AR: Lucie Stahl at Halle Für Kunst Lüneburg

Click here to read

Originally Posted: August 5th, 2016

Note: This entry is part of August Review, our annual look back at this season’s key exhibitions. For more information, see the announcement here.

Amy Lien, Enzo Camacho at various locations

(link)

Our bodily tumult like serial killer sprees in some hallowed halls, the offices of Texte Zur Kunst, Buchholz, Mathew, Lars Friedrich’s apartment - our representation fractured in the need to stash our bodies everywhere in art franchised, split spread divide and reconnect - of course we become like monsters tentacling and "suck[ing] unborn fetuses out of pregnant women" to maintain our youthful semio-capital.


See too: Amy Lien & Enzo Camacho at 47 Canal

“Take This Gun And Stick It” at Ellis King

(link)

A press release staging the objects in the doorway of the libidinal. Oft stated: Art is an object determined and structured by our relationship to desire, an object created of what we want to see exist in the world and even the staggering repression of desire by someone like say Christopher Williams becomes instead paraphilia rejection of bodily pleasure, instead expressing bodily shame, instead only the over-clean pleasure of what the product affords, a fetishistic antipodal relation to desire, and thus sick, circling all our hairy wet need. But so less oft said is our current and growing vogue for the micro-attention to the formal aspects of art begins to further and further be capable of discussion in terms of sexual fetish, desire is rerouted into inanimate objects, feel latex or the suspended touch leaving them blue balled and in agony.


See too: Fetish, Phillip Lai at Modern Art, Chadwick Rantanen at Essex Street, Olga Balema at Croy Nielsen

Ruby Neri at David Kordansky

(link)

"Fertility goddesses for the contemporary imagination;" the objects are a "fun" ironizing of femininity's tropes, of the goddess, a winking jest mocking the less progressive constructions of "woman" with comic timing while still being shackled to it. Whether we've moved past patriarchally constructed versions of woman (we haven't) we still get to feel some small relief of casting here the equivalent of a semiotic hex against it, which while cathartic still shows how brutally insistent those images are. The women branded 2016 to mark this moment. 

AR: J. Parker Valentine at Park View

Click here to read

Originally Posted: February 26th, 2016

Note: This entry is part of August Review, our annual look back at this season’s key exhibitions. For more information, see the announcement here.

John Kelsey at Daniel Buchholz

(link)

The behatted Kelsey's John Marinesque Watercolors prove Kelsey doesn't have anything to prove after decades romancing the artworld and sailing the echelons of cool across gallerist, artist, writer, fashionista etc. etc, finally expelling the exhaust of hyper aspiration where, like the mythic painted-in-secret still-life paintings of Clement Greenberg, the critic expended relaxes into the comfort of Sunday painting. The cash-in could be eyerolling but the watercolors are endearing in the attention to the body exhausting itself, fights are exhausting, which you can't but think now too of Kelsey - pretty much on his own death-bed of cool - reflecting his own exhaustion and while the legs arms often turn to overcooked elbow noodles, the determination to capture the body is present; the whale stuff, while coy, is shit.

Bernadette Corporation at Stedelijk Museum

(link)

You'll have zero idea what's going on here if you don't already know the projects, though you can make a guess. BC's absorption of fashion-means (not necessarily the clothes as McGuffin that they are) can't really be under-stressed. Launching a hundred like-minded careers since, BC weren't the first of the fashion-orient but their understanding its "based on mythmaking and seduction" opened the eyes of today's Genzkenites to the aura preceding their deluge of material whateverness. Brand was the powerforce of the artist, and confusion, misalignment and just stuff could dissolve objects to the narrative-sans-critque, seen performed in the phenoms of today everyone from Arakawa and Bratsch to half the surround-audience gen and trickling into some of the post-krebberites' conceptual horsing. Much of BC's project was pointed despite its intended then dispersion that now in exhibition looks like the miasma of the younger's extraction of it.


See too: Stewart Uoo at 47 Canal, KAYA at Deborah Schamoni

AR: Jana Euler at Portikus

Click here to read

Originally Posted: January 20th, 2016

Note: This entry is part of August Review, our annual look back at this season’s key exhibitions. For more information, see the announcement here.

Lutz Bacher at Daniel Buchholz

(link)

Some days spent in bed wondering: Does CAD love anyone more than Lutz Bacher? answered by the appearance of another before us. Gotta Catch 'em all Quarterly. If Bacher's theme of the erosion of the monument-as-sign's ability to mean isn't still apparent, the spamming of its images should make it: The semantic satiation of saying it again and again mirroring Bacher's interest in the loss, in the meaning photocopied to death. Like Gonzalez-Torres - who CAD also obviously feels some large affinity towards - significance is in the continual depletion and refill of an ability to appear -significant or loved - in the face of another, an artistic problem if there ever was one.


See too: Lutz Bacher at 356 Mission, Lutz Bacher at Statens Museum for Kunst, Lutz Bacher at Daniel Buchloz, Lutz Bacher at Daniel Buchholz, Contemporary Art Quarterly 2, On Kawara at the Guggenheim

Rochelle Feinstein at Francesca Pia

None of it quite makes sense, adds up, and that's the circumnambular point in a convolution of forms circleing to elide easy critical attacks. The fun is watching the boxer dance around the grab while you get punched in the head.

AR: Willem de Rooij at Le Consortium

Click here to read

Originally Posted: September 23rd, 2015

Note: This entry is part of August Review, our annual look back at this season’s key exhibitions. For more information, see the announcement here.

Phung-Tien Phan at Bonner Kunstverein

(link)

The art meme of placing a thing on another thing. Foregrounding the ghost who've arranged the space, the artist's hand, both magnifying their leave while highlighting the staging of the encounter. Like Broodthaers' potted palms casting the scene in its artifice, it makes the ghosts come out, those who constructed its object for you, tombs where flowers have been left.


See too: Ulla von Brandenberg at Pilar Corrias

AR: Lin May Saeed at Jacky Strenz

Click here to view slideshow

Originally Posted: April 4th, 2016

Note: This entry is part of August Review, our annual look back at this season’s key exhibitions. For more information, see the announcement here.

AR: Maria Eichhorn at Chisenhale

Click here to read

Originally Posted: May 30th, 2016

Note: This entry is part of August Review, our annual look back at this season’s key exhibitions. For more information, see the announcement here.

Please Donate!

July 14th, 2016

We’re trying to raise $12,000,000 to make some much-needed improvements to Contemporary Art Writing Daily. Thanks to everyone who's donated so far.

If we’re successful, we’ll work to make the site fitter, happier and more productive. Please, make a donation right now in support of this effort.

DONATE

Paola Pivi at Dallas Contemporary

(link)

"These gestures are about freedom." A Childlike freedom attaining adult power, a cartoon friendliness abstracting its happy bludgeon of reality. The world to putty to whatever libidinal desire or dreams, placing Zebras dying in the Arctic. It seemed fun. An absurdism that borders on the psychotic, like Burden's childlike megalomania masquerading as glee, fun hides its stupid destruction of reality in which, above all, our dreams must be manifest.


See too: Paola Pivi at Emmanuel Perrotin, Chris Burden Metropolis II at LACMA, Henning Bohl at What Pipeline, Sadie Benning at Mary Boone & Callicoon Fine Arts

AR: Lili Reynaud-Dewar at Clearing

Click here to read
Originally Posted: March 7th, 2016
Note: This entry is part of August Review, our annual look back at this season’s key exhibitions. For more information, see the announcement here.

Andreas Slominski at Deichtorhallen

(link)




Passed: Andreas Slominski at Proyectos Monclova & Barbel Graesslin, Andreas Slominski at Thaddaeus Ropac

Shana Moulton at Kunsthaus Glarus

(link)

Moulton's humor in our contradictions, our desperation in searching for spiritual value in commodic life, or authenticity, or comfort, or "magic" technologies all being juxtaposed with the day's small tragedy of turning over a can of beans to read its ingredients (to attempt to glean some control over our world, some mastery where we have none, there no mastery) is amphetaminically reminiscent of Cindy Sherman's endless mockery of her subject's desire to appear, to express itself in any sort of meaningful way, bullying our desire for comfort in recognition itself, to individualize with video effect, a root desire for anything other than this life, somberly kicking us when we're down with a medical donut strapped to our ass, you so desperately want these to be funny but no one has ever made anything sadder than these post-semio-industrial kafkaesque videos, like watching Gregor Samsa transmute to Mr. Bean and die, alone, gasping for air with the precision of a comic, Moulton.


See too: Jordan Wolfson at David Zwirner

AR: K.r.m. Mooney at Pied-á-terre

Click here to read
Originally Posted: November 26th, 2015
Note: This entry is part of August Review, our annual look back at this season’s key exhibitions. For more information, see the announcement here.

Shio Kusaka at Blum & Poe

(link)

Epicurean pottery, pleasure in the temperate, reserved handling of sensitivities implying a virtuous stake in its bright pleasure, internally luminous to mirror the porcelain souls of consumers who desire them - inordinate number of writing insinuating how much you are going to "want one" and they do after all make a point to confuse commodity, aesthetic and functional forms, defiantly vessels, or toys - anti-decadence assigning morality to their commodity which itself became a massive trend post 2008 recession, austerity itself becoming a thing to sell.


See too: Juha Pekka Matias Laakkonen at Corvi-Mora

AR: Henning Bohl at What Pipeline

Click here to read

Originally Posted: December 11th, 2015

Note: This entry is part of August Review, our annual look back at this season’s key exhibitions. For more information, see the announcement here.

Michaela Eichwald at Silberkuppe

(link)

Eichwald's ability to make true atrociousness platable, fecal umbers into gastro-figuratives of the stomach churning they induce. Their recuperation of contradictory elements. Not reducible to series of gestures, not looking effortless while still holding onto their improbable coolness, a defining feature against the contemporary sea of gentle abstraction, rendered figuration and Krebberian Spinoff of everyone positioning their paintings look as though off the cuff delivered as god's conceptual ornaments; Eichwald's higherpowers far more immanent, even personal, pained efforts that even if postured still posturing a decidedly uncool thing to affect the trope of painters struggle in 2016. Making pretty paintings in no way tasteful.

See too: Ida Ekblad at Herald St

AR: DAS INSTITUT at Serpentine Gallery

Click here to read

Originally Posted: May 17th, 2016

Note: This entry is part of August Review, our annual look back at this season’s key exhibitions. For more information, see the announcement here.

Fredrik Værslev at Bergen Kunsthall

(link)

Continuously amazing, Josh Smith's ability to produce a tasteful painting today. And Værslev too an incommensurate tastifying of painting identities smoothed and well worn into comfort: the softness of acid-washed history, whose untreated denim is stiff, abrasive, and has edges that Værslev happily washes away, with the already pre-distressed historical material. Gerberian friend support is made as a kind of joke, of painting "off-the-shelf," readymade and there's a story Værslev tells in interviews, of the shelf origin in which in his final moments at the Städelschule, and tormented years since his last paintings -"for three years and a half I did not paint, not a single drop of paint" - and encouraged heavily by professor de Rooij, he makes a painting to his (Værslev's) mother's specifications: useful and pink with a shelf for her flowers to prevent stereo ruination and does so, paints the pink shelf with the flowers, and this success deemed by professor student and ostensibly mother seems an apt in describing its continuation today meeting demand for a market, giving the people what they want, a comfort.


See too: Fredrik Vaerslev at Centre d’Art Contemporain Passerelle

AR: Peter Fischli and David Weiss at Guggenheim

Click here to read

Originally Posted: April 29th, 2016

Note: This entry is part of August Review, our annual look back at this season’s key exhibitions. For more information, see the announcement here.

AR: Stan Douglas at Wiels

Click here to read

Originally Posted: January 9th, 2016

Note: This entry is part of August Review, our annual look back at this season’s key exhibitions. For more information, see the announcement here.

AR: Ceal Floyer at Aargauer Kunsthaus

(link)

The aesthetics of small cleverness - the set-up, tension and click of conclusion- and its bathetic pull, "this interplay of expectation and disappointment." Floyer's work has always felt like mocking tragedies, less fun than sinisterly aware of their exchange of the broken sad comedy of puns as like existentially it, this small disappointment threatening to replace understanding with "getting it," our world as a series of painfully dumb effects.

Sharon Lockhart at Arts Club of Chicago & Antek Walczak at Real Fine Arts

(Sharon Lockhart, Antek Walczak)

Promotional stills standing-in for documentation in attempts to reprioritize viewership away from the digitally documentary to rechristen once again the in-person experience mostly just ends with everyone knowing the happening of an exhibition without ability to say anything about it, but we know it's there: its promotion has functioned while denying our ability to respond in a meaningful way, as advertising does, and even the well documented denies authority of commentary despite documentation's inordinate importance in today's tradeshow of art, a system catalyzing a sort of sublingual register and meme-like spread of tendencies across art absorbed in the free-flow hydrant of image feeds that still so willingly distribute them and we willingly participate and of which we can't speak formally but to which we are all incarcarated, knowing you-know-who did you-know-what at you-know-where, the takeover of information taking hostage any response.*

*In conversation with a famous architect while together painting his roof, asked if architectural criticism made prerequisite the in-person experience of the buildings they reviewed, the architect said no, but it was contentious, but that buildings were almost always reviewed by plans, images and renderings, that this was inherent to the nature of architecture whose plans  projections bore oversize importance, that this was the nature of the beast, staring into silver paint in heat.

Phillip Lai at Modern Art

(link)

What Romance! The expressionist stroke absorbed into sculptural gesture, a sensitivity so heightened they feel stunted by their own fetish of sense. The remnants, records and romance of the hand, the touch. The fetishistic attention to details which remind us of all the sexual deviant's interest in attachments, space, and knots, the fetishist knowns the beauty of his knot is bearer of his love, the pleasure in pained restraint.

See too: Oscar Tuazon at Le Consortium & Paradise Garage, Manfred Pernice at Galerie Neu, Venice: Gedi Sibony at The Arsenale, CAWD on Fetish

AR: Nancy Lupo at Swiss Institute

Click here to read

Originally Posted: April 19th, 2016

Note: This entry is part of August Review, our annual look back at this season’s key exhibitions. For more information, see the announcement here.

Yngve Holen at Kunsthalle Basel

(link)

The terrible emptiness of objects, an indifference that hurts, and in Holen and other's objects we begin to see boogeymen that we assume must be there filling the cold object with anything but an emptiness. We exceed at inventing gods where there are none. What is behind it is only us. It is obvious at this point that objects we design are reflections of us, this is how the field of anthropology operates. We are designers or our world, of our water coolers cut in half in attempts to find its ghost where there is only us standing around it attempting the small talk of art writing. Artists' recent turn towards this mystic auto-anthropology would perhaps be better suited to more rigorous dissertations of objects affectual torture of us that Holen and other's more symbolic moments seem primed to leech out of all-too-ready curators, but it is true that our objects haunt us.


See too: “Being Thing” at Centre International d’Arte et du Paysage & Treignac Projet, Yngve Holen at Modern Art, Mark Leckey at Haus Der Kunst + Kunsthalle Basel, Darren Bader at Andrew Kreps, Klara Lidén, Alicia Frankovich at Kurator, Park McArthur at Chisenhale, Sam Lewitt at Kunsthalle Basel

AR: Martin Wong at P.P.O.W

Click here to read

Originally Posted: February 4th, 2016

Note: This entry is part of August Review, our annual look back at this season’s key exhibitions. For more information, see the announcement here.

Matt Keegan, Kay Rosen at Grazer Kunstverein

(link)

Language at architectural scales, symbolizing words' own arrangement of the floorplan of your thoughts. The infectious insertion of a stranger's speech into yours: when I write "lake" the word appears in you, my voice for yours. Reading is like relinquishing control of thought to an author's temporary marionetting of yours. How odd that my words are a voice in your head. Reading is such an automatic mechanism. It is a base human disposition to "read" our environment, to make sense of our surroundings, and advertising takes advantage of this: a byline appears and before you can stop yourself you have read it, allowed it briefly to control you and its message has been passed, its transaction has been complete, and its sign depleted lifeless garbage. Artists soften this verbose assault by clipping meaning, leaving it to never complete a logic but hover incomplete and

Lucie Stahl at Halle Für Kunst Lüneburg

(link)

We haven't had a CAD Stahl solo since 2014. Which whose then, despite their slight derivitives, in the specificity of their slick digi-crust-materialism and resolution-as-sex, we loved the scanner trash prints: what everyone else was at such pains to display with existential and overwrought, like, expression, Stahl had turned into cheap easy and fast slacker products that got closer to the existential dread of that material-reproduction by embodying all its cheap easy fast sexy disposability. Somehow better than the cold tricks of Guyton/Walker because Stahl's was falsely warm. But that latent sadness present in this ex was sort always so.

AR: Sturtevant at Air de Paris

Click here to read

Originally Posted: Sunday, July 10, 2016

Note: This entry is part of August Review, our annual look back at this season’s key exhibitions. For more information, see the announcement here.

Alex Hubbard at House of Gaga

(link)

The move from perspectively delirious videos recording their own production - a sort of Genzkenian prolepsis of claiming the production the product - and acclaimed then before into the recent and ongoing big wet&sticky Jolly-Ranchers whose vestigial remains of the viewpointally ambiguous videos is their most interesting, albeit liminally, part; that Hubbard continues regressing into now actual figurative representations of the ambiguity and masking a drinking problem (there's a bar behind the paintings!) thematizing the boozie distress of authorship, the eyerolling tragedy of those painters drunk to death, and perhaps signals Hubbard has staged his own intervention and we can move soberly on.


See too: KAYA at Deborah Schamoni, Isa Genzken at David Zwirner, Isa Genzken at Institute of Contemporary Art

Sam Lewitt, Lucy Raven at Pilar Corrias

(link)

Clean the place out. Strip the lights. Burn the light to turn up the heat. Set the lights to "Siren." Representations of our current boring dystopia, both artists reaffirming the callous concrete conditions of the world, its artificialness and austerity, a coldness we begin to find somehow pleasing, enjoying our pleasure denied by assertions of power, warmth in the current that designates our capitalist life, comfort in our mastery by others as we acclimate and absorb the cold conditions of our world, artists thinking in the master's voice.


See too: Sam Lewitt at Kunsthalle Basel, Sam Lewitt at Miguel Abreu, John Knight at Greene Naftali

AR: William Pope.L at Steve Turner

Click here to read

Originally Posted: December 2nd, 2015

Note: This entry is part of August Review, our annual look back at this season’s key exhibitions. For more information, see the announcement here.

AR: Gina Beavers at Michael Benevento

Click here to read

Originally Posted: December 31st, 2015

Note: This entry is part of August Review, our annual look back at this season’s key exhibitions. For more information, see the announcement here.

Brian Griffiths at Vilma Gold

(link)

What had been Griffiths' tents, drapery and sealed wardrobes - alongside the occasionally recurring oversized head - before now's architectural models and fascination with Bill Murray's surface - yeah that's all Bill Murray there* - is still the obviously recurring theme of the exterior as phantasmagoria: blank surfaces for projection and the psychic cruel comedy of visage as facade. The use of architecture as representing psychic space has become a major motif in art, but whereas it had been usually literary or filmic to as physical metaphors for memory or dreams or whatever, art's use has recently become much more concerned with its meaty resemblance to a head, reminiscent of Deleuze pointing out that Francis Bacon didn't so much paint portraits but instead heads, the meat structure normally eclipsed by our concern with face. But so, concerning Bill Murray, has there ever been a celebrity whom people have been willing to wear on a t-shirt a giant image of their head? They're incredibly popular, yet a Brad Pitt head t-shirt seems unconscionable. We love the facade of Murray, his likeness, his surface, we treat him like a walking public architecture, a horrifying way to die.

*well not that guy, no. 



See too: Mathis Altmann at Halle für Kunst Lüneburg

Carl Cheng at Cherry and Martin

(link)

Cherry and Martin on occasion producing well timed exhibitions interrupting the "new" moment with gentle reminders, past artists who too had delivered on certain aesthetics promises. E.g. their delivering a new Support/Surfaces exhibition to at a moment when gentle auto-painting of certain painter-painters was reaching peak. And from Thek to 1960's Robert Graham to Kudo to here Cheng before today's bio-waste terrariums of a list of at least 15 artists currently voguing, the anxiety of futurology's biotechnic surrealism is well represented. When young artists start to occlude the past it is of course a market effect producing outshone visibility and C+M - and perhaps Greenspon across the continent and bummeringly very few others - dogged insistence against the new shiny thing commendable.


See too: Ajay Kurian at Rowhouse Project, Max Hooper Schneider at High Art, Nancy Lupo at Swiss Institute, Amy Yao at Various Small Fires, “Flat Neighbors” at Rachel Uffner, Hans-Christian Lotz at Christian Andersen,Yuji Agematsu at Artspeak, “RR ZZ” at Gluck50, Yuji Agematsu at Real Fine Arts, Mathis Altmann at Freedman Fitzpatrick Altmann, Olga Balema at Croy Nielsen, David Douard at Johan Berggren, Nancy Lupo at Wallspace, Katja Novitskova at Kunsthalle Lissabon, Anicka Yi at Kunsthalle Basel, Anicka Yi at Cleveland Museum of Art, Transformer Station, Florian Germann at Gregor Staiger, Timur Si-Qin at Carl Kostyál, Ben Schumacher at Musee d’art contemporain de Lyon, Anna Uddenberg and Nicolas Ceccaldi at MEGA Foundation,  Pamela Rosenkranz at Karma International, “Being Thing” at Centre International d’Arte et du Paysage & Treignac Projet, Michael E. Smith at Sculpture Center

Lutz Bacher at 356 Mission

(link)

In "Entropy and the new Monuments" Smithson's term "hyper-prosaism" for Morris, Flavin, LeWitt, and Judd described his artistic cohorts' inadequacy in the grand scales of time and entropy, the culturally catatonic monuments in human "progression." The bracing absurdity and nihilism of cosmic scales entering the personal ones, which Bacher recurringly recalls with invocations of cosmos xeroxed into the noise of their granular flooring, synecdoches of stellar scales spilled across expanses like baseballs or sprawls of sand. Mountains dissolve in grains that resemble liquids in geologic time. This recurring theme. The biblical "for dust you are and to dust you will return" is, as far as we know of entropy, scientifically accurate. Bacher never as deeply ironic or hurt as Smithson seemed by the crushing juxtaposition, the monuments themselves invoke already this loss.





See too: Lutz Bacher at Statens Museum for Kunst, On Kawara at the Guggenheim, Lutz Bacher at Daniel Buchloz

AR: Carissa Rodriguez at Wattis

Click here to read

Originally Posted: February 2nd, 2016

Note: This entry is part of August Review, our annual look back at this season’s key exhibitions. For more information, see the announcement here.

August Review 2016

August 1st, 2016

As the month begins, so does our eighth annual August Review. Every year we reflect on the exhibitions that were especially memorable to us since the previous August. We will re-publish one show each day, marked by “AR:” in the title. We will also continue to cover new exhibitions daily.