Andreas Slominski at Proyectos Monclova & Barbel Graesslin

(Proyectos Monclova, Barbel Graesslin)

Looking at dead things, torn from their living context, trapped under ethyle acetate in the kill jar's sterile light and pinned to walls to make a butterfly collection. A collection we understand culturally to hold meaning for the belief in the docents and researchers behind it. But they mean only what we know about them, and the objects sparkle. Like dead butterflies, Monoliths, and signifiers, blank beautiful entrapments.


See too: Andreas Slominski at Thaddaeus Ropac, “Seven Reeds” at Overduin & Co.,

Maria Eichhorn at Chisenhale

(link)

Art is collective cloud-based fantasy envisioned by the countless projecting its realm in which we all role-play our abstractions. When you begin to get into the material conditions of art things, of course, get hairy. The cloud space we envision is different from the dark recesses in the network of those hitting the pavement. Discussions of the material conditions are symbolic.
It is of course a privilege to be able to take time time off from work, (it is assumed staff will remain getting paid for this vacation although this is never specifically addressed (Lorey presents it as hypothetical) and the paid intern (trainee) actually completes his traineeship before the vacation but there might be a new trainee, but so all sorts of question) and - as is mentioned in the Eichorn's interview with staff, and further expounded by Lorey's essay on the infiltration of debt - art jobs permeate the very being of the worker and so the point is who even knows what a vacation is anymore, but at the very least no one was posting to facebook, instagram, or twitter, and emails are being deleted, but backup emails are provided.
But the whole question of work, privilege to be able to take time off, etc. remains in the symbolic and abstract realms. Nightmare artist Dan Colen once remarked that idol Dash Snow's heroic punk-tude was built upon the privilege of a trust fund, while Colen's aw-shucks background forced the polishing of objects we all hate because otherwise he would starve. Colen is telling this story, but it's symbolic, parable-like abstraction, and one is a legend and the other is despised. Even W.A.G.E. - mentioned in Chisenhale's publication - while talking about the grim mechanics of pay still mostly exists as a fantasy where things are fair, or fairer. Fraser's biennial essay self-examines as being part of the reviled 1% and cannot reconcile and thus cries. Everyone caroms off the material conditions. Artists aren't required to release their tax returns. No one knows that 60% of this blog was written in a car in a Big Box store's parking lot leeching wifi we didn't have. or who's curatorial lifestyle is funded by oil futures and not institutions, or if the difference is one of middle men.
The point is Chisenhale can do this because their funding comes from public and private funds and is not exactly tied to having the doors open for the showroom floor. Eichorn used the artists magic wand of artistry to divert those funds to this reprieve. 27% of which are public, taxpayer's.
"‘The public’ now floods the scene, but most of what they say will not be recorded. Out of the flood, however, bobs a vociferous new role, ‘the critics’, who will attempt to inflect the light of publicity and mediate between ‘the public’ and the artwork. ‘The critics’ have two masks readily at hand for this job, ‘the agent’ and ‘the provocateur’. Through one or other, or both at the same time, the hushed voice of ‘the public’ will be spoken over." - Stewart Martin in the catalog
Eichorn ultimately makes it opaque, a sign out front forbids entrance and we have all the tabula rasa visions of what those people are doing with all that free time and whose money where and maybe not being accountable is the real gift to them.

Miriam Cahn at Meyer Riegger

(link)

Cahn is important, perhaps like Andrew Wekua, in the age of the digital euphemising the body, that someone retensions connection to our corporeality. The body is battleground of artists deciding how to represent it back to us. An artist can drop it from a height over and over again and care nothing for it if they so wish. Cahn seems to care, even while suspending its pink people over the sandpaper causticness of its abrasive color, one of a very few painters to make painting's bright beauty a violent thing. and against people like rubbed erasers, pink and sensitive worn forms. Painting can do a real violence to balloons filled with red liquid. Rubbed of noses, devoid of hair, flesh the color of factory chicken skin. The manifold meanings of the adjective tender, "showing gentleness" as well as "sensitive to pain."  "(of meat) easy to cut."



See too: Miriam Cahn at Jocelyn Wolff, Group Show at Meyer Riegger, Lisa Yuskavage at Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, Nicola Tyson at Friedrich Petzel, Tala Madani at David Kordansky,  Andro Wekua at Sprüth Magers, Michaël Borremans at Dallas Museum of Art, Erwin Wurm at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg

Elaine Cameron-Weir at VENUS Los Angeles

(link)

"snake with sexual interest in own tail,"describing an onanistic ouroboros, oneself as sex object, bent in half autoerotically, folded in a mirror we devour ourselves, reflected in the blue light of narcissus's new glass pond, in our hands cupped holding ourself scrolling up and down vigorously on our electrically charged glass skinned self, in cupped bivalves on half shell the mouthfeel of genitals, with salt, lemon and myrrh. In a techno-seance eliciting the same sexiness muscles cars once did, a sexual response. In Pier Paolo Calzolari, who also used clams and neon, in an impoverished art not quite meeting the new alchemical conjuring of the spirituality we connect to the iPhone. "In using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) tests, my team looked at subjects’ brain activity as they viewed consumer images involving brands like Apple and Harley-Davidson and religious images like rosary beads and a photo of the pope. We found that the brain activity was uncannily similar when viewing both types of imagery."


See too: Tony Conrad's Glass, “RR ZZ” at Gluck50, “Flat Neighbors” at Rachel Uffner, Ajay Kurian at Rowhouse Project

Roni Horn at Museum de Pont

(link)

"She has linked her use of doubled forms or images and the ambiguity of many of her pieces to androgyny. Consequently, her work has been seen as an indirect form of identity art."¹

"If androgyny ultimately expands the possibilities of identity beyond its stable, gendered binary, Horn's paired works propose the untenability of the fixed binaries on which minimalism historically staked its own critique."²

"For Horn, the terrain of likeness - that which is similar, the same yet different, akin, or simply close - encompasses a panorama of experience. Her work dwells of differences of degree that, she suggests, constitute as profound a representational problem as the starker discrepancies that conventionally give us our social and sexual selves. "³

The androgynous minimalism of Horn's pointed critique of Judd's specific object: instead of the remarkable unit⁴ Horns work arrests flows in their state of transition, glass as a "supercooled liquid"⁵, androgyny the flow between genders stabilized, like taking a photo of river to supercool its movement, frozen transition, a gender like glass.

1. Mignon Nixon Roni Horn Artforum 2009
2. Roberta Smith, NYTimes, 2009
3. Zachary Rottman, UCLA M.A. Dissertation, 2014
4. unit is also slang for penis.
5. Roni Horn, in conversation with Jarrett Earnest Brooklyn Rail 2013


See too: Nancy Lupo at Swiss Institute, Tony Conrad's Glass

Cynthia Daignault at Stems

(link)

Most of today's returns to figuration finds everything chopped and screwed, comical and maniacal, in garish colors that have only become naturalized by screens, and painted with a hard edge and airbrush representing the discarded body of a post-internet subject. Of which Daignault is not. The central friction of Daignault's work is the body moving from its localized version to its decentralized self. In this upcoming metaphor the post-internet painters represent globalization and Daignault represents the locavore movement, relocalizing the product, marking its origin, and traded in the gift economy before adrift in loose markets of art, so that even once loose they will still be representations of that trade, of that local movement, so we get to look back and remember those days.



See too: Joshua Abelow at Freddy

Gerry Bibby, Henrik Olesen at Sismógrafo

(link)

The semiotic distress of Bibby is possibly a place to hide the body lint of Olesen. Puns, in material and language, open up space for innuendo, for the filthy human Olesen has, for a while now, been hiding in crevasses. A crosswalk becomes a Halley abstraction becomes our semiotic Jail, both the crosswalk and painting-referent limit what had once been free space. Insect is misheard as incest and we all call you out for it because that is a freudian slip and you are mentally sick.


see too: Henrik Olesen at Reena Spaulings

Martín Soto Climent at DREI

(link)

Coerced intimacy in sentimental sizes, there's an affection. Not that Soto Climent has always made small soft objects, there have been large pointed ones as well. But its not the way you touch the thing but they way your body scales next to them. Like Lulu, founded by Soto Climent, the tiny is given to a warmth, a scale of proximity, of being close.


see too: Martín Soto Climent at Proyectos Monclova

Math Bass at Michael Jon & Alan

(link)

Virtual Iconographies. Unlike Wesley, whose paintings we look into, these paintings come at us. Painting in the virtual space that our world increasingly appears. Space becomes an information deployment system, and layout becomes highly organized studied and manipulated. Style becomes a corruption of the subject. This one becomes a Bloomingdales, but in past Bass's paintings have been individuated works reflecting the increasing prevalence the interface over the image. Icons become shorthand redirecting thought. We understand them implicitly, terrifyingly.


See too: Matthew Brannon at Casey Kaplan

Ruth Root at Marta Cervera

(link)

Like a Yield sign from hell. Dramatically asserting its declarative without reason. Incoherent as a Rachel Harrison sculpture. Organized but staunch against coherence, disorientating. Even when painting in solid elegant tones, Root's paintings never resolved anything fully tasteful. Their garishness precedes them.


See Too: Charline von Heyl at Gisela Capitain

DAS INSTITÜT at Serpentine Gallery

(link)

2009, 7 years ago, 2 years after the founding of DAS INSTITÜT, already, then:

"However, the joke is actually on the curator, as many artists have learned to feed this desire with work made quickly, but with enough conceptual acrobatics to make them acceptable as part of a canon of their own oeuvre—or that of a supposed canon on the critique of modernity. And here, the artist has found a way not only to maximize the circulation of his/her work, but also to reduce the budget in terms of both time and materials—the original shady business of “skimming”, although one that is justifiable considering the low rate of artist fee’s. Within this particular loop, a potential critique of excess is ensnared as another symptom of that very excess. And it is with this dual farce of today’s production and related branding activities, namely the desire for the curator to collect and justify an artistic industry of prefab and ready-at-hand esoterics, that one should enjoy DAS INSTITUT’s irreverent something for everybody with a little for everyone approach.

“DI Why?” treats referents like refreshments at a party, from appropriation, to the politics of representation, to subculture fetishism, to pop, and even Relational Aesthetics—there was an opening event with an “exotic” food import: Currywurst and Berliner Weisse mit Schuss. What is truly unique about this show is that all of these devices are derived from completely blank and empty signifiers..."  -Adam Kleinman TZK

What started as a mock "import/export" business in 2007 became so quickly real, its sham background mattering little in art so long as it looked like it, and the network "featuring non-competing points of attraction at various scales and orientations" and franchise friendibitions and its hard to deny a room full of so much something.

See too: KAYA at Deborah Schamoni, Isa Genzken at David Zwirner,  Ann Craven at Confort Moderne

Alice Tippit at Night Club

(link)

Between the anthropomorphic and the pareidolia is the seeing ghosts in images that contain a sort of liquid content, innuendo, which form to fit the container of the viewer that views them. A cat butt appears but perhaps only in me.


See too:Autumn Ramsey at Night Club Larry Poons at Michael Jon & Alan

Judith Bernstein at Kunsthall Stavanger

(link)

The conceptual cymbal crash, punning cocks with screw, was defeatist humor mocking not just the male tool but deflating the hard language of conceptual art: telling the joke over and over again on larger and larger sheets of paper, the high rhetoric of big egos reduced to a bad joke - Cue: Beyonce "♪♫ Cause he's got a big 'ego.' ♪♫" Bernstein: "it wasn’t funny." 



See too: Judith Bernstein at Mary Boone

Zarouhie Abdalian at Clifton Benevento

(link)

Parts and pieces, fragments, inherently interesting in that they narrativize themselves, project their story as artifacts of it. We automatically read the objects as parts of a whole that they withhold telling. A story that doesn't tell itself, but the parts limn this possible whole and the tension in our inability to piece it perfectly creates a mistrust, mystery. Abdalian's "storytelling" makes art's metaphorical viewer as detective a sort of literal mode in a setting for them. The mis-en-scene carries the narrative. Artforum thought it was about gentrification.


See too: Michael E. Smith at Sculpture Center

Chadwick Rantanen at Essex Street

(link)

Mass market crap given torture burden, little batteries tasked oversized objects, drones that will exhaust soon. AAA batteries have a little under half the ampere-hours of their AA counterparts and Rantanen has made them to overwork themselves, speed demise, intentionally crafting kawaii critters to abuse their labor-force in the circuits of his machinery. The gestures seem less absurd than frustrated, Rantanen's exacerbation of late-stage-capital's more aggressively abject objects. Self-inflicted. The director of fetish crush films Jeff Valencia speaks often of desiring to be the subject under the feet of the crusher, identifying with the object/animal being crushed.


See too: Calvin Marcus, Chadwick Rantanen at Clearing, “Puddle, pothole, portal” at Sculpture Center, Dylan Spaysky at Clifton Benevento

Pilvi Takala at Centre for Contemporary Arts

(link)

Takala's The Committee, is a story of children given fantastical power faced with the continually dwindling possibilities of real: a child's unfathomable wealth, 7000£, quickly grinding down and halting the committee. The fantastic cannot be realized. One child equates the once impossible amount to a mere 7 iPhones. It's not enough for everyone. Unblinkered several children move quickly through history proposing different corporate schemes to generate profits with websites and business models (already envisioning themselves receiving discounts on fees) to sustain their wants, and the whole thing moving from open possibility to well-trod territory with a patterned timing. Watching the death of the possible in people so young raises questions of whether this is simply precocious social replication of the status quo, or whether capitalism is just natural to us and there really is limited amount of practical means and invention in world. The children, in the end, get a single -albeit large - bouncy castle.
The limits of invention are apt to both art's open escapes (eyerollingly) and Pivli for whom most of the films generously on view here each take their genre from established entertainment, candid camera shows, Kids Say the Darndest Things, prank videos, etc. Meaning while actual modes within possibility might be limited, that its all about how you work within the framework. The children, in the end, get a single - albeit large - bouncy castle.

Sylvie Fleury at Karma International

(link)

“Rather, Fleury represents her desire precisely as it is a far more interesting strategy  of ultimate passivity, not unlike Lacan’s slave/master relationship whereby the slave’s freedom depends precisely upon a position of submission and resignation to the order of power. It must be understood  that there is not the slightest critique, analysis or satire involved in Fleury’s presentation of her shopping bags or display of show and their boxes; this is her shopping presented as it is, and the radicality of this act is precisely in its divorce from any intention or argument, political, social, or cultural. This strategy may be as disturbing as Donald Judd’s vision of a new art based on absolute anti-emotion. In fact Judd’s visibility seems, in some weird, insane and impossible manner, akin to Fleury’s, both of them attracted to artificial shiny and fetishistic materials, both utterly opposed to Romantic formulas of nature and naturalism, to the ideal of “authenticity.” “Things that exist, exist, and everything is on their side.” Judd’s formula perfectly desires Fleury’s own project in which “thingness” is allowed to resonate by itself without further intervention.

“Fleury suggests art can be liberated from its reliance on constant innovation and complex physical formulation and relax instead into a sort of ne plus ultra of laissez faire “whateverism” which ups the ante on American “Slacker” culture’s aesthetics of resignation.”

-Adrian Dannatt

See too:  Simon Denny at MoMA PS1, John Armleder at Fernand Léger Foundation, Group Show at David Kordansky

Kathryn Andrews at Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago

(link)

I'm not so sure that the lip-service paid to warding off Koons as an aesthetic terrorist was anything more than fearful attempt at repression for the thing we all secretly loved, the shiny commodified surface. Keeping coming back to us.  Now in present form. The "inanimate demons" of Koons's "gangbanging" of us is made further vaporus and spectral here.

“Life Itself” at Moderna Museet

(link)

Kelley's Uncanny exhibition should be restaged every ten years, that was a good one. The word Life provides enough secondary subtext and poetic license, along with the "itself" existential attachment, to provide umbrella enough for any curatorial hand. A lot fits under it, it was the title of Roger Ebert's memoir, obviously alluding to all of film and thus art's examination of the topic. Hard to think of artist that doesn't fit. The idea of staging an exhibition around it is absurd, probably the point, that ha ha of existential loss. Like Holler states as much in common in the PR, any overarching definition of life is going to be incomplete, arbitrary.

William Leavitt at Greene Naftali

(link)

If it hadn't been film sets it would have seemed corny, but since these were the remnants of the way the world's image was constructed we were forced to believe them. The set broadcast becomes a truth. Truckloads of sand replaces the snow for B+W olympic broadcast in order to avoid whiteout, making neither version real. The world and its double overlay, and the shift in experience of seeing the world superposition real and facade, the world as malleable substance. Look at the designs for it.


See too: Group Show at Greene Naftali, Guillaume Bijl at Nagel Draxler, David Lieske at MUMOK, Alicja Kwade at Kunstmuseum St. Gallen

Ajay Kurian at White Flag Projects

(link)

Art's Post-war war on the symbolic, depictive or narrative - of say Greenberg, championing a purity and "universalist" language - isn't difficult to read as supression of narratives divergent from those commonly accepted as universal. Consolidating its experience as the universal. Think Everybody Loves Raymond. But so while Greenberg's and its modernist moment passed the specter still hangs, an artifact in the often refusal to read symbolism and signs for what they are. Think Mira Schor's incredulity at David Salle's critics refusal to see - and endless excusing of - the gratuitous nude women. "It doesn't matter what you paint its how you paint" is a fantasy stemming from another, the "universalist" experience from an artist whose body is non-subject, their body has never been in question in culture. Instead think Keinholz Mendieta Wilson Wong Ligon

Max Brand at Off Vendome

(link)

"They manage to look refreshing but not unexpected" says R. Smith spit-firing painters to see what would stick attending the flavors in the stew. Seeing the soup for its referents and judging hazy memories of once distinct tastes roiling in the surface. The consommé so clarified as to not single out any one flavor, any one referent, everything so blended, you could just keep naming ingredients. Which is where we're at today. Soup easy to mass produce, a base prepared in advance can be used to a support a wide and readily available ingredients on its surface.


see too: Sanya Kantarovsky at Marc Foxx, Joanne Greenbaum at Crone, Vittorio Brodmann at Halle Für Kunst Lüneburg, Heather Guertin at Brennan & Griffin,

Mathieu Malouf at Jenny’s

(link)

Hard not read in terms of Malouf's Real Fine friend Jana Euler. For Instance. Malouf's infringing inhabitation of stylistic churn mentioned in an RFA PR 5 years ago: "Contemporary Art’s Circulation as an operable form of life and its android engagement of "Hipster" art forms, which could characterize a vast array of artists from Simon Denny to Amanda Ross-Ho, are starting off points for Malouf." The Grinch was a lesson in learning to live with the generosity of others.

Cheyney Thompson at Raucci/Santamaria

(link)

Guyton printed and Thompson laughed. Losing your hands to the printing press was nothing compared to losing self to an algorithm, a standardized operations to create "content."  Coming from the genre of subjective's loss to evermore reflexive systems mirroring the structures they sat inside. Bochner to Asher. But Thompson's mirror churned through information processes arbitrarily translating randomized position into codified color produced as beautifully arbitrary as "pollen floating on water." From 3 standard stoppages to E. Kelly to McCollum arbitrariness in abstraction has a long history, and Markov Cheyney precipitating its endgames using of models that turn code into money.

Peter Fischli and David Weiss at Guggenheim

(link)

Almost no photos here but it matters little, we know what there is to see: an elegy fitting fragments. For FW time was always at issue, the small moment projecting its largess, say the moment of Einstein's conception, or large waste carving its single momento mori whittled in time's erosion. The Gug needing not expend documentary energy but instead promotion's concision, fragments. The humor of FW's misuse of time, in time, becomes instead its loss. Suddenly not very funny at all.