Uri Aran at Sadie Coles

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The sort of Brechtian alienation in the more too-on-the-nose moments make for sadness of communication interuppted by Uran's shoe-gazed shooting of his own feet: videos continuously interrupted, our stilted conversations scripted, half a heart in paint smeared surfaces, a plastic turkey flies in from nowhere to mock you, sentimentality tableaued in irony, a black stallion put down on a table, a teenage angst pre-rupturing its connection to prevent its predicted hurt by a distance placed clearly upon glass to let you know its there.


See too: Group Show at Salle Principale

Gerold Miller at Kunsthalle Weishaupt

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The severity of its blankness softened by form massaged to the shape that becomes the content of its extreme legibility: graphic and squealing. Extreme legibility; insta icons semio-traverse space to possess recognition, without it, the psychoactive element of Miller: getting struck in the face with blankness.


Amanda Ross-Ho at The Pit, Charline von Heyl at Gisela Capitain,

Lutz Braun at Nagel Draxler

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Irrepressible loveliness of paintings today blooming and bruise color as stains: we can't precisely handle beauty unencumbered, it must self-erupt as painterly stigmata. The material ooze, blood of painting conjured by the neo-occult painter. Braun by no means a great example of the vogue since predating it by a decade, and, on occasion, even applying paint, but look back and see in his history a painting that predicts every painting made today.

See too: Mathieu Malouf at Jenny’s, Max Brand at Off Vendome, Vittorio Brodmann at Halle Für Kunst Lüneburg, Vittorio Brodmann at Freedman Fitzpatrick, Vittorio Brodmann at Gregor Staiger, Jana Euler at Galerie Neu & Portikus, Sergej Jensen at dépendance

Group Show at Commercial Street

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The aesthetics of our mythic urban ruination, fragments. Google results:  "35 of the most Hauntingly Beautiful Urban Ruins" "Urban Exploration Tourism" "Beauty in Decay" " Amazon.com: Beauty in Decay; A visually stunning book" showcasing the wider appeal of our desperation, of our ruin. McCarthy's The Road on Oprah's book club. "For at least a year Rochelle Goldberg’s steel structure will be submerged in the water of Buzzard’s Bay." Children's films set post-apocalypse. Hopefully: a tiny little shaman to lead us out of our fascination with desperation and not back into it, like so many moths attracted to artificial light.


See too: Cathy Wilkes at Kunstmuseum Linz

Ann Cathrin November Høibo at STANDARD (OSLO)

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The compositionalizing effort. Arrange space to offset it, call attention to itself. The metal protrusions that highlight a body, like earrings, piercings or halo pinned to your skull. There's an erotic element to piercing, allowing someone that access to your body, to puncture it, the gallerist's giving to the artist. Like Krebber making explicit his hesitation in painting in order to highlight (to absurd levels) the artist's consciousness, composition in sculpture is a game to highlight the object in an askew flatness, the thought that went into it, so can't forget about that ghost.


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

Wade Guyton at Academie Conti & Le Consortium

(Academie Conti, Le Consortium)

Print the painting, how cold and deliciously malevolent it all seemed at the time until our own body temperature fell so low to match it that eventually even Scheljdahl felt warm towards a retrospective of them. Everyone stressed endlessly the physicality of them, that poor ol' Guyton had to actually tug them out of the printer, that it was tough work, a little sweat, a little body heat, not absolute zero, but this extraction only served to underscore the fantasy of the creative act soon able to be stretched out from digital ethers like raw id tugged from digital subconscious, and erect in a gallery. That we could lose our hands in the printing press because soon our wet desire would just print itself as diamonds on a wall, we could stop tugging them off in studios, and the Onanist accident of its spills and smears prevented reproduction, the accident made them unreproducible, sterile.
But now 2016 in the era of Atkinsian avatar-conciousness, and Rachel Rosist digital semio-corruption we understand that the digital was just a new pool to self-reflect in, and we're still looking into it wanking. Look a Guyton self-portrait appears up in it.


See too: Zak Prekop at Shane Campbell, Cheyney Thompson at Raucci/Santamaria, Daniel Lefcourt at Blum & Poe

Nicolas Deshayes at Modern Art

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Like slick shit out a goose, the constipatory is loosed in intestinal forms as nausea spiraling waste flushed. Turds are the one sculpture everyone makes, hopefully on the daily, that no one likes to be reminded of. Nothing worse than being in a overheated bathroom unloading and sweating with overheated intestines, running hot water, thinking about tapeworms, trying to forget about your body.

Natalie Czech at Crac Alsace

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Like Annette Kelm, the advertorial method turns the photograph into a transaction flatly, a communication disposable, in which Czech's picture's refusal to mean, to sell, show the absurdity of such a transaction of your attention for its image, like a peacock preened without a sex to sell, its inanity comic.


See too:Annette Kelm at Meyer Kainer, Annette Kelm at Gio Marconi

Lukas Duwenhögger at Raven Row

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A Manet-like estrangement in placeless bygone men, part Olympia part Lorenzo Lotto's portraits, a particular type of heat: the images constructed of the same overthick fabric the men painted of it wear, everything slightly plump, rounded, made of lips, you know just how that denim feels.

Ugo Rondinone at Carré D’art

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The particular sadness conjured by Rondinone is humor not completing - like a beautifully constructed joke that falls apart in water, its absurdity a torture device for our desire to connect with its elements, tiny horses, the light of day, nature, clouds. It's to prove how lonely we are. How badly we desire to connect.


Ugo Rondinone at Krobath, Olaf Breuning at Metro Pictures

Andrea Büttner at Kunsthalle Wien

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In the woodcuts' simplicity, scraping out of image, in recycling outmoded genres as quaintness, in their weakness, their fragilely cut iconography, in feeling contemporary archaeologic, like cut glass printed, like things made by nuns, or your mum, in feeling pleasantly non-art by virtue of their being art, so aesthetically wounded, the woodcuts are good.

Past: Gerry Bibby, Henrik Olesen at Sismógrafo

"The semiotic distress of Bibby a possible place to hide the body lint of Olesen. A crosswalk becomes a Halley abstraction becomes our semiotic Jail..."

Past: Gerry Bibby, Henrik Olesen at Sismógrafo

Goshka Macuga at Schinkel Pavillon

(link)

Of course a robot elucidating the beginning and end of man gives us the willies, like the end to Kubrick's A.I. the robots bear witness to humankind's end, the inverse Pinnochio, the human absorbed into the Mechanical Turk they program.


See too: Goshka Macuga at Rüdiger Schöttle

Vito Acconci at MoMA PS1

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Twisting conceptual art's fascination with linguistic bureaucratics, Acconci made grotesque conceptual Art's fetish for rules as a nightmarish pedagogical authority, made to assert his body frighteningly close. No excuse unturned for Acconci to get close and expose his body, voice or marmot-like nutsack. And his use of conceptual authority to instruct bodies in some way exposed conceptual art's ability to neutralize certain of its more abusive aspects. Wasn't conceptual art's denial of pleasure subsumed into instruction and authority itself a fetish.

Martin Creed at Hauser & Wirth Somerset

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Ah Creed, the ham at the bedrock of dumb; objects irrupted into the world as cosmic blunders, like the universe's mistakes, highlighted. If Nauman's neon proclamation of Artist's mystic truth was forever superpositioned between irony and earnestness, Creed's caustic stripping of linguistic intention made words themselves flaunt their own absurdity as a towering asininity. That of course words mean everything and nothing, and this categorical absurdification corrupted the basic exchange with glee, a saccahrine pop that occluded thought in the best way.


See too: Darren Bader at Kölnischer Kunstverein, Darren Bader at Andrew Kreps , Darren Bader at Radio Athènes

Marc Camille Chaimowicz at INDIPENDENZA

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Despite their allure, Chaimowicz's object withdraw behind soft facades, using friendliness as a foil. Chaimowicz's objects appear overwhelmingly kind, in pastels and patterning that soften the self, nothing unacceptable to a baby's bedroom. We find this wanton sensitivity almost unnerving in art, we fear the institutionalization of its form, the hospitalization of "sentiment." That Chaimowicz continually seems able to wrest its new versions makes him the anti-HeimoZoberning.

See too: Marc Camille Chaimowicz at Galerie Neu, Heimo Zobernig at Kunsthaus Bregenz

Past: Amy Sillman

"...its origination, adolescence, nubility and thus becoming etc., that Sillmans work, generally, seems about."

Past: Amy Sillman at Sikkema Jenkins, Amy Sillman at Kunsthaus Bregenz

Chelsea Culprit at Yautepec

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The figurative's coming back so why not jump the gun with a full blown explosion of nightclub George Segal, updated for Rebecca Warren's R.Crumb in garishness. The Camp goes to 11. Meeting our expectations of the figurative with an ludicrous version, to reroute and displace the normative right? The point being it's really not all that ludicrous, why wouldn't we take these seriously, what if George Segal had made these.  

See too: Nicola Tyson at Friedrich Petzel, Anna Uddenberg and Nicolas Ceccaldi at MEGA Foundation

Judy Chicago at CAPC

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"Why Not Judy Chicago?" answered by what appeared as Chicago's essentialist conservatism against more radical notions of gender performativity and less explicitly "feminine" imagery that seemed to only entrench gender roles in reacting to and thus confirming the overt power structure's definitions rather than just stepping aside, the same way many queer theorists rejected "Same-sex Marriage"* as simply the hetero-patriarchy asking a subaltern community to conform or perish, adopt its structures for its community or be forever exiled, like no one had read Adorno. That some women didn't want to be reduced their genitalia. Of course that was how it all appeared, and in hindsight Chicago's expressions of femininity - however they bent around the forms of stereotypical gender-roles - were still pretty radical expressions in their unironic brash political insistence of the "feminine" even if some were uncomfortable with imagery emanating lots of waves symbolizing the feminine ethereal power of "woman" sort of like you have op-eds in the NYT from feminist moms expounding their schizo position of raising daughters who demand to wear pink, our reactionary uncomfort to anything resembling gender roles, having become today's "not that there's anything wrong with that."

* What a fucking name.


See too: Lily van der Stokker at Koenig & Clinton

Gili Tal at Jenny’s

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The more pathetic and depressing aspects of commerce's reign are mirrored in Tal's reconstructions of it, like those half empty coolers, a lightness mimicking advertising's own getting closer to grim comedy alongside a press release from hell once again reminding us all of our relegation to capitalistic damnation: even that incessant gadfly of PR fodder, the flaneur - ever abused privileger of every artist's cockamamie tourism - is put to place as another symptom of globalized identity, flighting only over the surfaces of exchange and capital. Objects terrifyingly depressing.

Jessica Warboys at SIC

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I was writing something out about how, askew to the trend of dancing in front of paintings to cast spells as mysticism for meaning to stand in for yesterday's conceptualism, Warboys' paintings seem predicated on the distance of the painting's sign from its performative aspect, the things never overlap: Warboys never quite dancing in front of the paintings - splitting hairs quite thin here - that leaves everything as distinct as metal objects in a bag, together but never mixed, different from other performative dance-in-front-of-paintings painters inculcation of painting like its a dead hare, and feeling how crazy that sounded. In vast darkness, deprived of information images are projected on the backs of the caves of our skulls in phantasms in trying to construct a reasonable image. This is the power of the vast blank caves of today's art. It's occasionally fun.

Mathis Gasser at Centre d’édition contemporaine

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Like taking sips from a firehose, Gasser's sampling of the deluge of images: "thousands of signs collide and are multiplied in an explosive combination [...] diffracted by the immateriality of the digital world and by the invasion of information. [..] They oscillate between a nihilistic vision and an interrogation of the limits of a world ..." Using of the fountain to make a construct your own adventures storyboard, when the world is flooded dance in the rain.

August Review Index 2016

Carissa Rodriguez at Wattis

Gina Beavers at Michael Benevento

William Pope.L at Steve Turner

Sturtevant at Air de Paris

Martin Wong at P.P.O.W

Nancy Lupo at Swiss Institute

Ceal Floyer at Aargauer Kunsthaus

Stan Douglas at Wiels

Peter Fischli and David Weiss at Guggenheim

DAS INSTITUT at Serpentine Gallery

Henning Bohl at What Pipeline

K.r.m. Mooney at Pied-á-terre

Lili Reynaud-Dewar at Clearing

Maria Eichhorn at Chisenhale

Lin May Saeed at Jacky Strenz

Willem de Rooij at Le Consortium

Jana Euler at Portikus

J. Parker Valentine at Park View

Nina Könnemann at High Art

Lucie Stahl at Halle Für Kunst Lüneburg

Barbara Kasten at Hannah Hoffman

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Kasten's are like exorcisms to make photography reveal its surface: what was made to represent everything but itself - not to see its silver substrate as Deschenes or an self-indexing gambit of Beshty's mechanical noodling- but a surrealist project of photography's desire-surface, the paradox of photographing glass, making its car-body self expose without getting a look under the hood, desiring the wet image of surface. Like making love to someone's glistening sweat.

See too: Tony Conrad's Glass

Huang Yong Ping at Museum Ludwig

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The material representations of history so often just stuff: cast concrete memories, or just bags of concrete, Keifer's lead, every undergrad's duffles of weighty sand - masses of time connoted by its mulch, by abject material resembling eyelid crust - trying to represent the raw stuff of time before its conversion to history. That artistic representations of time/history so often take on this trope seems almost a sociological phenomenon, why do we equate trash with history, with dumping grounds of material.