Paul McCarthy at Schinkel Pavillon

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McCarthy the great desublimator, and of late the great literalizer. Literalization is a form of desublimation. And we watch him objectify someone, literally turn someone into an object, Elyse Poppers or himself. Unusual for McCarthy it is clean, clinical and calculated. It feels awful. This process, usually huge on billboards and bus stations showing half-naked young things, should entail all the fun of commodities, should replace the desire with an object that can be purchased, replace that desire. Instead here is cruel, useless and wasted. The world has little use for naked old man on table. Watch the procession of Poppers' body become not hers, the literal object consumable.

Thea Djordjadze at South London Gallery

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In a world where so much is streamlined, everything worn smooth by productive pressure and ergonomically bent for us, an object that feels like a reject from that process feels something like comfort.


See too: Venice: Thea Djordjadze at The Arsenale, Oscar Tuazon at Le Consortium & Paradise Garage, Richard Rezac at Isabella Bortolozzi

Ed Atkins at dépendance

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Fitting to see him now in the white wasteland of art's daily now as a disenfranchised series of promotional images adrift, incommunicable. Recall when Dave had the long ethereal hair of a newborn, bald Dave. Now Dave is dying, an infant with melanoma. Will Dave die? The existential questions of Dave pertain strangely to us all not since we're becoming less different from a render, but because our digital selves are already more widely real, and then who is Dave, the elderly child, newborn Dave.

See too: Ed Atkins at Serpentine Gallery, Mark Leckey at Haus Der Kunst + Kunsthalle Basel, Rachel Rose at High Art,

Stephen Prina at Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen

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The medium is the message another way of saying that saying nothing a whole lot of ways is the same as saying a whole lot of something. This has a lot to do with art, in which the goal is to make a elusive content engorge with meaning, make the non-content of biographic Galesburg seem big. And it does. We attribute meaning to this suburban genericism. Structuring experience as a series of means of deployments, Prina is, like the suburbs, a much more insidious real estate developer than first seems.

K.r.m. Mooney at Pied-á-terre

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Mooney born a jeweler makes sense, apart from its decorative function, the "setting" of jewelry is key, the holding of an object, the micro-fetish of attachmenting objects presented and the problem of material convergence, of which Money is all about. All this relating to our cyborg bodies. Of weirdo materials reminding us of things stranger than ourselves. The most typical aspect of the various object orientated is that we conceive of our body in relation to it, feel our meat as sinew and rod connected. Like the decorative decorates its thing, not the finger but the person atop flesh.

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

Max Hooper Schneider at High Art

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The decrepit Casino cut and parted out and distributed as a future predicted will speak to a fantasy of our gothic present amplified. The heavily floraed aquarium holds the lush world behind the glass screen of those surfing having fallen in. The web is like a very deep aquarium and there will be neon signs underwater, in glass. Whole fantasies behind glass, Disney World behind glass where 20,000 leagues under glass a squid would attack your submarine. From sentient watermelon to primordial hot baths, the Chuck-E-Cheese Animtronics begin horribly signing a new dystopian that is lush.

A continuation of: Ajay Kurian at Rowhouse Project

Sheila Hicks at Sikkema Jenkins

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While the larger assert themselves through a sort of program exhausted, and big, the small seem yet full with their potential, mysterious and replete; and not yet farmed for harvest, time + material. No doubt Hicks graduating in of an era not particularly known for much besides measuring competitions in some ways shaped the product.

“Open House” at Kunstverein Braunschweig

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Each installation shot of this exhibition as though cut from a different building entirely, of various architectures and at least 9 different flooring patterns, nearly one for every room. There is heavy disjuncture and little continuity between the spaces and these jarring cuts stand out against our growing predisposition for documentation that carefully establishes spatial relations of its installations. Like Kubrick intentionally breaking spatial continuity of the spooky hotel to create a viewer lost, there is unease in being disorientated, and in intaking a voluminous feed of disparate images the growing popularity for carefully sited images a way of avoiding the motion sickness of being in a sea.

See too:  Sophie Nys at Crac Alsace, Brian Calvin at Le Consortium,  Jacob Kassay at Fitzpatrick-Leland House

Mai-Thu Perret, Olivier Mosset at VnH

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"In early 2010, scientists in Italy announced that rattan wood would be used in a new "wood to bone" process for the production of artificial bone. The process takes small pieces of rattan and places it in a furnace. Calcium and carbon are added. The wood is then further heated under intense pressure in another oven-like machine and a phosphate solution is introduced. This process produces almost an exact replica of bone material. The process takes about 10 days. At the time of the announcement the bone was being tested in sheep and there had been no signs of rejection. Particles from the sheep's bodies have migrated to the "wood bone" and formed long continuous bones. The new bone-from-wood programme is being funded by the European Union. Implants into humans are anticipated to start in 2015.^[12]"

The third result for "rattan" Google searches returns, after wiki and dictionary results, Ikea's website. And thus our global domineers providing dystopian furniture to the masses and our futuristically repaired bodies are made of the same object harvested from Indonesian labor.

Glenn Sorensen at Annet Gelink

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Got to give Jennifer Higgie Credit for calling Sorensen "post-industrial Monets." If the impressionists commented on the particularity of French light, Sorensen maybe on the peculiar liquidness of lighted night, and what had been Sorensen's illustrative starkness now sights meltdown of a visual disturbance sort, of unnatural abruptness that shorts rods and cones into afterimages, emergency light, disorientated to something representational that feels abstract.

Lucas Arruda at Lulu

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Monochrome's abyss meeting Romanticist Friedrich's Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog envisioned as a first person ponderer as small materially sensitive jewels like painting.


See too: “Seven Reeds” at Overduin & Co., Sean Raspet at Jessica Silverman

“Play” at Tanya Leighton

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By bringing the others under Cesarco's distancing, they too have their discrepancy become a loss. The mismatched image/text of a Baldessari become numb, a Louise Lawler photograph no longer feels critical but sentimental, and Steinbach's rhetorical question floats with lost meaning, everything like dark ships passing in the night.

Gaylen Gerber at Studio for Propositional Cinema

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"In the second exhibition Gerber presents two Supports, each oil paint on cinematic props of Nazi scalps from Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds."

"Frieze Magazine: Questionnaire: Sturtevant.
What film has most influenced you?
Any film of Quentin Tarantino because he is a concrete example of the vast barren interior of man."

R.H. Quaytman at Miguel Abreu

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Miguel Abreu surrounds itself in a very distinct aura, it desires so strongly to be fictional literature, like a Borges labyrinth, where fiction is made to feel real, and the library the realest of all, from which entire worlds stem. Not even that Quaytman chapters her work, all the exhibitions feel like arcana and leaden magic where complexity's turgidity make it feel all the more real for its almost bureaucratic commitment to the fiction.  This PR treats us to the tale of a painter chasing an engraving that a philosopher loved so much to own inspiring a much loved passage of text, finding upon finally seeing the work, that something was hidden behind the print, a whole other world, but the thing couldn't be spliced and x-rays couldn't reveal, and this painter, Quaytman, poured over databases and archives dedicating herself to the task of attributing this engraving behind the engraving, a man in black robes. Eventually it is found not from obsessive pouring, but instead "a little luck." And the painter produces a whole new appendix to the chapter about the discovery revealing "an answer that does not satisfy so much as add complexity and mystery to this icon of ideology." Of course its just a google search away, but the point of the Borges story is would you want it revealed?

Mathis Altmann at Halle für Kunst Lüneburg

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The Model becomes predominate as the world's point of scale becomes unmoored, and reality floating between the virtual and material conditions abstracted by floating points of enumeration etc. etc. Housing replaces houses replaces house distinct from home, which is bombed out. The model encapsulates this world governed by virtual features, planning, projected statistical everything, abstraction of everyday. Looking down at our hands the sphere of the earth is said to be at our fingertips. This abstraction feels lived in. The architectural model exists as a plan scalable and virtual. The mix of real scales and virtual scales - a pipe standing in for piping - a vertiginous collapse, our proprioception lost in relation vibrates. Altmann's loss of orientation to physical objects has followed him for some time now.

Klara Lidén, Alicia Frankovich at Kurator

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A desire to express a body. But of recent the body is expressed through objects and not "figuration" but its intermediary, witness ourselves by the surrogate of objects that address it.  Think of Cady Noland's institutional objects, learning something about the specifics of flesh under society. Of elder's walkers and handcuffs. We make objects for ourselves and so of course they express us. And eventually they exist for so long beside us, silently shape alongside us, that they begin to take on facets and express things that were latent, learning by proxy.


See too: Erwin Wurm at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Marte Eknæs, Sean Raspet at Room East

Heimo Zobernig at Simon Lee

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This is as close as Zobernig will ever get to tie-dyed, and the distance is important one. Zobernig's approach is far too flat-footed to pace even stoner psychedelia. The colorful fuck-all isn't pleasant to weary red eyes but an irritant meltdown of modern values, gobbling all tabs before freaking out and regurgitating it back out all over the squares. This is a joke about post-war babies running races against their parents values sort.

See too: Than Hussein Clark at Futura, Heimo Zobernig at Indipendenza, Heimo Zobernig - Petzel,  Krupp, MUDAM

Than Hussein Clark at Futura

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By staging the objects as theatrical their vacancy becomes strength, hollowness holding a surface for eyes to move and containing whatever importance the narrative can attribute it, like a beautifully feathered bird you are required to know nothing about, or a Tahitian landscape unencumbered by syphilitic artists, or a tie-dyed Heimo Zobernig.  Like Sci-fi as excuse to CGI a lot of shiny things, theater to reimagine some neo-Memphis-group for Petra von Kant.

See too: “The Violet Crab” at DRAF, Than Hussein Clark at Futura

Group Show at Mary Mary

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The loaded vacancy of de Chirico, which everyone early learns is caused by discrepant perspective amplified by late Italian sun, here duplicated in a way that averts explanation, objects taking on the same eschew weight hovering with a coded urgency of stark quiet.


See too: Mathew Cerletty at Office Baroque, Matthew Brannon at Casey Kaplan , Group Show at Salle Principale

Michael Krebber at Greene Naftali

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Krebber seems to be preferring to these days. A brand established rescinding pleasant discussions of the elusive "krebberesque."  In 2013 Krebberesque was actually academically defined in the 8th edition of Quinton and Rohling's Aesthetic Jargon falling between between Kowtow kraut and Kremlin Stoogism. Excitement and Myth has given way to branded production. Having once "suddenly instructed his students never to paint again" now producing paintings at a brisk clip.


see too: Group Show at Greene Naftali

Puppies Puppies at Vilma Gold

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The sweet blood of all those Disney characters is actually corn, barrels of it, the dream of american heartland rendered sickly sweet, sweeter than sugar and cheaper to produce, our cellular frames now an industrial byproduct delivering and adapting consumers taste for saccharinity without restraint. A debate about whether or not these corny subjects are inherently harmful, their omnipresence in American diets surely presents later in life. The internet's rule 34 once predicted that if it existed there was porn of it, but has come to mean images of childhood cartoons engaging in sexual acts. Sweetness imprints in kids it seems. Rule 34 continues to grow as a google search (though interestingly less so in the UK where this ultra sweetness is not found.)  The corny fantasy without balance is an addictive substance, a better commodity, we never experience nourishment or taste so much as direct dopamine reverb, foods and disney treated to ever more focused scientific research achieving not only a more pleasing product but one never delivering satiation. Artists can at least deliver some form of relief to the fantasy by erotically showing off their ends' bitter taste, a fantasy cornhole.

See too: Venice vs. Triennial

Josh Smith at at Eva Presenhuber

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Half decade ago the most reviled painter on campuses, now they sorta look just like any other painting made today. Whether this is because Smith as the last Naumanian understood the wild importance of Ford's speed (and in-distinction) creating busywork spam into cultural consensus, or any true influence is hard to discern.

See too: Ann Craven at Confort Moderne, Zak Prekop at Shane Campbell

Anders Clausen at Between Bridges

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 You could believe these feathers of various metals and materials are strange turn for Clausen, coming from cold micro-interaction of detachment's emotional resonance, of interface a replacement for interfacing, but its is the same form of emotional micro-attention, of feathers beginning to look like birds with brand strategies. Maybe it's hard to tell the difference between fetish and sentiment, or between a fetishistic attention to detail and tenderness, fastidious and compulsion.

Elad Lassry at David Kordansky

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If Lassry's photographs feel fetishistic it's because, like Furries costumed in fursuits as substitute for the slick lines of the anthropomorphic cartoon animals they desire sex with, Lassry's photographs dress their photograph as slick objects to anthropomorphize the objectifying seduction of photography's cartoon version, wearing a "fursuit" of the image color coded to the frame. Lassry's "photographs" self-objectify under gaze as tactile and plastic visual pleasure. They more cryptic the photo - deprived of its raisons, however "straight" - the more its surface appears in blankness, the blank allure of sexual consumability of surface and seduction, lozenges of virtual material. These ultra expensive objects "carved from single timbers of Claro walnut wood" will disperse into homes and be collected by those seeing them dispersed, consumed like cherries in Pac-Man.

See too: Lucy Skaer at Murray Guy

Rainer Ganahl at Kai Matsumiya

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Institutional critique, was, at its base, a reflexive gesture, navel gazing en abyme, setting up a giant system of mirrors of various funhouse effects within the institution, but if we've learned nothing its that silvered surfaces sell really well. We desire nothing more than to see ourselves. And seeing everyone else is like ourselves in a strange mirror. And seeing other art patrons is like seeing ourselves in relation to ourselves, seeing a grand and baroque vaulting network of ourselves in a hierarchy of ourselves. And seeing a Jeff Koons painting is like seeing ourselves replaced with Barbie plastic.  We see ourselves in so many ways. It's all we really want.

See too: Peter Piller at Capitain Petzel , “Seven Reeds” at Overduin & Co.

Istanbul Biennial

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Assigning numbers to all artists and then a  random number generator to choose: Merve Kılıçer. 
Merve Kılıçer's images can be found here: istanbul-biennial/iksv_14b_sahirugureren_498, #499, #500, #501, #502, #503, #504, #505

Merve Kılıçer's biography from page 90 of the guidebook reads:
"1987, Istanbul. Lives and works in Istanbul. Mater.ial,  2014–15, 2 custom-made tables, 2 handmade artist’s books "

"There are two books in the library with prints in them. They tell the stories of Tiamat and Inanna. They are creation stories. Her prints are also stories – successive layers of etching on a metal plate with puntasecca and acquaforte."