Puppies Puppies at Queer Thoughts

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This prequel's synopsis: Puppies Puppies, as Gollum, dressed as ever the inept minion, lost his love, his precious ring, to our narrator Forrest, which I guess makes him Bilbo Baggins. Unless this is part of the Trilogy and Forrest is Frodo, which would make this allegory a lot more complicated. Either way Gollum is made ugly by his love, lost to hobbit and which Gollum is ultimately doomed to a tragic death with his beloved, if our erotic fanfic stays true to canon. Whichever book we're on, Puppies Puppies quixotic quest to imbue memecore with its pathos: poor hygiene basement dwellers in love with their precious ring of internet sociality that binds them, Contemporary Art Daily our eye of Sauron. And which makes us the disgraced Boromir, which means I'll soon be dead, exposed and embarrassed. Like FGT the signs of culture are representations of latent forms, two clocks as representations of time, like a condom filled with bloody white worms of mom's spaghetti gone viral, hand sanitizer, latex masks and make-up covered nakedness, and fish slime being washed, braced within a text effusing romance, is a comedy filled with latent bodily abjection.

Episode 1: “Friday, July 24, 2015″ at Essex Street

Shahryar Nashat at Silberkuppe

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In the glut consumed of CA images Daily the immediacy of a work to affect, or stylize "meaning" while withholding it, of which Mona Lisa's smiles is the dead pig beaten titular example of, a gesture of something that like code affects a totemic omen, an endless connotation of meaning, and in this exhibition everything awaits you with bated breath, however deciphering a meaning is a red haired lure, the question is why we feel affected to decipher anything at all, of which Nashat has long been decidedly brilliant at, is of supreme importance.

See too: Merlin Carpenter at MD 72 , Group Show at Salle Principale

Peter Piller at Capitain Petzel

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The earliest examples of art turning outward to creatures and power objects, before, in western cultures, quickly, and possibly with the rise of self-awareness, turned to self-reflection, depicting ourselves, our scenes with greater amounts of care, to now a contemporary world flush with depictions of ourselves, painting giving into the modern flora of advertising, adorning everything. If you judge narcissism by the amount of self-depiction in a culture, western culture rules. Historical painters' technical inventions are feats driving for vain indulgence: to render itself better. The eternal drive of the painter as masturbation in a mirror. All this self-reflection should beget self-awareness, but it doesn't, as colonialism is but one example, instead spreading ourselves everywhere, put pictures of ourselves everywhere, giant images of ourselves adorn everything, we erect them in stores to sell ourselves things, we paint heavily modified babes on our cars.

Ajay Kurian at Rowhouse Project

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Take a casino, and continue to supply power to it. With an insulation sprayer filled with soupy oatmeal, grass seed, and used band-aids in 40/40/10 mixture, spray in sporadic bursts over the interior. Turn to ON the produce misters piped into equal distribution throughout the casino's byzantine carpeted floor. Set the foggers on "Jungle." The aquariums should be clean. Open the amphibian cages, let loose several roombas. Animatronics from several Chuck-E-Cheeses should be stripped of their flesh and set in small pools of shallow water, still horrifically signing. When properly weighted the iPhones will levitate. Leave the faucets run. Scatter around the refuse of humanity. Allow ample wide fields of uncontrolled voltage to go unchecked from large gauge wires. Plug everything in. Lock the door and leave for 10 years. Upon the decade, proceed to cut up the architecture into small manageable sizes and distribute into white rooms of galleries over the entire continent to speak to the future. What is interesting is the names that these objects will fall under will have an endless micro-differentiation of aesthetics, have totally different meanings to them.

See too:  “Flat Neighbors” at Rachel Uffner, Hans-Christian Lotz at Christian Andersen,Yuji Agematsu at Artspeak, “RR ZZ” at Gluck50, Yuji Agematsu at Real Fine Arts, Mathis Altmann at Freedman Fitzpatrick Altmann, Olga Balema at Croy Nielsen, David Douard at Johan Berggren, Nancy Lupo at Wallspace, Katja Novitskova at Kunsthalle Lissabon, Anicka Yi at Cleveland Museum of Art, Transformer Station, Florian Germann at Gregor Staiger, Timur Si-Qin at Carl Kostyál, Ben Schumacher at Musee d’art contemporain de Lyon, Anna Uddenberg and Nicolas Ceccaldi at MEGA Foundation,  Pamela Rosenkranz at Karma International, “Being Thing” at Centre International d’Arte et du Paysage & Treignac Projet, Michael E. Smith at Sculpture Center

Isa Genzken at David Zwirner

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To make one of those statements that art writers have tendency to make based upon an inflated assessment of their own opinion's import feeling significant though ultimately isn't: Bruce Nauman has passed the torch of most influential living artist to Isa Genzken. It happened in field about 4 years prior as part of a much unpublicized ceremony 28 miles due south of Santa Fe. Without fanfare, neither artist even leaving their respective vehicle, handed through lowered windows, Nauman reported to have said "Best of it." The two made eye contact and somewhere off a small goose was made to fly, along with several terse press releases from the agency that assess such matters. It was said that Genzken's speed finally attained escape velocity from the crushing gravitation of Nauman's iron mire.


See too: Isa Genzken at Institute of Contemporary Art, Ben Schumacher at Musee d’art contemporain de Lyon 

Rebecca Morris at 356 Mission

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Like Bernhardt, feel less composed than organized, here a patchwork quilting clarity, holds its parts in distinct textures and color, like swatches, or a sample catalog, display system proffering an endless variety available. Or a grid stucture from which to hang paint. Like showcases, each flaunting its scrapbook of moments.


See too : Katherine Bernhardt at Venus Over Manhattan , Laura Owens at Capitain Petzel

Sam Durant at Praz-Delavallade & Vedovi

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It seems there should be a sub-genre of films called historical horror, and every Halloween we gather in cinemas releasing the red syrup of all the slasher films with historical accuracy, Chrisopher Columbus III: Total Genocide, every year another new terror revealed that we, all along, were the murderer.

Katherine Bernhardt at Venus Over Manhattan

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Brands often contractually stipulate distance their logos must remain from other images, exemplified in the grid structure of red carpet backdrops, giving not only clarity, but purity, singularity to the brand. And separatists like Matisse giving the studio a red that was particular, exceptional. Bernhardt always was invested in the advertorial, painting the magazine spread, and here this is use, rather than reflection, of the advertorial model is in the assaulting declarative of product, effusing their objects with the seductive quality of being visually held.

Morgan Fisher at Bortolami

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That no matter how controlled, contrived, explained, circumferenced, delineated and accounted an object is, there is still some form of fissure, a gap, between the experience of those objects from the overwhelming conceptual conscripture that ostensibly defines it. Conceptual art sought to control a world by being able to manipulate it by definition. 

Charline von Heyl at Gisela Capitain

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Von Heyl's paintings are striking, like being struck, designed with the force of icons and logos, instantaneous recognition, the paintings connect with a speed prophetic of the contemporary and understandable that her rise delayed would coincide with that of digital networks: von Heyl's paintings turn composition into a kind of semio-transaction of consumption, a painterly recognition that is particular, depleting, and manic. Like scrolling through a feed. Von Heyl is one of the few painters (image makers) seeming to understand and frame what it feels like to look at (consume) images today, emptying.

James Hoff at VI, VII

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We need a word for something.
Let's make a fictional example, an artist, let's say this fictional artist is named Lucien Smith.
Lucien Smith makes paintings with a fire-extinguisher. This is called "process based abstraction." But if Lucien Smith had made paintings with fire extinguishers pulled from the wreckage of an art warehouse burned to the ground with so much of Saatchi's art within it, these fire extinguishers unused and thus a testament to dashed hopes of prevention and ready for Smith's painting well then, he'd really have something wouldn't he. This value added of anecdotal content, of reference converted to sign and emblazoned on painting, this.
While this was the central conundrum to conceptual art since its inception, the rupture and distance between sign and object (always at risk that its sign didn't actually contain its object) it has since been taken as granted, as a granting agency for value added. While On Kawara's July 21st 1969 poses the question of whether it actually contains the weight of a moon landing, the paint sprayed is given to absorb the history. If an artist goes into the woods and there is no cellphone service around to hear him, does it imbue itself into the copper objects as significant?  Jason Rhoades built a career of mocking this value-added system, performing it under absurdly comical conditions, to create his referentially seminal signature: PeaRoeFoam, a mess of so much reference and history and jest that it self imploded. Or Seinfeldized by Arcangel.
So a word for this value-added process based absorption/valorization of reference.


See too: On Kawara at the Guggenheim , Simon Starling at Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago

Matthew Brannon at Casey Kaplan

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Midcentury graphic design made as stifling as the era's social mores, Brannon's cleanliness hasn't ever felt nice so much as overbearing hypochondria. Cleanliness becomes the expression of repression, and the clinicalness of printmaking anality becomes suffocating, even the friendly ones seem without air, ketchup like terror, nostalgia cleansed till the skin dries, cracks, and bleeds.

Wolfgang Tillmans at David Zwirner

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Tillmans unanimously loved with a work just so friendly, empathetic, every frame softening its subject, Tillmans the great tenderizer, photographs in well worn softness like comfortable denim in its endless micro-sensitivity, a magisterial flow into the interstitial micro-politic of the personal as political. The cotton t-shirt, the fabric of our lives. Tillmans is intoxicating; affirming and empowering, imbuing the ordinary with nostalgia, our dreary lives with the hope of aesthetic empowerment. "NICKAS: It is documentation, because it documents the fantasy. TILLMANS: Yes."

Group Show at Sprüth Magers

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The Sherman tank was most numerous for the United States proving to be reliable and mobile. Despite being outclassed by German mediums and heavy, Sherman was cheaper to produce and available in greater numbers. Thousands were distributed, stressing reliability, ease of production, durability, standardization of parts and ammunition in a limited number of variants, along with moderate size and weight. These factors, combined with Sherman's then-superior armament, outclassed other's and Sherman went on to be produced in large numbers, spearheaded by the Western alliance. The relative ease of production allowed huge numbers of Sherman to be manufactured, and significant investment allowed returning service. These factors combined to give the American numerical superiority. Despite its deficiencies to other superior German as well as other American tanks, Sherman won the war through its adaptation to modernization techniques.

Darren Bader at Radio Athènes

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If Bader seems to come out of a minimalist and conceptual legacy, it is that history's tension between object's specificity and their genericness, singular yet replaceable, a box built industrially to specs, or definitions superseding the objects they define, and for Bader one burrito and all burritos are with the possibility of being the same. The psychoactive part of Bader's work is this aspect of minimalism hypertrophied, that you can never be sure if you are looking at a concept or an object. Even people.


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

Will Benedict at Overduin & Co.

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Thinking of Benedict like a gothicly depressed Baldessari is helpful. A formal artist using the basic propositions of art against itself, in the wrong, that if, like Baldessari, the text must relate, when in semio haywire it does not, its semantic slippage disconnects us. While Baldessari's rupture produced laughter in art's children, Benedict's continual unplugging of content creates morose vacuum: when Benedict, as early on, is funny, it is easy to take, but when it, as he continually more and more aims to depict culture as, is decidedly empty it creates a resignation to its abuse, a feeling of learned helplessness in rats, of numbness, feeling like viral conditions speaking through stuffed nasal sinuses, stuffed up, comparison leading violence.

John Baldessari at Marian Goodman, Will Benedict at Bortolami

Autumn Ramsey at Night Club

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Look at this cat butt, lovely and sensuous cat butt. Ivory white revealing hind's cool pink rear turning over into the warm autumn of anus.

Jacob Kassay at Fitzpatrick-Leland House

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Having been with this thread for a while,

“Seven Reeds” at Overduin & Co.
Sophie Nys at Crac Alsace
Brian Calvin at Le Consortium


It's an old advertising truism that a every consumer, even the jaded, buys the emotions associated with a product more than the product itself. The buy-in being a broad sense of any investment, monetary, social, symbolic or otherwise. When selling a chair from a glossy mail order catalog photograph it on a beach to associate a lifestyle. Imagine these objects without this backdrop.
And so is CAD a lifestyle mail order catalog? No, but Kassay sorta makes it look like one. Which is funny. Using the imbuing qualities of setting/documentation to perform its totemisms.
As always, Kassay lovely in a vague sense, of a model home.


See too: “Being Thing” at Centre International d’Arte et du Paysage & Treignac Projet

Giorgio Griffa at Bergen Kunsthall

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What is perhaps important about Griffa is that despite the ledger like accounting of marks, like most Povera, it provided a contingency to Minimimalism index and auto-reflexivity, projecting a trajectory outside literalist theater without a return to expressionism, keeping their hands that Minimalism sought to cut off. A materialism waiting around looking pretty for its 2012/13 "rediscovery" coinciding with the gentle turn in abstraction and Columbia sponge painting that looked so much like it, coming back again just way more soft, but at least someone "remembered" it.

Florian Germann at Gregor Staiger

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Like Zorio's "Per purificare le parole," circular motion through cooling liquids performs a occult function, no longer impoverished but updated in the clean sexy design of modern function, a 2.0 making one nostalgic for the poverty we see returning, now funnily enough the circle is automated.


See too: “Flat Neighbors” at Rachel Uffner, Michael E. Smith at Lulu

Group Show at Dold Projects

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Clownic comedy, funny for its exaggeration and broken social codes, carries with it an jagged edge of distrust.  Slapstick is violence upon the real, and the clown uses slapstick to make his violence appear as fiction. The clown, building unreality, edges complete societal breakdown, the clown might enter your personal space and never leave it, as a joke or as true violence is hard to tell, but its why clowns and horror have always gone hand in hand, as a comedy is often indistinguishable from violence.  And this sort of comedic terror has a lot to do with this show, with that awful funny video.

Glenn Ligon at Regen Projects

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It is, actually, surprisingly enjoyable watching the body of the man disembodied from his voice gesticulate comedy. Without necessarily being sure anything much deep can be read into the gestures, they are hypnotic, and ultimately the film's elegiac meditation feel more and more like a conspiracy clue hunt of insight into the man that we believe must exist. Back and to the left, back and to the left, hoping for the telling moment. But instead you're just watching footage of a man whose head recently exploded be silenced, turned into a monument.

See too: Mitchell Syrop at Croy Nielsen & Glenn Ligon at Regen Projects

“TRUST” at offsite locations, Den Frie, Nikolaj Kunsthal, Overgaden, GL Strand

(offsite locations, Den Frie, Nikolaj Kunsthal, Overgaden, GL Strand)


While individual artworks dominate the economic hemisphere, the broader art system uses the exhibition as the transactionary unit; legitimation transferred from the institution to the artist/curator as a single affirmation, bestowing their emblem of conviction, to bear, if briefly, their name. Every name representing that institution's confidence, a sign of credibility, the journeyman artworker collects people's affirmation of yourself. As there are no ultimate arbitrators of value within art, networked legitimation becomes the dominant mode, collecting them all. And so for all those calling in to ask, that is why CAD decided to publish this as five separate exhibitions.

Nancy Lupo at 1857

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Rubbermaid's BRUTE® UTILITY containers are pervasive. And the containers at first seem, ominously, to lack any qualities whatsoever, but Lupo, different from Bill Bollinger's formalized mass materials, draws out the latent, systematically mocking its soft qualities, the infantilizing soft curvature, the flesh of it. Objects humans draw for ourselves are getting bodily, begin to resemble ourselves, as erotics and curvature seep into everything, and these look not much different from baby toys, from chew toys.

Thomas Bayrle at dépendance

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Wading through repetition of criticism that bogs Bayrle produces the same repetition fatigue of the paintings, trying to extract endless allegory out a single metaphor. And while the prophecy of Bayrle's oft cited Jacquard loom parable didn't bear out and the world doesn't look like the 60's science fiction expecting mechanization to ensure repetitive homogeneity, instead an endless individuation, the paintings do contain some abhorrence befitting the current situation, "It’s what Bayrle calls the quality of quantity, or the process of making pure quantity into a quality."


see too: Allan McCollum at Petzel

Richard Rezac at Isabella Bortolozzi

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Writing in the LA Times, David Pagel called Rezac "dyslexic minimalism." The metaphor is functional, Rezac's sculptures follow the syntax of a language but disordered, their ordering law unavailable yet suggesting a function or ergonomics. And today we are more than acclimated to objects and commodities adapted to us, and any object displacing suggestion for the function they provide (to us) produces an uncanny effect. We say they look otherworldly, alien, simply because we don't know what good they are to us. This makes them strange.


See too: Katja Novitskova at Kunsthalle Lissabon , Nancy Lupo at Wallspace

Jamian Juliano-Villani at Tanya Leighton

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Like Ernst's graphic novels cut up from the cheap illustrations of culture, surrealism and pop go in hand, the abject impoverishment of images today begets a mash-culture on amphetamines, channeling, thieving, and mixing everything and more regardless of flavor. Ingredients in the style John Wesley placed into Albert Oehlen's 3D render blender on Rosenquist's dice setting all in the backyard BBQ of Hannah Hoch. The point today is to accelerate the katamari like sludge while maintaining, like Ernst, a semblance of representational order, to make the regurgitation uncanny, seem, somehow, true. Of course the concoctions going to make you feel nauseous its still got a face.

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

Olivier Mosset, Karin Sander at lange + pult

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So sure, two people making "white paintings" couldn't be more different. One likes reflexive indexing, the other motorcycles, both come in white. 

see too : Karin Sander at Barbara Gross,  Fredrik Vaerslev at Centre d’Art Contemporain Passerelle , “Seven Reeds” at Overduin & Co. ,  Paul Cowan at Clifton Benevento

Ulla von Brandenberg at Pilar Corrias

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This gesture - laying a thing next another thing to break its singular frame - is a meme of art, and we should wish to detour funding, get Grad Students to surrender their Broodthaers dissertations and instead advance proposition of, a definitive history, of this gesture. Start with his potted plants if necessary, the gesture plays a theatricality. Maybe follow a lineage Strau and Blinky Palermo and of all the capital F Fetishists, Tom Burr - who extracted a fey contingency from it- through Lieske, working into the whole Mathew thing, and dispersed into the ether of Europe, formalized. Not sure why I'm including only men in this lineage, arguably neither Harrison or Genzken quite fit, but you can include that in your theses too.

see too: David Lieske at MUMOK , Tom Burr at Franco Noero Drunk

Dana Schutz at Friedrich Petzel

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Everyone has these like huge opinions on Schutz. Which drives everyone else to stake larger opinions for themselves. Which causes even further polemics, ballooning so far as to remove any air for little thoughts.

I enjoy Alice Neel for all the moments gone awry in a face. Upon an upper lip you will find hanging a bouquet of exotic birds, a moment of painting brilliance. Martin Creed's portraits channel these "oopsies" moment all over the canvas by painting blindfolded. Schutz actually attempts forcing it, to comprise a painting as a series of series of "painting events" in clean cubo-futurism. Sometimes it works.

Sanya Kantarovsky at Marc Foxx, Vittorio Brodmann at Freedman Fitzpatrick

Urban Zellweger at Karma International

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The PR rapidfires the names of 6 painters in prayer against thinking the critically uncool Salvador Dali or Yves Tanguy. Look, the desert dreamscape and droopy floating globule of Surrealism is coming back and that's alright. It's picked up a lot of Germanic influence along the way and its slick enterprise seems more at least somewhat tempered by the internally reflective.