Gina Beavers at Michael Benevento

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Culture ate Warhol, and the body is spectacularly insane, but culture wants the body flat, glossy and sharp, like the Warhol which became fame, and Beavers reanimating the body's real corpus in such a culture that does not want it feels like real horror.


see too: Gina Beavers at Clifton Benevento,

Annette Kelm at Meyer Kainer

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The PR, in one paragraph, describes well how the things function; Kelm's practice has narrowed slightly here, removing its expansive and dissonant genres eluding easy art-practice circumscription, the landscapes and genres etc.; this exhibition honed to icons, which are sharp, what would be called "striking" images of the advertorial, direct, but when they fail to deliver anything on that promise of a striking image, fail to reveal anything at all, what the PR calls "demonstratively unspectacular productions" feels not only dissonant, but depressing, like you're complicit in something you never meant to be. This is what makes them equate with commodities.


see too:  Annette Kelm at Gio Marconi, Adriana Lara at Algus Greenspon

Carol Bove, Carlo Scarpa at Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens

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So as to encounter the whole no individual thing could be too interesting, Modernist Architecture's elegance was blankness sliding eyes away from any particular to encounter an entirety, but Scarpa's bent version was filled with particularities, rather than decoration, as a means to emphasize itself. The awkwardness inscribed the elegance, like all those supermodels with strabismus. And this Particularness is the commons between the two, a hyptrophied aspect of modernism looking baroque within its narrow view, everything overly attended to.  Bove's looking not so much plain but obsessive, fetishistic attention toward the display, like the objects are beautiful but wouldn't the objects be more beautiful if they were wearing some organic leather strapping or tied down.

See too: Matthew Brannon at Casey Kaplan, Venice: Thea Djordjadze at The Arsenale

Richard Phillips at Mathew

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Yeah that Richard Phillips, channeling Wool and Oehlen in the fabric with a playboy bunny.

There's an old artworld legend, that as far as known here is true: of a famed and admired painter, European and critical darling, 6 or 7 figure painter, this is 2003, painter with a waiting list and shows sold before even openings, this painter deciding to exhibit at a small provincial gallery of the American midwest in what couldn't even be called the garage of the green front lawn of a suburban home but a sort of concrete storage shed not much larger than the honest to goodness 6 or 7 figure painting being shown in 6 square meters of gallery space, to be sold out of that shed. It was one of those star-struck mutually beneficial kind of deals. Artists using the full breadth of their powers and burning it as gift, street cred for economy kind of deals.

This exhibition is like the black oily bizarro version of that legend.

Group Show at The Duck

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M/L doing exceedingly well for themselves as a roving symbiotic socialiaty, an institution "going its own way" with middle fingers raised in intentionally hyper-postured PR and social muscle glistening with heavy artist lists' ostentatious lifting. The press release states as much, all this, and more: "a social experiment."  (q.v. Bourdieu; the artist maintains aloofness to the economic field while accruing its social capital etc. etc.) This the playing field for some time now, but now CAD is the grand legitimizer to concretize social relations in viewership, others will actually award you a number based on social rank within a field and continue to do so no matter how hard our eyes roll, none of this is new, what makes M/L interesting is the sort of blatant and innocent way in which it does this.

Andrea Zittel at Sprüth Magers

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I purchased a vegetable with Star Wars adverts on it. A large anthropomophic talking bumble sells cereal to adults. Fantasy is a strong force in the universe. "Smashes box-office records." Zittel is local science-fiction - ideas as propositions, viewing them you get to feel the utopian impulse, image a fantasy of a world cognizant considered and real with magic - "how to live?" - imagine a world where we haven't already welcomed the new insect overlord, rebellion against Empire.

John Bock at Regen Projects

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There's a goodwilled cartoonishness that overlays Bock's violence. It's like the fun face culture puts over its assertions, the growing patina of fun that you find on cereal, a talking bumble bee selling food to adults.

Yngve Holen at Modern Art

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Even objects designed for us, to make us like them feel nothing reciprocal, a universe is dead to us, difficult to accept them as absolute cold material completely aloof towards our existence. These insectile eyes we recognize is an anthropomorphism softening the blow of cold dead indifference.

Juha Pekka Matias Laakkonen at Corvi-Mora

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Reverence is intoned by vast space, emptiness. Used as moral in cathedrals and power by banks we are made to feel small and thus invest ourselves in its offering. People in large open settings show preference first for seating along the edges, backs against walls, or within small alcoves, whereas seating in the center feels vulnerable. In this way Architecture forces an experience of self-awareness, a shiver of our own mortality. The poetic is often reducible to connections within a system of signifiers that ultimately fail to coalesce - or produce a fissure within - a logical statement, a lapse sort of a lot like the architectural expanse. But then the material conditions of an artist placing his head where the log was, into the gap.

Camille Henrot at Metro Pictures

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Leckey engaged in entertainment insofar as understanding the viewer as a receiver, not cryptographer presented an object-code for contemplation. An "object" instead active toward the viewer as receiver, and a for once happiness to pacify audience that so much art wished to shake "awake."
Nolan's Inception is the comic concrete (slapstick) version, a parable of the Hollywood model lulling viewer's into the theater's dream state, inserted with the various registries and synaptic firings of plot, awaking from a Hollywood feeling having somehow participated in it.  Entertainment the long thin wire pushed deep past cortex and pulsing.
Anyway this entertainment has something to do with Henrot, the surface means, and the telephones delivering comic haywire monologues into a viewers ear, the carousel, the overabundance of registry achieving big fatigue, delivery vehicles for the assuage of how fun it all is, so much fun.


See too: Venice vs Triennial, Mark Leckey at Haus Der Kunst + Kunsthalle Basel, “Puddle, pothole, portal” at Sculpture Center,

Contemporary Art Quarterly

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Cross referencing Greene-Naftali, CAQ is missing around 7 exhibitions of Bacher's, but also contains another 2 the Greene-Naft CV does not mention. This cross reference and accounting was interested in being profound. It is not. In a world of such connectivity and surveillance planes can still go missing in the dark part of the ocean. Just "Vanish." The thought of this now is unthinkable. Heads erupt on CNN speaking 24/7 to its unfathomability, babbling as a comfort nightlight. The map becomes the territory because it produced the most socially, economically, and material fungibility. The map is productive while experience and anecdotes are not. At best words, writing, babble, in comparison to the marketability of information, of knowing, is just a form of letting someone on the other side of a screen know you are there. Everyone has an opinion, but only one person has the stock from which opinions fount. Now with ease I can know what Bacher was up to in 1988, and all along a thing for granular substance spread across blank expanse, spilling items across floors, sand, baseballs, black orbs, and dusty bookplates of the galaxies, grainy film etc. etc.

See too: And so Quarterly has come to pass.

For the Vinyl Completist, the following appear to be missing.

1992 Sex with Strangers, Trial Balloon, New York
1997 Bunny Yeager LA, Los Angeles
1997 A Closed Circuit, Pat Hearn Gallery, New York
1996 Pat Hearn Gallery, New York
2005 Being There - I Like To Watch TV, (ongoing video installation at White Columns)
2005 Particpant Inc, and Taxter & Spengemann, New York
2006 Bots, Mason Gross Galleries, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ

2008 Taxter & Spengemann, New York

Sascha Braunig at Rodolphe Janssen

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Mixing op's visual concrete against trompe l'oeil's illusory tricks, the two ends of representation, could make a eyerolling mix but within its surrealism - the "smooth" conditions of clean eroticized bodies - its "affectual package" - like Dan vaan Golden-  having a lot to do with advertising's cybernetic affect this 4th wall smudging version.

Peter Saul at Mary Boone

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In a Saul all objects seems made of the same balloons of pocked flesh surface holding the same filler. Saul's world is made of all the same arbitrary "stuff" regardless what it is. All objects are like zits ready to pop the same cream substance. The dogs seem prenatal and pink. That the world is actually all made of the same arbitrary stuff lends some creedence to Saul's horror. The smile of curtain above.

Rudolf Stingel at Sadie Coles

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"All photographs are memento mori. [...] To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability." (Sontag) Richter drained the blood from the body and Stingel the mortician meticulously copying the deceased face's crimson lips atop its sullen corpse: the mortician painter repaints the embalmed dead as motionless life for an audience that wishes for brief illusory glimpse of that thing's memory totally cold.


See too:   Luc Tuymans at David Zwirner, Michaël Borremans at Dallas Museum of Art,

Dylan Spaysky at Clifton Benevento

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For Jane Bennett the pathologic hoarder expresses a heightened sensitivity to the world of objects, not some vestigial evolutionary trait gone haywire post-scarcity.  For Bennett's hoarder the world is a little like Toy Story 3, in which the cheap and mass produced must be saved from the incinerator, kept indefinitely and experienced with connection. And perhaps the mass production doll replacing the handmade one coincides with a turn from paganist expression to materialist hoarding expression. Anyway, Spaysky, who feels something towards garbage, attempts smuggling their components out of the trash. The "warm" items of refuse attempt their own repackaging, a reincarnation, second life in the only way objects know how: camouflaging themselves as fresh commodities. Like the drug smuggler casting his contraband in the shape of Jesus and painted to escape the prying eyes of men seeking to ruin them, Spaysky recasts the trash as flimsy endearing objects that we are made to love.


See too: Yuji Agematsu at Real Fine Arts, Yuji Agematsu at Artspeak

Nicolas Ceccaldi at Real Fine Arts

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Ceccaldi repeating the wearables. In the original exhibition their lightness and precarity made even the survey of their fragililty feel impure. We dirtying their weight with our unclean sight, merchandise to decor the human like a Christmas tree. Projecting the missing bodies these were meant to adorn. Now the slightly more ruined adornments bear what is implicit prior: their decrepitness in sight, commodities decorating what should be free.



See too: Nicolas Ceccaldi at Mathew, Anna Uddenberg and Nicolas Ceccaldi at MEGA Foundation

Valerie Snobeck at Essex Street

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As abstraction, the bodied-object no longer resembles us alone. Our bodies accessorized, attached, hooked up to small wired black devices that we bring with us everywhere, became uniform. The millenia of clothes and decoration were highlights individuating our bodies' translucent lumpy bag across cultures, differentiating. But now every body contains a little black box.


See too: “Flat Neighbors” at Rachel Uffner

Henning Bohl at What Pipeline

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Use the magnifying glass to find him, "Knot guy," wishing for control, he wishes the world to be rational and organized, his wish, deep down, is that the world be sensible and ordered. Not being so, he rails against this. The knots being so, he asserts authority over them, his realm he seeks to control some small portion of, a symptom of most overly authoritative blogs on aesthetics. The inconsolable arbitrariness of the world is a scary cosmic horror, thus knot guy assuredly does not like the vast abyss of non-meaning that Bohl has been politely skipping across falling into for some time now. Bohl is the indeterminate horror that knot guy fears, of the possibility of arbitrariness, inconsequence. (This is why conservatism, tradition, fear-mongering and religion all go hand-in-hand.) Fearing a world where meanings and distinctions slip, erode and are horribly abused in dark concrete cells called studios.


See too: Adriana Lara at Algus Greenspon

Miami 2015 Review

Nursing the post-Miami with these past selections is now complete:

Michael Krebber at Greene Naftali

Michael Krebber at Nagel Draxler

Michael Krebber at Daniel Buchholz

Ann Craven at Confort ModerneBrian Calvin at Le Consortium
Heather Guertin at Brennan & GriffinKaspar Müller at Société
Katherine Bernhardt at Venus Over Manhattan
Paul Cowan at Clifton BeneventoSanya Kantarovsky at Marc Foxx
Miriam Cahn at Jocelyn Wolff
Richard Hawkins at Jenny’s and Richard Telles
Keith Mayerson at Freddy
Raimer Jochims at Jacky Strenz
Richard Rezac at Isabella Bortolozzi
Frances Stark at Daniel BuchholzSimon Denny at MoMA PS1
Simon Denny at Portikus
Michael E. Smith at Sculpture Center
Michael E. Smith at Lulu
Michael E. Smith at Susanne Hilberry
David Douard at Johan Berggren
Trisha Donnelly at Air de Paris
Pentti Monkkonen at High Art
Pentti Monkkonen at Jonathan Viner
Albert Oehlen at New Museum
Albert Oehlen at Skarstedt
Isa Genzken at David Zwirner
John Miller, Dominik Sittig at Nagel Draxler
Jonas Wood at David Kordansky
Alicja Kwade at Kunstmuseum St. Gallen
Lutz Bacher at Statens Museum for Kunst
Lutz Bacher at Daniel Buchloz

Lutz Bacher at Daniel Buchholz
James Hoff at VI, VII
Zak Prekop at Shane Campbell
Will Benedict at Overduin & Co.
Will Benedict at Bortolami
Will Benedict at Bergen Kunsthall
Will Benedict at Balice Hertling

Haegue Yang at dépendance
Amanda Ross-Ho at The Approach
Magnus Andersen at Neue Alte Brücke & Dorothy Iannone at Air de Paris
Dorothy Iannone at Peres Projects

Robert Barry at Schindler Church

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Wall text is awful, it is the domain of the advertorial, that assaultive violent realm reaching across space to clutch you and place its thought in your own. Advertising and Conceptual art's same concerns for tautology, non-sequitur and profoundly desensible statements. Slogans to pretty much wipe the brain. Here it is ethereally placed onto the walls of a modernist church which too advertised space. I like Robert Barry.

Richard Hawkins at Jenny’s and Richard Telles

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What if we said something like, collage becomes important as the collisions of the world's disparate systems become increasing violent, and the Surrealists and Frankfurters were wrong that irrational juxtapostion wouldn't spark any mass as the world world became the biggest surrealist juxtaposition of all, and that collage in the larger sense - the sense that Hawkins has practiced since the beginning - was meant instead to make "alternative forms of touch" as soft touchdowns, as a sort of pathos? The decrepit sexual patina grown over Hawkins work wasn't always so. There were once clean young men paper-clipped to fields of bright fabric, and anyone was yet to be beheaded.

Merlin Carpenter at Reena Spaulings

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"Self-Consciousness" in painting mainly excused noodly paintings in rhetoric as sales adage's humble aggrandizing: a painter so conscious they cannot paint! Oh how romantic. Carpenter amped this to the level of broadcast, enacting the paralysis on the viewer. Attempts to unpack exhibitions as even description overflow, stacking sub-clauses and tangentials and questions of where to even begin with a vantage that can be continually shifted in attempts to circumscribe what is exactly at stake. So, a list: what is going on is that formally the paintings might actually not suck, this is big, because if they do, contain the possibility of formally not sucking, this means that the "conceptually orientated" Carpenter may be invested formally as a painter (and which he may never have not been to begin with) and if he is a formally invested painter, which he might be, means we would have to go back, reassess, though he may just be turning "on" for this exhibition a formal investment and never will be again which would make this a "conceptual gesture," Carpenter may not have even made these paintings, and would that matter, but what would that mean if someone can suddenly "switch on" a formal investment, and can formal investment be a joke if it is taken so far as to actually formally invest oneself so far as to make paintings which contain the possibility of not formally sucking, or is irony always overpowered by its sign, and is that even possible that Carpenter is not formally invested but is making paintings that don't entirely suck - and I brought a second party in to confirm the possibility of these not entirely formally sucking, which second party did affirm the possibility - and are these categories more useless than thought, but then what does that mean for so many formally invested painters who may or not be emotionally wounded by Carpenter's, or hired lackey's, ability to just pull 40 out of a hat, assuming they were so easy as to pull out of a hat, and what would that mean for "painting today," for then Carpenter to happily ironize 40 paintings with a ledger accounting the 40x40k= 1.6 million dollars of paintings underlining painting as cultural object of conspicuous consumption, and the whole art trope of symbolic cred to $ cash-in that many of the conceptual sort must resort, and Carpenter's obvious awareness of this, and again subclauses of whether awareness of an artistic scapegoating preclude that wiener from being eaten, and I would have thought Carpeneter's paintings were selling for more than that at this point, and what does it mean that Carpenter is making paintings that have the possibility of standing at a level with so much championed painting today on formal level even as a self-aware ironic "conceptual" conceptual cash-in if this exhibition in fact is and if they do sell and if Carpenter is aware of all this, though the mirrored floor's reflection's points all point towards..., at all and if the painting do in fact not suck of course which we can not be sure, so switch those on and off at leisure, and one hasn't mentioned a Marxist or Bourdiean take on this en abyme.


See too:  Merlin Carpenter at Overduin & Co., Adriana Lara at Algus Greenspon, Merlin Carpenter at MD 72

Jochen Lempert at Between Bridges

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Taped like gift wrap to walls, the curling paper stresses the physical precariousness of silver held gelatin. Grain clinging like dust to paper; eyelashes etched into the silver they prevent from falling into the black iris behind it, which is poetic. The overt romance balanced not so much by an attachment to science, but just the basic desire to show: "Trained as a Biologist" it is easy to say that Lempert provides a sort of phenomenological augment to any scientific illustrativeness, that like Audubon who upset the world of avian illustration by depicting accurate birds in naturalistic motion (as opposed to the stuffed rigidity of classificatory diagram common to the time it) was realized you can learn two things about the world at once.

William Pope.L at Steve Turner

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There's a joke here, somewhere, but the joke dissipates abruptly and the punchline, lost, disperses the energy of its expectation to an audience as nervous flatness. This type of joke flips the roles, the performer now audience to reaction, making the best of such jokes just complex enough to contain within the possibility of real punchline hidden and produce doubt, a heightened consciousness of where exactly this all lay, the blankness of its meaning a projectable void that you can stand on many sides of.


See too: William Pope.L at Catherine Bastide

Manfred Pernice at Galerie Neu

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There are emotional stakes. Sluggish works burdened by difficult existence, the 1000 years of an Imperial Cathedral bears the same weight as a Cheeseburger, all strewn the same next to a deflating globe. Construction, for Pernice, is made like a complaint, the decisions feel heavy and won. Manfred Pernice at Regen Projects had trouble getting erect, the depressive often does, but at this new gallery gets it up with a troubled aloofness: stacking premises the possibility for it but it doesn't feel like real monumentality but faking it for the onlookers, stacking like the pained smile as response.


See too: Manfred Pernice at Regen Projects,  Group Show at Bortolami and Galerie Neu at Gladstone Gallery