society who would place them there, these images of people leaping to their death.

“RR ZZ” at Gluck50

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Assemblage 2.0, a nostalgic affair. If everything looks out of an 80's film depiction of basement techno-carpentry, its not so much remergence of childhood's latent memories, but a link to a time still inclusive to all the weird science of going back to the future's possibility, copper and shoe-string objects representative of when, though we didn't understand the flux capacitor, it still held a possibility that today technology no longer does hidden behind opaque fronts of clean glass commodities. For most today, the iphone is closer represented to 2001's Monolith on a moon of Jupiter than the tungsten of Edison. And we feel cold for it. And emerges a wish that one could still believe in our control over technical objects, over magick from the tongue, over the advertorial usurp bodies filmed, for objects that though we don't understand its primitive occult, still seem more understandable than the blank fury of an iPad.

See too: “Flat Neighbors” at Rachel Uffner, David Lieske at MUMOK, Amy Lien & Enzo Camacho at 47 Canal

Erwin Wurm at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg

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Everyone has a body and that's funny. And Wurm revels in the humor of making the body appear against everyone's better wishes for it to disappear behind the prim decorum that Wurm won't let it. Fat or thin you appear tented behind fabric. That our bodies are, of course, comedies, and every Wurm sculpture seems made to exhibit the body as a meat gag. Wurm's eating at our bodies presents the other end to the contemporary assault of the body by advertising slowly eating up our erotic capacities as commodity, Wurm programmatically mocking it as doughy dull thing. Wurm today is in a good place, a child of Nauman and Actionism and bearing the torch of violence to the "puddle, portal, pothole" youth re-uping slapstick and its aggressive alienation potential that the world that feels ever more like. Our faces and bodies are a joke. The best that can be said is that at least sometimes its a funny one.


See too: Martín Soto Climent at Proyectos Monclova, “Puddle, pothole, portal” at Sculpture Center, Andro Wekua at Sprüth Magers

Rachel Reupke at Kunstlerhaus Stuttgart

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Against all odds the video's excruciating slowness is somehow enjoyable. Watching a woman or man hold a syrupy Guinness aloft becomes achingly charged with the physical strain of holding aloft the drink still. It's physically uncomfortable to watch, and unnerving how much we have come to expect these stock images to deliver a certain thing, a closure, and when that thing is denied how unbelievably irritating it is. In Ten Seconds or Greater the cinematographer drunk precession away from even the very lame action of chopping vegetables - aggravated by the generic characters doing so without looking at their precarious fingers - is almost nauseatingly annoying, and this endless denial our expectations from what should be recognizable is sort of embarrassingly enjoyable. Why am I enjoying being denied pleasure, this masochistic viewing experience, entering into a sort of bondage contract with the viewing experience, where at any moment one can utter the safe word, look away, and be done with it, but doesn't. And why are stock images pleasure.

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye at Serpentine Gallery

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Historically, you could say, oil painting has had trouble representing people of color. So, seeing black skin sit comfortably in the modernism of Manet, Cezanne, etc. reminds one of the entirety of a historical lineage of failed attempts at it by white painters getting it stubbornly, wincingly, wrong, from orientalism to the particularly inept Dutch to Eric Fischl  and the spectacular failure of Elizabeth Peyton's initial foray into it, the painting's halting failure among so many luminous whites highlighting the lacking portrayal. Peyton has since gotten better. But Yiadom-Boakye's easy naturalism, without an issue of it in a historical vernacular, stands out for it, evincing the casual omission of this natural representation from historical painters who, untrained in such matters by an academy, lacked an ability to literally represent this other flesh not of their own palette, racism underlying tones and pigments, issues of representation abound. Something for which the lived in easiness of Yiadom-Boakye provides relief.

Martín Soto Climent at Proyectos Monclova

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The most direct rules of inanimate erotics are first that the object be becoming flesh, and second exemplifying the curve of inside into out, curving exterior into insides, an expression of explicit vulnerability distinct to the anthropomorphic.
Soto has always loved the curves and the fleshy fabric, but the transitional state of the objects isn't not so much a becoming-subject of the abject, but instead a faint pubescence of gender, objects just arriving at a split, a fork budding a semblance of female or male possibility, blushing blues and corpulent pinks.


See too: Torbjørn Rødland at Henie-Onstad Kunstsenter, Lucy Skaer at Murray Guy, Katja Novitskova at Kunsthalle Lissabon

R.H. Quayt­man and Michael Kreb­ber at Museum Ludwig

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The two most retentive painters around. An anality of one expressive, smeared on walls, and the other's compressed tight to form diamonds of expression. Krebber is the embodiment of a public's contemporary art fears, the disordered body, Quaytman's crystalline structure a slick transparent version. Either way its desiccated enough at this point to be allowed into clean halls of adult history.

see too: “The Contract” at Essex Street, Michael Krebber at Nagel Draxler, Michael Krebber at Daniel Buchholz

Anna Uddenberg and Nicolas Ceccaldi at MEGA Foundation

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Ceccaldi now making paintings like high-school students from the internet, and Uddenberg's physically manifesting advertorial fetish for both tech and flesh in cyborg refresh to Allen Jones, all the odder for their ambivalence.  Both engaged with embodying cultural representations (which might explain the odd cardboard modernism) where identity is emergent from cultural signs rather than any sort of inherence, becomes currently impossible to imagine an identity outside of cultural signs. Uddenberg's recent sculpture are weirder than Jones' because they seem to emerge from the surrealism of culture itself, rather than the artifact of some dirty boy's head.

See too: “About Face” at Kayne Griffin, Nicolas Ceccaldi at Project Native Informant, Nicolas Ceccaldi at Mathew, David Rappeneau at Queer Thoughts

August Review Index 2015

Willem de Rooij at Arnolfini

Mark Leckey at Wiels

Sturtevant at MoMA

Rachel Rose at High Art

David Hartt at LAXART

Lily van der Stokker at Koenig & Clinton

Juliette Blightman at Eden Eden

Tam Ochiai at Team Gallery, Inc.

Oscar Tuazon at Paradise Garage

Yuji Agematsu at Real Fine Arts

Trevor Shimizu at Rowhouse Project

Trisha Donnelly at Air de Paris

Dorothy Iannone at Air de Paris

Zak Kitnick at Rowhouse Project

Gina Beavers at Clifton Benevento

Stephen G. Rhodes at Vilma Gold

Greer Lankton at Participant Inc.

Amy Lien & Enzo Camacho at 47 Canal

Chris Ofili at New Museum

Josephine Pryde at Arnolfini

Danny McDonald at House of Gaga

Aldo Mondino at Eden Eden

Veit Laurent Kurz and Stefan Tcherepnin at What Pipeline

“Friday, July 31, 2015” at Essex Street

Simon Denny at MoMA PS1

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There's a great panel discussion published with Denny in which his staunch refusal to talk about artmaking in any terms but the corporate terms of "product" "content" and "brand" leaves the other art-types at a sort of incredulous distance, wondering whether to refute the position (corporate terms obviously implying evil) or understand it at the safe distance of metaphor. This "struggle" to come to terms with such description is mirrored in much of the writing about Denny's work, in which writers search desperately to find where the critique - that of course must be there- lay.

Throwing two cents into the pile of change one hopes to be in the world: there isn't "critique" in the ambivalence of Denny's semi-archaeological work, and if there is, it is a tangential critique of the art-world itself, that the Artworld is much less interesting than the oddness of "experience" larger-Culture provides, even its objects. That an exhibition of Mega founder's collection of - what one glossy art magazine felt it without qualifier could be stated as "bad art" - misses the reflexivity of such situation in which a representation of an artifact of culture, an exhibition of "bad art" would be a more interesting experience than more art itself. Whether Pierre Menard or the Quixote himself, "critique" for Denny would only be part of experience of the product, its brand. And, in the same panel, stating a complicitness with capitalism that he doesn't want to kill, Denny is challenged asked what he does "want to kill," again implying the assumption of "critique" that the artworld so desperately needs for its own ends to be there. Denny responds, "That's not my goal. My goal is to make interesting content."


See too: Simon Denny at Portikus, Timur Si-Qin at Carl Kostyál, Ben Schumacher at Musee d’art contemporain de Lyon

“Popular Images III” at Karma

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4 artists, 4 points creating trajectory cut across a spectrum of tone, from a delicate hesitancy to the overt use of its ephebic delicacy as style, and then that style's co-option in advertorial seduction, and then that seduction replaced with forcible assault.

See too: “Popular Images” at Karma

Isa Genzken at Institute of Contemporary Art

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The deployment of entirely new means at some point became Genzken's means. The abrupt shifts in technologies was part and parcel of working to race the speed of culture itself in the evolution of new forms of attraction. And Genzken was good at it, this adaptation, championing a disposablity and turnover as the means to competition that is today's standard for young artists.  But Genzken was brilliant at it, and the trust we have for it means she could place anything on the walls of the gallery and at this late stage we would buy it, a level of trust built unbelievable.

See too: Ben Schumacher at Musee d’art contemporain de Lyon

Lois Weinberger at Kunsthalle Mainz

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There's a different thread of art in Europe supported by Kunsthalle and other publicly funded systems that sprawl without the pull of capitalistic pressure reaching $100psf+ to squeeze slick faceted objects out of artists from "cultural capitals", without pressure to discharge perfect turds of ideation, you get a common theme of shows like these heavy on documenting the hundreds of objects and drawings spread out over the no spectacle of artist's careers, trailing thoughts and ideas over the years across the floor.

Otobong Nkanga at Portikus

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Relating ourselves to the vantages of Nkanga's sculptures flip between their synecdochal and real vision, from scales representation and the real we walk on. The floor becomes both a vast representational plane modeling a continental scale, at the specific barren earth we stand on, a sort or vertiginous loop, and the models as representations as well as objects, territory on the map.

Joshua Abelow at Freddy

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The wider artworld came to know Abelow through his Art Blog which -coming to prominence against the sterile facade of CAD's hegemony -  felt human, resistant, and no-qualms subjective key to a very specific NY scene, felt warm in reestablishing the local against the global, like grocery co-op charm to Walmart's efficiency. It felt NY again. And as interest increased for those looking for the freshest produce Abelow became, if a not a ringleader, then a purveyor of visibility, a figure of some small access in a scene, that everyone knew, all the while and for like ten years before making scruffy hamhanded paintings that purviewed the doubt of the painter, the doubt morphing over many years, the paintings changing over the course of Abelow's character development from unknown, from entendres of suicide ("HANG ME") to flat laughter ("HARHAR") and as the painter character grew to show himself, to paintings of a man running full speed with his erection before him, to today that same man cloaked in the facade of a powerful witch, and all lovely abstractions along the way, still running.

Nina Koennemann at Taylor Macklin

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This work finds the link between the our techno-surrealism and its occult totems. Contemporary sculpture a primitivist pagan based practice, sighted in the realm of the product.

See too: “Being Thing” at Centre International d’Arte et du Paysage & Treignac Projet , Zak Kitnick at Rowhouse Project