Grayson Revoir at Frankfurt am Main

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Artists digging holes, Urs Fischer and You, Chris Burden unearthing foundations, Zobernig out in a field a hole as deep as could go, Hans Schabus pulling up his floor to expand the studio into sewers, into the untapped expanse beneath our feet that is the province of the undead, dying, necrophiliacs and mole-people; the living have no business under the earth, making for a projectable and mysterious alter-space conjuring as much speculative-fiction as any, and in art this fantasy projective meeting its pipe dream dead-end is its pathos, of dreams meeting material ends that Revoir attempts avoiding by not digging the hole at all, leaving it to a text to conjure and imbue its potential baroque glory. Yet Revoir's interest in the gratuitously pedantic of say Gass's text entombed here is still the projectable fantasy meeting its end in the material conditions of words, destroying the text hole that eventually ends, exhausted.

Jordan Wolfson at David Zwirner

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Wolfson is a semio super-villain, weaponizing Naumanian irony to outwardly undermine the connection to affective means, objects which establish identification (the artist's interest in the gaze and facial recognition tech as well as nostalgia and cultural mythos) only to systematically abuse and deplete that link through endless tonal dissonance and juxtaposition, e.g. playing saccharine love-songs while a boy who looks into our eyes is repeatedly dragged and dropped onto concrete from a steel marionette of the artist's hand, basically irradiating the gold underpinning our emotive currency, held hostage and tortured. It's akin torture's use of learned helplessness and depersonalization to make its subjects concede to it.
The most successful villainy involved is that in order to say no to a very formally successful scourging of the emotive would require we admit that we believe there is an inherent "good" in art, that art be helpful, admit that we believe ourselves the good guys.

MARTEN: The whole sum is a stylization of wrongness or error.

WOLFSON: That is what I wanted.




See too: Steve Reinke at Isabella Bortolozzi, “Puddle, pothole, portal” at Sculpture Center,  Ed Atkins at Serpentine Gallery

Aaron Garber-Maikovska at Clearing

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It's nice to see a PR admit an artists animist beliefs others attempt camouflaging with the rhetoric of conceptual art or vague reference to philosophic trends. The trend for dancing in front of paintings - of many Ei Arakawa, Otto Knapp, Lutz-Kinoy, et. al. - achieves a clarity here in totemizing and activating the brand beneath simply by its proximal highlighting, ostensibly Lowe's. But animism is a pube hair distinct from some post-Baudrillard product fetishism, see: Merlin Carpenter at MD72, and this exhibitions stark lack of paintings can't help but feel in reaction to the artist's unfortunate market darlingship (a google search page full of auction results and artrank's most collectible artist sub 100k - things only taken seriously by those who take them seriously) and statements in market reports like: "“His work is something to live with and not worry about because the quality is so apparent,” says Schachter who bought one of Garber-Maikovska’s works from a friend and promptly put it in storage." So the performance continues for those paintings unseen, an incantation to conjure critical reception and not market reports, a "language in a state of emergence" to quote Tumlir.



See too: Merlin Carpenter at MD 72

N. Dash at Casey Kaplan

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Like cabinets of curiosities collecting various exotic tokens displayed for enlightened society's pleasure, N. Dash's material deployments like swatches of touch are the anthropological remains of our dissolving physical world, distributed like catalogs of our once sensual pleasure over digital networks, "The Kunstkammer conveyed symbolically the patron's control of the world through its indoor, microscopic reproduction" but no one is that hubristic today, these are about the loss of that, mourning it, our desire to once again touch things again, like all those salvaged wood paneled Brooklyn bars so apt for Tinder dates.


See too: Daniel Lefcourt at Blum & Poe, Tony Conrad's Glass

“Your Memories Are Our Future” at Palais de Tokyo

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As art furthers its occult investment in the auras and mechanisms of technologies and industry, it makes sense to hold its seances to the technocratic in the sites that create it.

Zak Kitnick at Clearing

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Like Warhol's Shadows, the darkened frames projected zoopraxiscope-like as silhouettes stacked build a dizzying depleting motion that like Bausch's Kontakthof's accounting of the vast inflections of the word "Darling" or Foster Wallace's Pale King opening sentence's taxnomic vegetation, Sturtevant's Finite/Infinite, the trend for lists in art writing, the cycling and dispensing of information bludgeon's our affective connection to it, a "diminished emotional response to a stimulation after repeated exposure to it," a desensitization, a very modern ennui building tragic subjects recalling Ranciere's quip on Bela Tarr: "one does not win against rain or repetition."


See too: Zak Kitnick at Clearing, Zak Kitnick at Rowhouse Project

Rachel Harrison at Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler

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"so caught up in this chaos of signs and surface effects, it's precisely because it's so serious about space: In a time when space and image lose their distinction, and the old, ideal distance between viewer and object is always already filled up and occupied by a thousand communications, sculpture, too, finds ways of making itself multi-surfaced and schizo-temporal. In order to re-occupy our contemporary no-space, it trades in its timeless pose for a temporary one, or for a manic series of appearances." -Kelsey on Harrison

Whereas Harrison's objects had once incorporated the conditions governing the mall-like sign-systems overtaking public space, the all but destroyed semio-coherence of advertising illogic into art's poetic fissures structuring a grand palace on non-sequitur, have mutated, over-inflating into a cartoon version of a Harrison object itself, a big throbbing tumescence of a lumpen art object.

See too: David Lieske at MUMOK, “Flat Neighbors” at Rachel Uffner

Meg Webster at Paula Cooper

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Webster provides an interesting link with the today's techno art as similar strategies are used for an environmental or earth-work purpose, i.e. between povera's mysticism and its pastoral, a desire to reconnect us with something long come to be an abstraction. Similar to the science fair aesthetic predominate today which appears symptomatic of an anxiety of sweeping technological change begetting not only a loss of control but an increasing awareness of that loss of control, "all the news that's fit to print" is comical today, and left off digital editions, we find our grasp on the world or earth increasingly running through fingers, abstracted into concepts. The art we see is an attempt at effigy, to physicalize and relocate a nebulous power, like the earth it sees itself having once belonged to.



See too: Sam Lewitt at Kunsthalle Basel, Elaine Cameron-Weir at VENUS Los Angeles, “RR ZZ” at Gluck50, Hans-Christian Lotz at Christian Andersen, Ben Schumacher at Musee d’art contemporain de Lyon, Timur Si-Qin at Carl Kostyál, Amy Yao at Various Small Fires, Anicka Yi at Kunsthalle Basel,

Wolfgang Tillmans at Daniel Buchholz

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Like well worn jeans we've gown comfortable in the softness of Tillmans, and so one would wish to find some sort of hard take to revitalize and refresh the practice, but one doesn't exist. Everyone loves Wolfgang. Tillman's activism was so couched in beauty and positivity as to be almost unremarkable, its seamy undercarriage was this trojan aspect, of looking fashionably pleasant while remaining avant in the subtle radicality taped up in constellations of subjects with a Tillmansesque grace that was unpretentious and gentle and modular, placable over a rotating set of subjects conjuring a loveliness almost overbearing, saccharine. But the rise of instagram with it the "small subject" that had seemed so radical then has become defacto as "unpretentious" photography is the ocean we tread weary, the artist having created the fashion that has come to obsolesce him, Tillmans will eventually amass a lifetime of them, these small moments, able to outpace the fashion.

Wolfgang Tillmans at David Zwirner, James Lee Byars at VeneKlasen/Werner,

Michael Beutler at Spike Island

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Making monumental art with unimpressive tools whose roots in the child-like art-n-crafts freedom of imagination are run amok fueled by grandeur: a work ethic showy while retaining its unpretentious strategies of the vernacular. Like Tuazon its interest is in the wonder of construction itself, but whereas Tuazon's protestant ethic posits a lot of somber logs Beutler seems interested in the impressive monumentality of structure itself, seeing your imagination huge and erect.


See too: Oscar Tuazon at Le Consortium & Paradise Garage, Chris Burden Metropolis II at LACMA

Past: Nancy Lupo at Swiss Institute

Contemporary Art Quarterly

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Most anomalous and interesting of Quarterly is CAD's anachronistic reach into time pre-hegemony-of-the-art-image that it itself wrought, when the earliest shows are seemingly lost altogether - there's at least one imageless exhibition here - or are images of the painter in front of her painting, or wildly green uncolorcorrected, all totally unimaginable today, there was no need for it then whereas today's paintings are only as good as their documentation proves them. That the global conglomerate who meme-like spread - if not started - the requirement for ultra-crisp white lighting of a pornographic sort is now looking back to the yellow-tinged days before what it enacted is almost a sort of pathos, a thing remembering a time before itself.

Wasmuht seems like the odd one out, but looking through it may be an important historical connection between say the Imagists and Mehretuian globalists presaging todays digitized power collagists of say Juliano-Villani or Singer.


See too: And so Quarterly has finally come to pass.

Sam Anderson at Rowhouse Project

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There is rarely an object of Anderson's we don't look down upon, that you don't watch where you step, a presentation whose, like early Wilkes or Aran's tables, dust settled marks this specific instance foreboding its wind, isolating its moment like Manders' cat at night cast in metaphorical bronze, or the Kelleyian arena which situates creatures (even while attacking its sentimentality) as an offering, like a little dog rolling over exposing belly's soft pink skin veiling easily destroyed guts, people we stand over, Perniceian vulnerability, an emotional connection to things that require our care.


See too: Cathy Wilkes at Kunstmuseum Linz, Cathy Wilkes at Tramway, Sam Anderson at Tanya Leighton, Sam Anderson at Off Vendome, Manfred Pernice at Galerie Neu, Manfred Pernice at Regen Projects

Diamond Stingily at Queer Thoughts

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How did the written form of Jungle Book's all powerful snake Kaa become the Disney film's second tier villain and comedic relief, and how did natural black hair become a 9 billion dollar industry so profoundly contentious it led Chris Rock to make a documentary about the subject with a Rotten Tomatoes 95% approval rating after his daughter at three asked why her natural hair wasn't "good?" Disneyfication, conforming a subject to dominant culture's preexisting expectations of how that object should be, making for a lot of unnecessary and uncomfortable changes. In a book rife with assimilating contradictions, in which the Medusa fights an Odalisque from obscure Quebecois myth so beautiful anyone catching sight turns to gemstone against the gorgon's stone, an elaborate fight fought through mirrors, one of Infinite Jest's major characters who wears a veil is either hideously disfigured or fatally pulchritudinous behind it, forever ambiguous until looked upon which like the quantum cat's vitals inside a box, a physical attribute achieves a superposition in culture, a sort of walking contradiction as a symbol of power at the same time it leaves open the wound for the bitter slight, "Becky with the good hair."
They're contentious things and that's why they're hanging in a gallery.

Tomma Abts at greengrassi

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Even just 2 years ago Abts still seemed an island of jilted tight trompe-leoil abstraction perhaps only harking back to the much forgotten "abstract illusionists" or all the way to constructivists. But the rise of tight-knit illusionist abstraction, in say Braunig or Orion Martin as much as Owens among others, makes Abts seem less hermitically sealed as the reference - if not influence - spreads in the reaction against mass-processed abstraction and toward slow-abstraction and icon illusionism.


See too: Tomma Abts at David Zwirner, Sascha Braunig at Rodolphe Janssen

John Knight at REDCAT

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Compare Knight to Bacher, two for whom the sign's circumcision opens it as an affectual and metaphorical possibility, snip its end so that it can't complete the power it was meant to effect. Space photocopied to empty its intent, remove us from it. Its signified sort of just floating away.


See too: John Knight at Greene Naftali, John Knight at Cabinet, Lutz Bacher at Statens Museum for Kunst

“Every Day I Make My Way” at Minerva

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Photography may be comprised of the accident, but its an accident captured and cast in the glass of its image; there is nothing more horribly crystallinely concrete than a photograph, "an object which virtually produces itself." Chetrit's video shows its molten form, the slow liquid flow of "photography"'s staging, strung and malleable in its cheesy goo before cooling into its hard representation of us. Photography's glass found perfect deployment in advertising and the commodity who craved its ability to deliver a glass-like surface of perfection that even then Barthes, Benjamin and Sontag were, it's possible to believe, already reacting to then in their nostalgic interest in photography's yellowing, like now pretty much every photographer today not necessarily trying to break the glass, at least looking to place a sticker on it or find some odd way to warm its domination of us, with a filter say, the image.


See too:  Moyra Davey at Institute of Contemporary Art, Peter Piller at Capitain Petzel, Tony Conrad's Glass

John Miller at Institute of Contemporary Art Miami

John Miller at Institute of Contemporary Art Miami

MILLER: Yeah, he’s very much into that. I think it’s just a generational difference, too. I know this from my students—they check out shows online all the time, they keep up with Contemporary Art Daily. So we might think, “Oh, this show was over there and this audience hasn’t seen it,” but younger artists, if they’re engaged, they’ve probably seen what’s available online. I always forget that because I’ve never gotten in the habit of looking at shows online. It’s just not something I do. But artists in their 20s and 30s are very much doing that.

WILLIAMS: I have to admit, I look at Contemporary Art Daily every morning. When I’m having coffee, I look at the New York Times and Contemporary Art Daily...

Urs Fischer at JTT

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Interactive art, of which this is, like Web 2.0's flourishing predicated on the 2006's person of the year, You, the system shifts from content generation to interactivity itself, turning itself into interface for the user themselves to self produce, the turnkey-op entrepreneurial dream, in which as long as the structure is up and running "content-revenue" will self-generate, perfect museum lobby bait fulfilling two functions in programs whose "outreach" have kids painting in the style of those artist to see themselves as, mimicking the corporate strategies as a manic oversized art-as-cartoon-absurdity version constructing a real crowdpleaser if there ever was one, because like Scanlan on Sehgal, even mediocrity is acceptable to a public so long as it has a hand in it.

Jessi Reaves at Bridget Donahue

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Like Rembrandt's Flayed Ox tinged with new meaning against the repetition of his auto-erotic visage, Reaves doubling-down on material entrails in the age of avatars could seem perversely obstinate memento mori; a reminder that, like all that stolen Ikea elegance whose eventual blown out corners reveal its making of all but compressed trash, underneath everything we desire to be is an intestinal makeup of sponge replacing its weight with rumors of dead-cells and dust-mites of a body threatening to turn fungal even while its pubescent biology meets identity, becoming gendered but threatening death makes them erotic like the ox meat.


See too: Miriam Cahn at Meyer Riegger, Dylan Spaysky at Clifton Benevento, Nancy Lupo at Swiss Institute, Chadwick Rantanen at Essex Street, Martín Soto Climent at Proyectos Monclova

Liz Craft at Real Fine Arts

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We could wish our communicado could find space for ethereal content, walls to text become brick to evoke a feeling rather than language, emoji mise-en-scene. The emoji took off by passing meaning's creation to the viewer/listener with interpretative glyph.  and Against interpretation was this erotics of the communal, a seance of meaning between two people joined. The nostalgia inherent in this, against communication's hyper-ecstasy and towards more primitive mode of communication still accepts the digital as a lot like witchcraft, or, like, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from it, and you get it packaged in a nice little pottery object, sent like primitive messages.


See too: Liz Craft at Jenny’s

Past: Lili Reynaud-Dewar at Clearing

Lui Shtini at Kate Werble

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The shapeshifting Jinn appears here in abstraction's referential amorphousness, a resemblance that, like inkblots, adapt to the viewer they appear to, and painted with a hapticness lending credence to its apparition as innuendo. Do you see the sunglassed DJ's hi-top fade, do you see a booty shaking, a wailing baby, or a pig outdoors at night through a molar keyhole. The dentist sees a horrible horrible cavity like a portal to hell. You leave a show and realize later no one saw the same thing. The void stares back as it were and the Jinn's phantasm in such concreteness erodes a certainty in material seeing.


“Comparing a sock to a vagina is OK, it’s done all the time, but you’d have to be insane to compare a pure aggregate of stitches to a field of vaginas [...] Salvador Dali, in attempting to reproduce his delusions, may go on at length about the rhinoceros horn; [...] But when he starts comparing goosebumps to a field of tiny rhinoceros horns, we get the feeling that the atmosphere has changed and that we are now in the presence of madness.” - D+G


See too: Alice Tippit at Night Club, Larry Poons at Michael Jon & Alan, Michael E. Smith at Sculpture Center

Christopher Williams at Capitain Petzel &Lucy McKenzie and Laurent Dupont at Meyer Kainer

Christopher Williams at Capitain Petzel, Lucy McKenzie and Laurent Dupont at Meyer Kainer

Commuting in the same deception, that no amount of looking will explain the object/image, they are representations, deferring elsewhere, and never conceding what lay beneath.  Images are treachery, sight can betray. A genericising only serves to underscore the point. And that old po-mo question what does it mean for art that seeing reveals so little.


Nina Beier at David Roberts Art Foundation

Sam Lewitt at Kunsthalle Basel

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"Keeping the lights on" is synonymous with capitalist vitality, the blood flow current signifying property over time, which Lewitt turns to heat, redirecting its energy to liminally exchange light for warmth for the corpse.

It's impossible to be certain whether the new techno-conceptual isn't anything more than a refurbished arte-povera, in which its spirituality and metaphysics is replaced with a ghost in the scary looking machines of a predestined future come to haunt us menacingly, like cultures assigning gods and poetry to corral phenomena we are at a loss to control.


See too:  Elaine Cameron-Weir at VENUS Los Angeles, Ben Schumacher at Musee d’art contemporain de Lyon, Chadwick Rantanen at Essex Street

Past: Mungo Thomson at Contemporary Art Gallery Vancouver

John Knight at Cabinet

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The subtle assertion of power rising the tiny dictators, covering the world with chain link fence to keep theirs. Knight with the usual verve excises as a grand authorial means, exerting as much power as is his.  The austerity as though seething through clenched teeth, we seem to implicitly understand this type of anger.


See too: John Knight at Greene Naftali