Geta Brătescu at Barbara Weiss

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The Romanian Zobernig-before-Zobernig milking and misremembering modernist genres for a discrepant experience of the thing against its meaning that many of today's young interesting artists enjoy, a slowly distending/displacement of its artistic signs protracting artistic identity. Nauman's continual media swapping only served to hone and underscore the themes across and despite its diversity, whereas today it services youth to deny the eventual meaning/understanding implicit in art. See the drawing above and cross-check it with its genre cafe drawing with which it fits but doesn't add up against the breadth of Brătescu's almost methodological formal move making against identifiable parameters in which it can't help but feel ironic, detached, somehow knowing.


see too: Adriana Lara at Algus Greenspon, Kaspar Müller at Federico Vavassori, Annette Kelm at Gio Marconi, Henning Bohl at What Pipeline

Martine Syms at Human Resources

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Proposals for a radical graphic design often denotes expensive fonts and overlaid text, beefing up the intensity of its devices whereas a real radical design would be one which self-exposes the mechanisms of its influence. There is a lot of very unradical graphic design in museum exhibitions whose stark posters and mild conceptual parameters stand in for radicality by being visually and thematically aggressive. This isn't now to put forth Syms as radical graphic design but that a graphic design actually filleting itself probably wouldn't look like graphic design at all and within Syms' claims to be a designer in the visual production of identity is at least closer.

J. Parker Valentine at Park View

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Valentine's drawings entail expectations of legibility depictive of some tip-of-the-tongue subject within a library of means detailing the amorphous thing it circles but fails to produce. There is the lure of subject object, the thing that will at any moment manifest itself in the definitive lines of drawing schematizing, hypothesizing, its existence alongside the slide show's equal directness that again begins circling its subject over the course of its ribs. Parker is good at this, at making the object appear as though right around the corner, in the next slide, on the next page, in the next sentence.

Judith Bernstein at Mary Boone

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Always interesting the late career rise, speculating the difference then that occluded the work and now what allows its flourish. Judd's three separate 1960 repetitive comments on Anne Truitt reveal mostly what he himself couldn't handle and kept incanting against her, unsystematic color. Judd getting it wrong reveals way more about the culture than it does about Truitt. And for Bernstein painting what had always been repressed as explicit - the large male "personality" embedded in art's very culture - of course couldn't be acceptable, art despises the frank open, it must be embedded; the great irony that Boone is showing these now: think of a giant crusty cock painting hanging in the same room as Schnabel, asserting maybe just where all that great thick paint on large canvases was coming from, the Yale professors of course uncomfortable by this exposing, like totally classic Freud. And so now 2016 this is for many reasons acceptable and but we should be nervous again about now what isn't.

Dawn Kasper at David Lewis

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It's not a stretch to think this installation as turning the tables on her WhiBi installation, the endurothon live-in where everyone gawked at her, the object viewed, inverted to set instead the viewer on heavily amplified stage, a sort of DIY version of Abramovic's spectaculars less concerned with (ostensible) spiritual risk of, like, all encompassing ego death in another's gaze and more just like the day to day drudgery of moving a lumpy sweating thing through space along with stacks of records and books and your like metaphorical underwear for all to see, there was, afterall, some Camus in her belongings did you see? I think the moral here is that it's hard to be looked at but easy to decide to be looked at. There's some saleable objects on the backwall.

Past: Darren Bader at Kölnischer Kunstverein, Darren Bader at Andrew Kreps , Darren Bader at Radio Athènes

Amy Yao at Various Small Fires

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Yao's recurring placement of things inside or stuck to bodies, like words to bone-like sticks or injected in ladders, having gotten progressively more bodily, seems concerned with the carrier, things embedded with the foreign, infiltrated. Surrealist juxtaposition in an age bio-medical cybernetics, aerosolized industrial waste and food packaging with endocrine disruptors distributed between ever more complex global conglomerates makes war and diamonds seem quaint as the juxtaposition is dispersed into further and further micro-artificialities, plastics outweighing plankton in certain parts of the ocean. The sculpture here is called Doppelgängers, consisting of Rice, PVC rice, polyester resin, epoxy resin, freshwater pearls, plastic pearls.


“Paris De Noche” at Night Gallery, Anicka Yi at Kunsthalle Basel

Larry Poons at Michael Jon & Alan

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The boringness of Google's "Deep Dream" project was in making explicit the pareidolia friction latent, hidden in carpets and noise and always threatened distrust in seeing, those momentary misrecognitions and ghosts in corners. Humans are apophenic machines - made to "see things." The inkblot innuendo was an essential of abstraction that was far too impure for post-war painting to deal with, it would have limited abstraction to the mere human, like Cecily Brown's meaty innuendos, very untranscendent, when people were throwing around the possibility of universals. Op-art was a cheap imitation of the purer form's sanctity; Op-art rested on physiologic parlor tricks rather than the more strict and thus universal forms of abstraction that could communicate with dolphins and gods.


See too: Ann Veronica Janssens at Bortolami

Henrik Olesen at Reena Spaulings

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I don't know if anyone remembers Garbriel Kuri risen to prominence by interjecting globalist pluralism into modernist austerity, tin cans into rectangles, but Olesen asserts the filthy body into the sexless/bodyless vernacular of conceptualism, all those conceptual gestures of cutting gallery walls, photocopied images, and philosophical referentials, are with Olesen given to an unclean version. Meat and Christian martyrs are two things one shouldn't mention when playing with the neat rationality of conceptual art. It's "dirty." And the screws should be neatly gridded, they shouldn't resemble deformity. Like Alan Turing, paragon of rationality and computer logic - that clean efficient purity - until he wasn't in the eyes of society so bent on binary, was stripped of everything and given breasts as if that would somehow be better to have a breasted man without libido, is its own minimalism, a bent version of society's high ideals, this conceptual art so clean.

Thomas Hirschhorn at Chantal Crousel

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The Aesthetic bullying of Hirschorn is continually justified upon the premise that if the world is this violent so too may I be, which makes some sense, a world comprised of violent images justifies artists having some tendency/responsibility toward them, of which Hirschhorn, bundling himself in political declarative truisms, has no issue meeting or exceeding this violence under the auspice of political knowledge or at least rhetoric, serving as gross illustrations of the madness of culture. True grotesque violence can't, shouldn't, be consumed in the way artwork generally is, with its polite meanings and lineages and references exonerating genteel abstraction.  Hirschhorn instead aesthetically screaming. But as the provided documentation examples, no matter the madness involved we are just men standing around politely considering it.

Mathias Poledna at Daniel Buchholz

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After the fact of Poledna's crystalline film, an exhibiting of the mass labor, what was described as a "language of pure joy in a fantasy world with no worries, anxieties or fatigue that pervades the viewer’s every pore" exposing the requisite energy manifesting its fantasy, you can find numerous animators online claiming it in their portfolio, hands amounting in labor hours to let the Donkey have its clean moment. The pure bodies of cartoon animals aligned by sweaty men and woman, somehow erotic for that. In this sense cartoons are the perfect representation of bodily shame.



See too: Matthew Brannon at Casey Kaplan, Larry Johnson at Raven Row, Yuji Agematsu at Artspeak, “Puddle, pothole, portal” at Sculpture Center

Calvin Marcus, Chadwick Rantanen at Clearing

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Ranaten's objects are itchy, irritants in a body desiring to reject them. Ranaten's concern for the commodic waste that comprises much of modern life differs from many in that its cheapness is amplified, overhead lights hanging, made a wedge, shards of waste, fluorescents are gallery expendables, hanging, turns not-yet-trash into splinters of it. The thought of plastic inside you, a blanket in plastic inside you.

Sam Pulitzer at Real Fine Arts

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Pulitzer creates dungeon mazes for its crawlers reading its signic runes, like prior commissions of artists' illustration adorning walls they are flush with potential at the same moment disenfranchised from completing a meaning within a diaspora of Pulitzer's exhibition, they are once removed, and here a schematic's projectable potential unrealized, forever in flux; which as images become further and further devalued in the gluttonous amount of them published daily the importance of artists to revalue the image as puzzling indeterminable founts, labyrinthian puzzles, to stopgap their expediency, becomes paramount.


see too: Merlin Carpenter at MD 72

Julia Scher at Natalia Hug

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What in the real is frightening, threat, in art becomes sexy. Mass Surveillance becomes quaint voyeurism, a bucolic kink. Like the panopticon becoming a sex-club accoutrement featuring one-way mirrors reversing Foucault's hypothesized societal metaphor in the same years he was made it, the metaphor. Dirty Words: Mass incarcerate me. If one without anything to hide should fear nothing about mass surveillance then hide nothing, give them a mass to survey.


See too: Torbjørn Rødland at Henie-Onstad Kunstsenter

Thomas Eggerer at Friedrich Petzel

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Seurat's subjects were lost to method where the calculative replaced care, an artifact of style that Eggerer transmutes into a violence, draining the person from people under his aerial high-view out over his subjects. What makes Eggerer an even icier painter than the morbid bloodletting of photo-influenced Germans is Eggerer's return to moments before photography's explicit rigamortis, when then those were still dying.


See too: Thomas Eggerer at Richard Telles, Luc Tuymans at David Zwirner, Michaël Borremans at Dallas Museum of Art

Simon Fujiwara at TARO NASU

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Anthropomorphic bivalves with micro-cyborg corporeality, the clam, the armored body crusted scaled flesh, overlay to the clean imperfect labial birth stone, the pearls opposite representing this Ghost in the Shell- did we mention cyborgs - the body adorned, internetted to its surroundings like Swiss Victorinox bodies. The Clam is the representation of the human, examples of talking clams accelerating.


See too: Valerie Snobeck at Essex Street , “Flat Neighbors” at Rachel Uffner  Andro Wekua at Sprüth Magers, Anne Speier at Galerie der Stadt Schwaz, José Rojas at Vilma Gold,  “RR ZZ” at Gluck50

Martin Wong at Bronx Museum

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see too: Martin Wong at P.P.O.W

Stewart Uoo at 47 Canal

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Uoo is fashionable, and that used to be an insult. Fashion is means for representation. Fashionable would mean representation of a moment- pejoratively implied that the moment is fleeting. Speculative-fictions - Sci-Fi - fashion, perhaps misguidedly, attempt projections of futures to distend its transience by destroying its moment. The trendbook's fashion is always fleeting but, at their best, allow new representations, if only for a time. Anyway, Uoo's "politics of luxury" - like many today - is for a fashion without camp, that the glitz doesn't necessarily have to be artifice, that we can be rich.

Julia Wachtel at Vilma Gold

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Wachtel's sign systems of the cultural meltdown, express the rupture, floating between Baldesarrian inanity and Wolfsonian semantic violence. Finding the tense middle ground where the inanity is the violence, of someone hitting you in the face with something so dumb.


See too: John Baldessari at Marian Goodman

Kaspar Müller at Museum im Bellpark

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Not knowing is unacceptable, and outright rejection would prove viewer's impotence, thus created an environment where artists are able to produce further and further extremes of blankness filled by those refusals to not-know, whose sensory deprivation creates phantasms, see the abyss looking back because we are doing the projecting.


See too: Kaspar Müller at Société, Kaspar Müller at Federico Vavassori

186f Kepler at Contemporary Art Daily

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In late 2015 Tinder added a "super-like" function to its standard swipe left/right yes/no configuration. The "super-like" was a limited use feature, whose expendable nature - one-time only (per day) - made it possible to express through the burning of it that the person in question really meant it and introducing further rarity and actual symbolic exchange in order to counter-act to what had anecdotally become a numbers game of mass publication for later curation.  and would thus stand apart from a crowd in a mass feed of regular "likes." That the social of course would have to absorb tactics of marketing the plenty of fish in the sea were going to be caught with anything but dredge nets.


"Clifton Palace," “Pho Viet Huong” "Vzszhhzz," "Astro 5," and "Tes Yeux" at 186f Kepler,

Ann Veronica Janssens at Bortolami

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Magenta doesn't exist in the natural spectrum. It is an extra-perceptual color, an artifact resulting from our eye's biological structure of rods and cones attempting to interpret a mixtures of reds and blues. Part of a subsection of non-spectral colors, along with imaginary, chimerical, and impossible colors all having no material basis. It isn't difficult to warp with human perception, our bodies create the world we perceive and many physiological rifts in its construction that create whole subgenres of "optical illusions" exploiting these glitches. But the simpler the construction of the exploit - the more minimal its resource to mine such faults - the more distrustful we become of our basic grip on reality, real trippy.

“Äppärät” at Ballroom Marfa

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We hear of videos documenting children attempting to turn magazine pages as if they were iPads, swiping at paper. We hear of these videos as if there are hundreds. As if children had become ethereal. Confusing the materials and their virtual counterparts. A virtual leather now. Your interface hovers over it. Virtual stone. The skeuomorphic book is a reflection of ours under the watery surface of glass. And thus physicality is linked to its virtual counterpart, and the cartoon to our meat. Digital men being cut apart still elicits disgust in the audience. We identify with concepts. Watching the concept of a man self eviscerate was more moving than watching the man. And so somehow sculpture became the way to obliquely talk about the virtual, and HD video the way to talk about the world.

KAYA at Deborah Schamoni

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Genzken 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; for some time the exhibition had been replacing the singular object exhibited as the base unit of art. And whereas others used this to produce "series," product lines, Genzken extrapolated, used this as a means of acceleration in which speed and production was the communication, attachmenting amassing product and centering production as the point. Genzken's resurgent rush fucking-the-bauhaus predicated interest on their speed. That the production of itself became the product.


see too: Isa Genzken at David Zwirner , Ann Craven at Confort Moderne,  Kerstin Brätsch at Gavin Brown

Martin Wong at P.P.O.W

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The countless young gay artists that died of AIDs' tragedy made all the more egregious for their shared concern in an abject body, a commonality that occurred at all different points throughout each of their lives, sometimes far before, meaning that it of course had nothing to do with the tragedy that would befall them, but a representation of a common experience among them, of a body merely ill at ease in culture, now looking like a premonition.

Carissa Rodriguez at Wattis

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The wider the distance between signs/images the greater the space to be filled, the grander the concept, the impossible gap, generally seceded to the viewer. This is our conceptual moment. Objects have meaning, we cannot pass that off, and the distance between them, grand like the canyon, vacant and large. Rodriguez, against any "signature object", the only thing left to do is to produce greater and greater gulfs of meaning.


see too: Adriana Lara at Algus Greenspon, Henning Bohl at What Pipeline

Mark Grotjhan at Karma

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Artists' private esteem for the simple, functional object. These objects against which art feels inconsequential, inadequate against their elemental usefulness: the crafted integrity of functional objects that nobly perform their service, blue-collarly. Of course the painter feels a private respect for the signboard, it performs what the artist cannot. The handcrafted simplicity creating a directness of intention that art is forbidden.
Grotjahn says as much in in the PR.
And then detached from their context they return to performing the art trope of functionality without purpose, of signifier detached from its -fied, we receive them but there is no hotdog or High Life to manifest. They become totemic or omen-like, mystified, connote but do not mean, become hieroglyphs of a culture lost.


See too: Gedi Sibony at The Arsenale , Oscar Tuazon at Le Consortium & Paradise Garage , On Kawara at the Guggenheim

Diane Simpson, Lesley Vance at Herald St & Dana Deguilio, Molly Zuckerman-Hartung at Lyles & King

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American art's geo-politics are usually microtized to endless laments of their 5 years in the Bronx licensing gentrification's complaint but little spoken in wider terms unless under the rubric of "globalization" accrediting an exoticism as somehow conceptually justifiable. But artistic geo-politics in the middle ground above rent whinging, and questions of "upstate," but then the weird flyover marsh 2,7894 miles in between, and should we buy a building in Detroit and the perennial and eternal decision of L.A., but everyone today definitely fleeing Chicago, except Diane Simpson firmly planted since the 70s. Everyone today, including CAD, Vance, Degulio, Zuckerman-Hartung: all midwest evacuees. And David soon yes you too.
The material question underlying all the choices of final willingness to exchange rent for intangibles is "will we be visible?" Which is generally lessened to, "Will someone trek out to studio visits there?" or forebodingly, "Is there even someone there to make studio visits?"  Art is fueled by the same overhead as any business. New York once contained the largest and loudest broadcast mechanisms fueled by it's nouveau-wealth that made it the all-powered center that has continually lost ground to the flattening distribution means, but you still got to get the show to be able to be moved. Simpson's regional success to led to some powerful coasters including her in strong group shows and now on people's radar. Vance early to L.A. Conspiratorially MZ-H&DD - regional stars of CAD's homeland - finally left Chicago to have their first exhibition featured when a world over CAD was setting up shop under a palm tree.