Lee Lozano at KARMA

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Hard to do better linguistic service to Lozano than the Molesworth quoted in the PR. And then what better book than Lehrer-Graiwer's One Work, Dropout, taking Hainley's detective format (though in far more FBI sanctioned means) to find the criminal gone and the epilogue, the loss, as the climax. And so despite the wellness of our language's attention it doesn't yet deplete the metaphorical meat from behind their crust. And Which like the dropout itself, painting a series of subjectivities, of choices, consequential actions leading to a piece bereft of its initiator, the death of their author, and their corpse surface left as a reflection of us.

Koenraad Dedobbeleer at Clearing

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Go back and look through it. Dedobbeleer never quite producing the same object twice. Packaged as units, the additions make for an n+1 movement continuously distending itself, a palliative against the headache of art's circumscription i.e. eluding the circle by adding one more, not so much resisting identity as a resisting "signature." Rather than the signature's motif of some variable we can solve for, instead we look for an equation that would satisfy any new addition, any one more, the sensibility at the heart it. An ambiguity manifest in the objects themselves who lack any taxonomic class beside that of simply objects, feeling less sculptural than misplaced, removed, the small look of the functional. Making their absolute functionlessness sort of spooky, like looking at a corpse.


See too: Charline von Heyl at Gisela Capitain, Richard Rezac at Isabella Bortolozzi
Amy Sillman at Sikkema Jenkins, Mark Grotjhan at Karma, Oscar Tuazon at Le Consortium & Paradise Garage

Isa Genzken at Hauser Wirth & Schimmel + Daniel Buchholz

(Hauser Wirth & Schimmel, Daniel Buchholz)

Genzken's (post-fucking-the-bauhaus) work is a box containing the sound of its own making. Genzken so loved by artists as a consummate "maker," a producer without pretension or ideology but whose work advocates its creation: the amassment of itself, the making of the work contained within itself, the object created, creative.  Genzken founded strategies rather than objects, an artistic down-shifting, a speed that could overtake. "the most influential living artist not because everything looks like it, but because it predicated a conglomerate speed absorbing any last vestiges of particular attention to individuated objects" i.e. When we see Genzken we react to the deployment or manipulation/alteration to its strategy, the means of attending the object rather than object itself. Weirdly deny the consumptive act of looking by permanently existing in a state of limbo that, with the rise to rule of art's image alongside the internet, allowed its acceleration to not self-deplete under an all seeing eye. See Josef Strau.


See too: DAS INSTITÜT at Serpentine Gallery, KAYA at Deborah Schamoni, Isa Genzken at David Zwirner, Isa Genzken at Institute of Contemporary Art, Josef Strau at House of Gaga

Puppies Puppies at BFA Boatos

(Link)

Like the oral tradition whose stories allowed modification to fit the moment’s ethos, PP’s unconsensual public domaining of intellectual property proposes the Chiquita banana as open material. Beyond the usual mash-up/mix-up of post-warholian popists, PP’s appropriation remains intact, using brand as pre-established content for its storytelling, inhabiting the corporate/commercial sign systems that have come to determine our world. Harry Potter is the new Iliad for better or worse. And rather than collage systems of most contemporary post-Kelley-Walker appropriationist whose vita-mixing of signs stand in for the dismantling of Empire’s own, PP takes the post-cybernetic appropriations at their word, using the contemporary no-copyright anarchism along the lines of much more politically activated and transgressive forms of appropriation of, say, slash fiction. But so this public-domaining of the private one could posit as having to do with, not only, drag (drag as corporeal parasitization) but too the dirty and cruel world of bodies forced to adopt the identity and means of the larger cultural empire that oversees it, i.e. Adorno’s conform or perish: and that there is a sadness at the base of PP’s comedy that involves the body adopting not its own subjectivity but the the larger culture's as its means of representation with the implicit and ostensible threat to not be seen at all. Making the work super gay, even without the title’s innuendo or PR’s suggesting. Like same-sex marriage, acceptance for a subaltern group within a larger dominant culture comes with the implicit warning necessitating conforming for its acceptance. Of course PP’s marriage proposal as part of its exhibitionary history. PP obviously positing the tertiary: replace conform with thieve, steal the banana.

Which then, 2.): Like Gober’s drains and sinks conflating cleanliness and washing with sickness and waste (drain - and all its attendant synonyms: bleed, deplete, exhaust, consume, empty, reduce) draining away in the wash, PPs hand sanitizer updating Goberian themes to its hypochondrial present, the drain of wash is replaced with the sterilization and preservation of self. Like fruit gone overripe, the body, the vanitas of PP’s early interest, and all its attendant themes of transience, under overarching theme of homosexuality of this exhibition (for whom viral conditions have dark history) and Puppies own experience with a body that betrayed him, and the fruits of the title and the fruits on the table whose bodies and the metaphorical ones too all too early compromised themselves and rotted away on tables, and the desire to be clean, to preserve bodies, the new chemical cleanliness, antibacterial science replacing good-ole-soap, a sterilization that, as we know of those who adolesce under such conditions are prone to new problems, eating boogers reduces asthma in children, the need to be cleanly to conform your body to dominant standards erupts new problems. Dirtiness a real drag, drag as dirty; do you see where this goes?


See too: Puppies Puppies at Vilma Gold, Puppies Puppies at Queer Thoughts, “Friday, July 24, 2015″ at Essex Street

Past: James Hoff

"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, 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."

Past: James Hoff at VI, VII

Matthew Watson at Federico Vavassori

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That despite the overtness of their visual frenzy - the visible rendered as technical proficiency - and the importance placed upon it, the visible is - or could feel- unnervingly subordinated to our relation to and what we know of the objects, which is very little, the heavy weight placed toward their unidentifiable reason versus the degree of their depiction, and the less we know about these objects the more psychotic they become: the arbitrariness of the subject incommensurate with the exhaustive - pathological - attention paid, and even if the objects are of some discerning import - which, doubtful - what good does paying them attention in paint do - beside re-inscribing their wealth by leveraging technical prowess and labor time. The attention paid to objects as things of their own intrinsic, post-human, value is unnerving, an uncertainty created at how we relate to our world, everyone is only ever both a mirror and an object, do you see yourself?


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

Paul Sietsema at Matthew Marks

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The hamfisted questioning of painting representation which we all thought had died when pipes were called to question, and Foucault treatised, returns possibly with intonations of "Forget Foucault" whose simulacrum comes bulldozing in with questions of representations replacing real. It's literal here in the currency whose IRL lines authenticate it, and questions abound as to whether perfect replication of those lines would still make authenticate currency, since the map makes the territory, the code to make the currency, etc. etc. and MFA questions of whether painting a drip is the same as a drip. The most interesting question is "Hey, what's under there?" covered by authentication lines. Did Sietsema expose his underwear showing his own very-technically-unaccomplished painting or is it very technically reproduced copy of an unaccomplished painting? The main point is we like looking at dead things and wondering if they can still be considered life.

Silke Otto-Knapp at greengrassi

(link)

The Otto-Knappian nostalgia glossed contemporary palette's palatability makes her recycling fun. We get its depictions at the remove we can respect them. Modernism in a dark lens so we can talk about it without being it. With the ethereal silver surface appending some Last Year at Marienbad memory as surrealism. They're backdrops to us looking, sort of ingratiating you as the actor to them.


See too: Silke Otto-Knapp at Galerie der Stadt Schwaz, “Seven Reeds” at Overduin & Co.

Past: Herbert Brandl

"The Germanic brushstroke. The fanned and smeared.  Brandt's earlier paintings joining Richter's always distinct two practices, abstraction and fan-brush, lead to mutual horror, revealing the lapse Richter himself couldn't even..."

Click Here for Herbert Brandl at Bärbel Grässlin

Ree Morton at Alexander and Bonin

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Usually art's sentimentality comes as a latent or numb form, like Gonzalez-Torres whose catatonia in place of speech is its pathos, articulates it as loss, distance-from as its means. This a common theme in art; expressions come pre-packaged with their antidote and us all walking around quite well medicated by it and in the face of such desensitization Morton's explicit sentimentality is overbearing, with a theatricality almost comforting.  We need it now obviously, some comfort food, and like the character of Clinton singing elegies for losses, we create a collective fantasy, we desire revision, that someone will step in and just read us the good parts, a fantasy.

Walter Swennen at Xavier Hufkens

(link)

Flat-footed painting, and the precedent to today's Richard Aldrich or Allison Katz. There is a distinct aversion to deftness. Swennen's painterly literalness: nothing hidden, there is no magic, just the object and just the plodding painter's sisyphean onus, push paint. It makes an image. The interest in this hamhandness is in never pulling the same gambit twice, still producing some object interest while lacking any painterly ambition whatsoever. Doing so with half the sleeve of tricks of most painters, almost ascetically so.

Mark Manders at Zeno X

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There isn't a Manders sculpture that doesn't use an instance as a permanent fixture.  This stasis, like a pause, blurs sculpture as its image, blur their bronze eternality with the fresh moment they inhabit. A moment replaced with its object. To be both an object and its ossification, the chair is still a chair even if its a sculpture of it, and bronze dogs are sculptures well as depictions of them, these odd points of superpostion between their difference that makes the world uncanny, reduced 88%, like all the various fives in the world still representing the other. Its a subtle thing treating the world as an image, masking the violence of our treatment of it as such.

Tino Sehgal at Palais de Tokyo

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There's been some phenomenal take-downs of Sehgal. From Benhamin Meyer-Krahmer's comparison of Sehgal to Paris Hilton in TzK or Scanlan's to the Music Man in Artforum. Both unfortunately unavailable online. Both wildly lucid and entirely written with the same tongue-in-cheek smile and slightly exasperated understanding that, despite their overwhelmingly negativity towards it, provide the most incisive compelling explanation of it free of the jargon usually accumulating in stacks as the columns that herald them, the artists. It is perhaps the trait of the negative review that the author wishes to be understood, as opposed to the masses of words which however useless semantically already denote the crown.

http://ge.tt/2yFzSwh2/v/1
http://ge.tt/2yFzSwh2/v/0

The radicality of Sehgal's practice softens as it finds ways around its ascetic limitations, as it is documented by onlookers, as it sells itself to museums, as images on CAD.

Sara Deraedt at Essex Street

(link)

Vacuums look like Star Wars robots, that is a technology not sleek but faux mechanical, overly so. The term "greeble" was invented for Star Wars' scene builders to describe the false detailing added to increase surfaces visual complexity, to thus exoticize if not heighten the inferred technology. Vacuums are a tube that sucks and yet their encasements evolve all sorts of sleek sexual-mechanical curves and corners, a shell that infers the inner without much referring to it. Agree with the assesment that these are more Konrad Klapheck than Christopher Williams, but only because the objects themselves are. Removing William's pornographic white light for the pseudo-affectlessness of point and shoot reveals the objects themselves as Klapheckesque. The casing isn't designed for the object inside but for person deciding upon it, obviously.


See too: Nina Beier at Croy Nielsen, Nancy Lupo at Swiss Institute, Nancy Lupo at 1857, Nairy Baghramian at Marian Goodman, Katja Novitskova at Kunsthalle Lissabon, Klara Lidén, Alicia Frankovich at Kurator,

Past: Will Benedict

"Thinking of Benedict like a gothicly depressed Baldessari is helpful. These look the way having a cold feels."

Will Benedict at Overduin & Co.

Past: Urs Fischer

"...because like Scanlan on Sehgal, mediocrity is acceptable to a public so long as it has a hand in it."

Click here: Urs Fischer at JTT

Michele Abeles at 47 Canal

(link)

Signs distressed like denim, "suggesting the works as literal vortexes into which you might be pulled" "Call them pictures generation 2.0" the symbols vita-mixed into oblivion, like David Salle amphetamined on Kelley Walker for the attention deficit. And today the Nytimes posts an article about decision fatigue, the overabundance of information, in which people at malls faced with so much choice cognitively exhaust and the brain, in crisis, in attempt to manage resources, begins to decide either impulsively or not at all, purchasing unrestrainedly or leaving with nothing. So whether you feel tired of these or want to purchase one probably has something to do with that.


See too: CAWD on Desensitization, Steve Reinke at Isabella Bortolozzi, Rachel Rose at High Art

Georgie Nettell at Reena Spaulings

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Okay so let's be honest here: what we've got is Nettel taking cultural-cool's fetishization of politics and basically metastasizing it into garishly obvious and horribly blank versions. Like Shepard Fairey posters for today's political desensitization that feels like a personal catatonia, the semio-dissonance frustrates. Like the iconic hope poster quickly depleting its utopic optimism, now appearing ironic gravestone. Embodying the corruption of desire for political agency and replacing it with the politically negligent. The strategy of corrupting its signs, of language, ruins our ability to form political response. If you fuck up language, the rational, enough it destroys the opposition's ability to speak, to rebut. Enough of this causes the "learned helplessness in rats." Again, our political desensitization. Common assumption that art should be a positive force is mistake, sometimes it just proves how evil things can be, like leaving dirty dishes in place of discourse, we feel nothing but alienation.


See too:  Will Benedict at Overduin & Co., Gili Tal at Jenny’s, Merlin Carpenter at Overduin & Co.

Sarah Charlesworth at Campoli Presti

(link)

Not being able to see the object inferred, the faintness and its soft faded form, leaving it where sight doesn't quite apprehend it, indefinite states where even though we barely see the thing we still think we know it. Charlesworth's excision of variables from photography leaves portions of its experience as it. Here we don't really see anything, but still see. Dropping the context from objects so we are left with ourselves reflected in them, nobody to hold your hand through it.  The coldness of such a practice might seem to border cruel.

See too: Sarah Charlesworth at New Museum

Kathy Prendergast at Kerlin

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Scientists detect distant planets by measuring the color shifts marking the slow wobble in the precession of stars. The unseen planet's gravity pulling on the star. The amount of wobble infers the size of the planet orbiting it, with everyone hoping for a roughly earth sized planet in the "hospitable zone" to make headlines and add to the list places where life may exist. The point is looking at the blacked-out-except-for-cities's-dots atlas pages is analogy to the stars-which-may-harbor-life. You look at them and imagine worlds.
Like Lutz Bacher's interest in the granular, or Paul Thek's dust, or Gonzalez-Torres' replenishing feilds, it converts the world into an expanse, appending distance, we feel distant, its loss, its dissolve, things returning to dust.


See too: Lutz Bacher at 356 Mission

Charles Mayton at David Lewis

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Mayton's tooling around inside painting's molding corpse has gone on way longer that most, way further than necrophilia - while others have cleaned their pallets of its thick blood in exchange for the clean tools of airbrushes, rendering, and illustrative blending - Mayton has tent-poled the corpse, setting up shop in its really-getting-old flesh. A lot of this was predicted by Polke and mocked by Kippenburger even before it had turned but it's Mayton's stubborn continuation of the corpse-fuckery that manifests whatever interest might lay here, still itemizing black organs turned to mush from already several decades of autopsy in hopes of finding a new clue. Like long ago the host asked the guests to leave but one person's commitment to the party long since past you stay for just to see if anything might come of it, and everyone waiting and everyone else screaming please leave, please stop.

Past: Jamian Juliano-Villani

"Of course the concoctions going to make you feel nauseous it's still got a face."

Past: Jamian Juliano-Villani at Tanya Leighton

Nina Beier at Croy Nielsen

(link)

Moving from a visual virtuality to a dispersed cultural one, finding points to overlap as sculptural homophones: cultural cross points bringing their distance together like two ends of a blanket. All the points, listed neatly in the press release, converge here in the voluptuous ass as its breakthrough. You thankfully get to assemble the metaphors yourself, the spine of it: the venus's absorption into our cultural memory (like, the most latent image) surfacing in strange objects, objects that massage the asses they mimic. The vibrato chair's pleasure, or the rotund tourist thieving the paradisiacal pubis he cannot contain himself from taking, utlimately ruining his desire, what an ass.

These latent images precipitated by human desire, embedded into common objects, as anthropologically surreal manifestations of it continually becoming a more interesting aspect of today's surrealism resurge, strongly produced mostly by women. See too:


See too:  Nancy Lupo at Swiss Institute, Nancy Lupo at 1857, Nairy Baghramian at Marian Goodman, Katja Novitskova at Kunsthalle Lissabon, Klara Lidén, Alicia Frankovich at Kurator, Nina Beier at David Roberts Art Foundation,

Michaela Meise at STANDARD (OSLO)

Meise's 15 years of reproduction of modernist tropes in awkward phrasings is, like Raoul de Keyser, its visual aberration:  Meise's (or de Keyser's) irregulairty forces a recognition of their having been a regularity, a system of rules to which these avoid conforming. Aside from visual interest, allowing inference to see why these wouldn't have been acceptable then and are of interest now. Like, placing the thing outside the circle allows the circle to be seen at all.


Raoul De Keyser at Inverleith House

Alma Allen at Shane Campbell

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Smooth muscle occurs mostly in the gut, uterus, walls of blood vessels, bladder, sphincter, etc.- the body's transit tubes - and these sculptures look like the things those organs produce: turds, early fetuses, blood cells, kidney stones. Shapes assembled resemble a basset hound, the artist's sculptures, partially digested. There is analogy to be made: exchanging the smooth muscle tube for linear time and the sculptor for an intestinal tract. Freed from the striations of skeletal muscle that once predicated historical sculpture, the smooth muscle sculptor turns to the open touch of just rubbing, frottage with the inanimate until the rocks are tumbled to our gratification. The basset hound even looks like a partially digested dog.


See too: Nicolas Deshayes at Modern Art

Aaron Garber-Maikovska at High Art

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"It will never be realistic for him to claim a critical position for his current works outside of consumerism" says Jonathan Griffin before connecting this thought to the artist's investment in areas of bland mass commerce (which we could extrapolate here to the gallery itself) but never really seeing the point through: What is with the strong connection between commerce and Garber-Maikovska? The higher powers commanding the hand on Garber-Maikovska's ouija-board canvases appears a ghost suffering palsy attempting graffiti: A lot people point out they like hieroglyphs or some beginning cuneiform. The point is they're inscrutable but look meaningful. A ghost affect. This has something to do with commerce, with commodities' ability to move us to buy.


See too: Group Show at Salle Principale, Merlin Carpenter at MD 72, Aaron Garber-Maikovska at Clearing

Nina Canell at Wien Lukatsch

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I'm not entirely convinced art's absorption of the technologic look isn't simply a means to bring something it doesn't understand into a realm it does in order to feel some small control over it. Let's face it, the world has moved beyond pretty much everyone, we only get our small corner of it, and it would make psychologic sense to develop pathologies in order to feel control of something you have little over. Fetishes develop over a lack?


See too: CAWD on Fetish, Ajay Kurian at Rowhouse Project, Simon Denny at MoMA PS1, Ben Schumacher at Musee d’art contemporain de Lyon

Past: Tris Vonna-Michell at Jan Mot

"the glowing object claims some illuminated significance that connotes but doesn't necessarily mean but just gives a screen to look into and empty."

Click here for Tris Vonna-Michell at Jan Mot

Fred Lonidier at Michael Benevento

(link)

Politics aside, which at time when a president-elect we don't like is one of few who thinks such trade agreements are up for discussion while everyone we do like thinks any discussion spells, like, imminent economic apocalypse and a current president who we didn't like but now do but as the opposite rears head and who promised to but didn't enter discussion of said trade - and so what a time for this exhibition - making a real ideological pickle indeed, the work which can't be read with any real ease here and who probably could have stood long enough there, and which proves the book it needs, and so can't easily be read anytime soon and so we interpret it at the level of surface, form becoming the content, the affectual, having all sorts of relation to today, like watching debates with the sound off and which we sometimes did, it looks pretty good.

Daniel Buren at Bortolami

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The ascetic refusal Buren's game of course eventually gives expression to Heimo Zobernig. Buren's game aimed outward as critique of the walls, someone would eventually see the opening and drive it at the art itself. Zobernig wetting the sand beneath feet to prove it was quicksand all along. The mental fart of Zobernig reairs in seeing these, Buren, in trying to ascertain the difference of one but tone. It's the Baderian question of a difference between fire bricks on floor and shrimp on foosball. Of the complete dumbness of objects, their utter asinity. Of course Zobernig needs Buren as his hostage in order to remain in negotiations, and Buren's calm cool continuation despite it, still striping away, is sort of endearing if not insane. The gallery, the institution, looks on with a smile.


see too: Darren Bader at Kölnischer Kunstverein,  Heimo Zobernig at Indipendenza, Heimo Zobernig at Kunsthaus Bregenz, Heimo Zobernig at Simon Lee

Pentti Monkkonen at Truth and Consequences

(link)

"Blanks" is a production term for a material partially formed that has yet to receive whatever finalizing process will finish it, painting, milling, etc. The blank receives all type of process and treatments. The work formed work yet unfinished. They then recieve the processes of production, for Monkkonen the individual sign systems at play, the quasi-readymades applied the blank of painting. Monkkonen who has obviously been playing with painting as product for some time. The bug splatter, like the expressionist's before it, becomes the interpretable tea-leaves of the painting, the same as the cell-phone roach and patterning: signifiers that perform the interpretable content of "Monkkonen." Again treating painting like a blank, a material for production, vessels.


See too: Pentti Monkkonen at High Art, Pentti Monkkonen at Jonathan Viner

Jay ‘J Berd’ Keating at Freddy

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Freddy's low overhead model geared toward the internet and openings returns freedom from certain stakes and pressures making for all sorts of decisions at odds with normalized gallery modes socially reproduced - exhibitions in barns and second tier cities and artists lacking any semblance of social capital (becoming its social capital), unknowns, the tragically unhip amidst the tragic hip and the elderly, which is to say wonky curation separate from the usual sense - order from a different logic - and but still function well - which is what we find so endearing about the outsiders and self-taught artist themselves, including the odd infatuation with color, and - while Freddy is no outsider and - and while the playbook drawn from isn't totally new (like really at all) it's the fact that it's still drawn from by an insider that makes it important to its outsidery quality, otherwise I'm not sure we'd see it.

Amalia Pica at Marc Foxx

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Marble once stood as bodies, now here the prosthetics that infer the body. The space the sculptor once removed has become the more common cultural object. Like formalist lessons in negative space, the vacillation of passive/active object has significance, and metaphorical overtones towards all forms of speaking vs listening, active bodies passive bodies, protests and police: things inform their opposite, and we become the other, create it. etc. etc. etc.


Further inference of bodies by the objects that matter: Park McArthur at Chisenhale, Klara Lidén, Alicia Frankovich at Kurator, Nairy Baghramian at Marian Goodman, Yngve Holen at Kunsthalle Basel

Maggie Lee at 356 Mission

(link)

Coolness is an affect and the point attempted to be made was that adopting these strictures to see the subject express through the grate of social coding was its pathos. Did everyone then just think they were cool then? The loss of self to the adoption of vernaculars. The objects here are the physical embodiment of the grate through which we express self at that moment of earliest self-expression in newfound self-awareness immediately confronted with the terror of self-consciousness. "Gigi is me in 2006." A teenage self-conciousness and the distance as adoption-of-another-subjectivity having a lot to do with art and its performativity.


See here: Maggie Lee at Real Fine Arts

Daniel Rios Rodriguez at Lulu

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The crust laden and the spiritual, it's hard to do sentimentality in art without being an outsider. You can't paint a flower without ironizing its loveliness, your desire to impress this. Sentimentality drips into its performance, theatrical, a too-much-presence and we blush for the artist having fallen into the trap of their own subjectivity for them, too often. Thick paint helps. It alleviates with its own paintertly over-presence, which provides, if not an ironizing, at least a solidarity. The paint expresses materially the same excess as the subject is. Confidence in clumsiness, endlessly endearing, a situation where you'll want to care for them.


See too: James Lee Byars at VeneKlasen/Werner

Klara Liden and Karl Holmqvist at Kunstverein Braunschweig

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Charming post-Naumanian displacers of content, the work's emptiness as interest (fun or dark?™) maybe finds relevance to current political situations in that one must find interest elsewhere: the contents of speaking is beside itself - nonexistent - and we must look around corners, to the edges of whited out posters, build our own shoddy unstable platforms, find the non-content of its rhetoric and ham-handed demagoguery as a new type of poetry we can't ignore it has steamrolled itself into our vision, just like our political leaders.  "In the video work Nhite Woise (2015), Klara Liden and Karl Holmqvist connect in a charming yet dilettante dance performance."



See too: Klara Lidén, Alicia Frankovich at Kurator, Karl Holmqvist and Ei Arakawa at Overduin & Co.

Camille Blatrix at Wattis

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The hospital aesthetic. How objects present themselves when encountering you in your vulnerable situations. Which in a Gallery is a pleasant change, to have an object soften itself to you, rather than brutalize you with austerity. A softening [that is] less the adoption of commericial interest in infantalising you [luxury car interiors that look as intestinal as they do sexual] and of which much similar art interprets but instead a vulnerable thing. The cuteness of Hospital beds, which are ostensibly sympathetic to us.  Like that other Camille, Chaimowicz, the look of object who wish to project their sympathetic nature to us humans. This is what iPhones will look like in the future. They are already starting to. Like baleens overturned and vibrating.


See too: Marc Camille Chaimowicz at INDIPENDENZA, Richard Rezac at Isabella Bortolozzi

Lynn Hershman Leeson at Vilma Gold

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CAD never explains why things are important but Hershmann should be paid attention to not for this exhibition but for her resurgence now showing in Dreamlands: her forecasting much of the renderstentialist video and robot art of today's youth. Skip these images and go watch a low quality online sample of her work Seduction of a Cyborg and then everything else and see all the foreshadowing of Moulton's mock techno-spiritual, Wolfson's sex robots, Atkins' authorial monologue and sound cuts, Rose's affective slippages, Steryl's anti-comedy, Cortright's digital Sherman-esque subject construction, James Richards affective collaging, etc. etc.  It's all there.

See too: Shana Moulton at Kunsthaus Glarus, Jordan Wolfson at David Zwirner, Rachel Rose at High Art, Ed Atkins at Serpentine Gallery, Petra Cortright at Société

Danh Vo at White Cube

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Vo, the interminable and loved symbolist, coming out of Gober into literalness. Whereas Gober invented his own icons self-filled - plumbing metaphors - Vo compositionalizes pre-existing signs to move them around in space. Sculpture becomes words, texts of an affectual sign space, so the curators can write their own on the wall. Bones ascended alongside Jesus into the higher plane extinction.

See too: Gina Litherland at Corbett vs. Dempsey

Emily Mae Smith at Rodolphe Janssen

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The trend couldn't be clearer at this point, the neo-imagists.

Mathew Cerletty
Orion Martin
Sascha Braunig
Emily Mae Smith
Alice Tippit
Jamian Juliano Villani
Lui Shtini
Milano Chow
Etc.

It's less the digitalization of painting than its conversion to iOS, then made surreal. Like Magritte's redesigning app icons, like surrealism for iPads, like Magritte's rupturing our expectations of standardized images. We today understand icon's intent to be informative with immediacy. Any delay on that causes produces the Magrittean dissonance. The new id eruptions from post-digital dreamlands. But then all those who all already sort of predicted this landscape then:

Christina Ramberg
Diane Simpson
Ray Yoshida
Ed Paschke
Roger Brown
Art Green
Miyoko Ito
James Rosenquist
Etc.

See too: Ray Yoshida at David Nolan, Sascha Braunig at Kunsthall Stavanger, Alice Tippit at Night Club, Lui Shtini at Kate Werble, Sascha Braunig at Rodolphe Janssen, Sascha Braunig at Foxy Production, Mathew Cerletty at Office Baroque,

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CAD breaking precedent. Interview with an Archivist.  Whatever thought of CAD's aggrandizement of the archive, of which it - of one sort - provides, the gesture remains. And while Self aggrandizing its worth through the intellectualization of it may seem a bit much in a day that many - as online posts claim - struggle to get out of bed, it's an argument that at least claims worth for its continuation on a day that many refuse to. Not really many can say the same. Art needs to recon with the fact that the world has - for a long time now - been turning to leave it here, wastelanded and self-ostracized. The implicit statement of the interview that collecting at least sediments a moment - a group or idea as (ideally) unrescindable - is perhaps wishful as it is necessary. Like, if we believe in art, then the archive is necessary, as a group, to prove - even if we don't continuously see eye to eye - that we existed, and antagonistic to whatever else. Events haven't yet shown themselves to be as dire as the Interviewed's AIDs origin was, but the point is beside. An affirmation that of course we are here. And while the outside prolly cares little at most we can look and see at least some - however warped - reflection of ourselves to know - however narcissistically - that we were at here and that is - however esoterically self-ghettoized and corporate - something. However flawed the system, it's a point of representation. “Trauma leads to collecting" not quite collectivization, but the root is there, at least it exists against the real bummer of a day.

Antek Walczak at Jenny’s

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PR: "The prevalence of icons, symbols, and glyphs across the screen interfaces interacted with on a daily basis, and their basic shorthand command work equivalent to the first steps of written language. To communicate, at a glance, tallies of river cargo hauled on the Euphrates (c. 3100 BC), memorable recordings of mastodon hunts and campfires, what gets attention on the App Store."

Humans are information processing machines with leg systems to move us toward the carrot of new information. Dopamine, long mythologized as the "pleasure center," instead creates seeking behavior, which, at the roulette wheel of digital feeds, scrolling news, and authoritative lists, causes all the odd psychological problems of lab rats given access to their own dopamine levers in humans. "After only a few days of training, the monkeys showed a clear preference for choosing the informative colored target." Walczak has proven for some time now, with paintings that prize information-as-legibility, that the usefulness of the information matters none: the complete arbitrariness of it here still invokes its authority.

Misaki Kawai at The Hole

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"Konrad Lorenz argued in 1949 that [cuteness] triggered nurturing responses in adults and that this was an evolutionary adaptation which helped ensure that adults cared for their children, ultimately securing the survival of the species. Some later scientific studies have provided further evidence for Lorenz's theory."

Victor Burgin at Bridget Donahue

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As early internet's de-motivational posters were antidote to the faux-enrichment of the office's patronizingly motivational own, the very first digital memes spread viral in forums and message boards in the new quasi-underground of workers' stolen snippets of off-time web-surfing, a small revolt-solidarity-communicado for the proletoid forced to do so beleagueredly under those signs and not hard to see the viral spread of such comedy and its big business as desire to own one's dark expressions rather than cover it. The point being: with the democratization of image making software and the ability to easily disseminate it the worker - as early as 1998 - immediately creates funny images revolting against its dominant structure asking for false optimism. Memetics are an intensely powerful form of social construction.
Victor Burgin's images arrive from the same period that another Victor gave us the original famous motivational poster, the "Hang in there, Baby" cat. And while Baldwin's markedly expressed positivity and hope (despite dark threat of failure's toll). "Memetics is also notable for sidestepping the traditional concern with the truth of ideas and beliefs. Instead, it is interested in their success." Burgin's instead, with their elusive and meandering political sentiments that couldn't be more obviously intended to deny easy authority or expediency, seem to exist as a radical stop-gapping of message production and instead desiring suspension of the image/text consumption/construction of meaning (a more culturally/politically apropos Baldessari), the blurbs of authority and manufacturing ideology in which everything is related with succinct tautology of demagoguic ease that we find so alluring today.  In the same way de-motivationals were an ironic detachment rupturing the facade of their motivational counterparts, Burgin's exist oppositional to the consumptive force as anti-memes. Which of course has all sorts of relevance to today, Burgin's underground expressions of anti-ideology held hostage in a gallery.


See too:  John Baldessari at Marian Goodman, Henry Flynt at Audio Visual Arts, CAWD on Fetish,

Past: FLAME

"Reinhardt’s dictum of his as the last paintings taken as a challenge rather than rhetoric, certain artists since race to end painting in an escalating torture-porn of it, sending their innocent child paintings to be forcibly taken in all the imaginative ways of the market, ready to prove - by forcible insertion - its shiny new neo-liberal critique to teach it know better, horror as ethics."

Past: Flame at 576 Morgan Ave Apt 3L Gallery

Anna Ostoya at Silberkuppe

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Ostoya takes images of historical, political, personal significance and runs them through the office paper-shredder, into abstraction. The overlay of "art" atop the images, both absorbing and destroying the initial significance, a conceptual gesture, making its futurist and Sheeleresque overlay a quasi-destructive act that reviews of Ostoya's paintings spend most space ignoring to tell you about the images buried because its usually easier to elucidate history than art, at root an act-as-question of what reason if any aesthetic overlay performs in creating significance or just aesthetify them, which in the ex's title reference to the New Objectivity who had no issue in caricaturing the object, this old objectivity still given to enjoy birthing a grotesque.

Past: Maria Lassnig

"It’s the ones that run near amok that are best... [the] subject-object problem permutes as prescient proto-version of Sillman’s bodies-that-matter imbued formalism, and many others..."

Past: Maria Lassnig at MoMA PS1

Leidy Churchman at Rodeo

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Painting representation fails. The plainness of Churchman's depiction is a respect to the source material, a non-compete clause showing deference to the object it can't fully contain or conjure. A fish swims, it shouldn't be the wild fanciful object of some painter's heinous desire. Showing it some respect by leaving it well enough alone, plainness acknowledging the representation that can't do justice to it. Painting treatments like massage to soften the body presented. Like any of Paul Thek's paintings of the Earth hovering over black unarchival void, the distance is homage. PR:"we are so afraid of the brilliance coming at us, and the sharp experience of our life, that we can’t even focus our eyes."

See too: Trevor Shimizu at 47 Canal

Kathe Burkhart at FIERMAN

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What's it take to get your new gallery's first show on CAD?  Running the art advisory for the interminably wonky Salon 94, or a previous gallery for 5 years that never once got on CAD, or Kathe Burkhart. Of course Kathe Burkhart will be the answer. Who knows. Neighbors are jelly. Burkhart is great, and been terribly assigned to group show fodder for a number of years. Nice to see someone step up to bat. CAD's obvious thing for the resurgence of older semi-omitted oft-gay New Yorkers is understandably interesting for what it all predates now. And Burkhart's interest in the campy celebrity seems in line with today's mass-culture minded youth. Neat.

See too: David Rappeneau at Queer Thoughts

Milano Chow at Mary Mary

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Ornateness and decadence is given the silent treatment, made square, hard-edge and if-not-quite cruel at least ordered to austerity, its skin off. They become Clue boards, picturing images as signs to feel in need of decoding, the compositional feng-shui that makes objects mysterious, play along if you like.


See too: Matthew Brannon at Casey Kaplan,  Mathew Cerletty at Office Baroque, Lucy McKenzie at Daniel Buchholz

Amelie von Wulffen at Barbara Weiss

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One of the few painters not caught up in their own stylistic bog, instead with ease shift between means that never feel coerced by their author. It will be fun to one day see von Wulffen's retrospective because there will be surprises and not strategies.

A.L. Steiner at Koenig & Clinton

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A man made blaze-orange and reflective through the stranger emergent rules of capital's risk assessment, donning its anonymous uniform highlighting his labor we are meant to ignore in a world he manicures to pretend the world isn't ending, like we're keeping something intact, like there will be something intact, scrubbing the earth. Channeling all the tragedy of the paradoxical rules that stem from of our world's "rational actors." I.e. To save cents per worker on insurance we paint them orange. Emergence is known for producing some of the most spectacular feats in nature - snowflakes, bird flocks, Giant's Causeway - and in Capital it causes our workers to turn orange. The absurdity is as staggeringly beautiful as it is tragic for the once human who is made subservient to it. I mean maybe this man wanted it. This anonymous and yellow drone trimming our earth to meet the desires of those who control it, channeled here in a photograph of Steiner's personal-as-political best.

Cerith Wyn Evans at Galerie Neu

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The beautification of conceptual art, by assigning it more visceral roles it had once, in theory, rejected, is a hypostatization of conceptual art's poetic function. i.e.: Conceptual Art was always maximally poetic, failing to deliver the bureaucracy its language promised - breaking the glass of language to expose perfume of its confusion, irreductive - and glossing beauty atop to prove it: annoying at best. Wyn Evans engagement with this problem seems, at least partially, the point, the aestheticization of experience and awareness of the gloss. This is the sinister pulsing quality of Wyn Evans, the fact that there is no need for this artificial light.


See too: On Kawara at the Guggenheim

Eric Wesley at Midway Contemporary Art

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Wesley's ability to mock what contains him, a laughable institutional crit whose assault is the brilliant dumbening of art dialect. The Burrito is hot right now. You've got Murillo's 300k one, Flame's mockery of, Bader's continual replenishing it as category, and Wesley's endless one. The difference here is Wesley's insistence of the burrito not its signifier which art has long found a way to be protected from, but to actually work with the burrito, which morphs to Taco Bell here, to force that most base of architecture to reflect on the walls of Midway. The joke isn't Taco Bell placed in art, but actually maybe caring about it.

Erika Vogt at Overduin & Co.

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Big objects mock us. They hystericize space by treating it as plastic, irrationally. And their lumpy forms remind us of our bodies, which makes their injustice to the general order of space a personal issue, taking up space that was, ostensibly, meant for us with a big cartoonish grin. They are weapons. As theater props and staged here they are meant to have a relation to your body.

See too: “Puddle, pothole, portal” at Sculpture Center, Amanda Ross-Ho at The Pit

Julien Nguyen at Freedman Fitzpatrick

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The unending loveliness of these, that, even we must admit, are good, technically adventurous and ripple with sex. Variance in finish shimmer like veins in marble or cocks, undulating detail as arousal: detail is attention paid, stimulation, titillation. For anyone who ever found eroticism in the restraint and rigidity of Piero della Francesca, here is your proof melting with Althoffian foppishness. These things bruise sex out of their flesh. Paintings with the depth of early video games while retaining the material pleasure of scuzz: a man smeared in choking purple softness, and legs splayed. Get close to his pink hand. There have never been more homoerotic paintings than these.


See too: Julien Ceccaldi at Jenny’s

Dena Yago at Sandy Brown

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The PR all but stating the genericness of the images, a perfectly acceptable position that Yago, for a time now, has run with. Genericness is the power of seeing reality transitioning to its metaphor, or concept, its particulars liquify into the universal soup, qualities dissolve. It's really hard to see generic images. If seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees then knowing it is blindness. On being too bored to see. The optic cable is capable of data transmission spikes of roughly 1.25MB/s - the same as an ethernet cable - that are metabolically expensive. As a way to disable the brain's shortcut system researchers don goggles that invert the world into a 24/7 color negative and minds reel at processing raw data, causing profound disorientation, loss of appetite, inability to recognize common objects, colleagues, or family. "This is a hardwired system, and no matter how much you try to override it intellectually, tell it what it should see, it will tell you what it really does see." A difficult system to override, look.


See too: Oscar Tuazon at Le Consortium & Paradise Garage, Larry Poons at Michael Jon & Alan, Heimo Zobernig at Kunsthaus Bregenz, Darren Bader at Radio Athènes, Kaspar Müller at Société, Nancy Lupo at Swiss Institute

"You would think by looking at Jerry Saltz's instagram, and viewing his general media presence, that there is nothing going on in the world besides the fact that half of the population owns a vagina. We have waited to see if he would eventually evolve… if eventually he might become interested in communicating something besides other people’s genitalia, and move onto a more relevant topic- his obvious and continued mid-life crisis. It only takes thirty seconds on Saltz’s instagram to see how destructive and trivial his interests are. How he is using his power to openly fetishize female bodies, in lieu of actually presenting valid cultural critique. [O]ne out of every three of his posts is a vagina."

--> JERRY SALTZ- THE DONALD TRUMP OF ART WORLD SOCIAL MEDIA

Shadi Habib Allah at Reena Spaulings

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The metaphorical potential is there, poetic reading of the viral clone system's invasive colonizing and laying waste to natives by blanketing them - kudzu kills by heavy shading, eclipsing the plants whose structures uphold it, a "structural parasite - though other of Habib Allah's projects seem less reliant on explicit metaphor and instead finding some geo-political point to wrest a myth from, an unseen point of destruction, dark communications, or self-lubricated sliding of the fat, i.e. the dislocation of the point, contextual slippage, the lack of a point here, spreading metaphor.

Valerie Keane at High Art

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The capitalist equivalent of bodied-objects coughed up in the night, the night terrors of Haegue Yang shopping spree, they assemble the technologies of display that here become streamlined, spined, and injectable. Sharpening the garbage of post-ford CNC driven custom-ordered world, the grosser parts of the capitalistic buffalo, amassing the plastic neurosis that gives men breasts dissolved into micro-slush of our eco-systemic foodchain: we have plastic fears. And all the sharp points here remind us like swallowing jagged metal Krusty-Os of the possibility of bodily harm on all those sharp points against our bodies. Inverting Genzken's blind-beautiful speed of production to engender the nightmare of its waste. A real nightmare.


See too: Isa Genzken at David Zwirner, Yuji Agematsu at Real Fine Arts, KAYA at Deborah Schamoni