Kathe Burkhart at FIERMAN

(link)

What's it take to get your new gallery's first show on CAD?  Running the art advisory for the interminably wonky Salon 94, or a previous gallery for 5 years that never once got on CAD, or Kathe Burkhart. Of course Kathe Burkhart will be the answer. Who knows. Neighbors are jelly. Burkhart is great, and been terribly assigned to group show fodder for a number of years. Nice to see someone step up to bat. CAD's obvious thing for the resurgence of older semi-omitted oft-gay New Yorkers is understandably interesting for what it all predates now. And Burkhart's interest in the campy celebrity seems in line with today's mass-culture minded youth. Neat.

See too: David Rappeneau at Queer Thoughts

Milano Chow at Mary Mary

(link)

Ornateness and decadence is given the silent treatment, made square, hard-edge and if-not-quite cruel at least ordered to austerity, its skin off. They become Clue boards, picturing images as signs to feel in need of decoding, the compositional feng-shui that makes objects mysterious, play along if you like.


See too: Matthew Brannon at Casey Kaplan,  Mathew Cerletty at Office Baroque, Lucy McKenzie at Daniel Buchholz

Amelie von Wulffen at Barbara Weiss

(link)

One of the few painters not caught up in their own stylistic bog, instead with ease shift between means that never feel coerced by their author. It will be fun to one day see von Wulffen's retrospective because there will be surprises and not strategies.

A.L. Steiner at Koenig & Clinton

(link)

A man made blaze-orange and reflective through the stranger emergent rules of capital's risk assessment, donning its anonymous uniform highlighting his labor we are meant to ignore in a world he manicures to pretend the world isn't ending, like we're keeping something intact, like there will be something intact, scrubbing the earth. Channeling all the tragedy of the paradoxical rules that stem from of our world's "rational actors." I.e. To save cents per worker on insurance we paint them orange. Emergence is known for producing some of the most spectacular feats in nature - snowflakes, bird flocks, Giant's Causeway - and in Capital it causes our workers to turn orange. The absurdity is as staggeringly beautiful as it is tragic for the once human who is made subservient to it. I mean maybe this man wanted it. This anonymous and yellow drone trimming our earth to meet the desires of those who control it, channeled here in a photograph of Steiner's personal-as-political best.

Cerith Wyn Evans at Galerie Neu

(link)

The beautification of conceptual art, by assigning it more visceral roles it had once, in theory, rejected, is a hypostatization of conceptual art's poetic function. i.e.: Conceptual Art was always maximally poetic, failing to deliver the bureaucracy its language promised - breaking the glass of language to expose perfume of its confusion, irreductive - and glossing beauty atop to prove it: annoying at best. Wyn Evans engagement with this problem seems, at least partially, the point, the aestheticization of experience and awareness of the gloss. This is the sinister pulsing quality of Wyn Evans, the fact that there is no need for this artificial light.


See too: On Kawara at the Guggenheim

Eric Wesley at Midway Contemporary Art

(link)

Wesley's ability to mock what contains him, a laughable institutional crit whose assault is the brilliant dumbening of art dialect. The Burrito is hot right now. You've got Murillo's 300k one, Flame's mockery of, Bader's continual replenishing it as category, and Wesley's endless one. The difference here is Wesley's insistence of the burrito not its signifier which art has long found a way to be protected from, but to actually work with the burrito, which morphs to Taco Bell here, to force that most base of architecture to reflect on the walls of Midway. The joke isn't Taco Bell placed in art, but actually maybe caring about it.

Erika Vogt at Overduin & Co.

(link)

Big objects mock us. They hystericize space by treating it as plastic, irrationally. And their lumpy forms remind us of our bodies, which makes their injustice to the general order of space a personal issue, taking up space that was, ostensibly, meant for us with a big cartoonish grin. They are weapons. As theater props and staged here they are meant to have a relation to your body.

See too: “Puddle, pothole, portal” at Sculpture Center, Amanda Ross-Ho at The Pit

Julien Nguyen at Freedman Fitzpatrick

(link)

The unending loveliness of these, that, even we must admit, are good, technically adventurous and ripple with sex. Variance in finish shimmer like veins in marble or cocks, undulating detail as arousal: detail is attention paid, stimulation, titillation. For anyone who ever found eroticism in the restraint and rigidity of Piero della Francesca, here is your proof melting with Althoffian foppishness. These things bruise sex out of their flesh. Paintings with the depth of early video games while retaining the material pleasure of scuzz: a man smeared in choking purple softness, and legs splayed. Get close to his pink hand. There have never been more homoerotic paintings than these.


See too: Julien Ceccaldi at Jenny’s

Dena Yago at Sandy Brown

(link)

The PR all but stating the genericness of the images, a perfectly acceptable position that Yago, for a time now, has run with. Genericness is the power of seeing reality transitioning to its metaphor, or concept, its particulars liquify into the universal soup, qualities dissolve. It's really hard to see generic images. If seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees then knowing it is blindness. On being too bored to see. The optic cable is capable of data transmission spikes of roughly 1.25MB/s - the same as an ethernet cable - that are metabolically expensive. As a way to disable the brain's shortcut system researchers don goggles that invert the world into a 24/7 color negative and minds reel at processing raw data, causing profound disorientation, loss of appetite, inability to recognize common objects, colleagues, or family. "This is a hardwired system, and no matter how much you try to override it intellectually, tell it what it should see, it will tell you what it really does see." A difficult system to override, look.


See too: Oscar Tuazon at Le Consortium & Paradise Garage, Larry Poons at Michael Jon & Alan, Heimo Zobernig at Kunsthaus Bregenz, Darren Bader at Radio Athènes, Kaspar Müller at Société, Nancy Lupo at Swiss Institute

"You would think by looking at Jerry Saltz's instagram, and viewing his general media presence, that there is nothing going on in the world besides the fact that half of the population owns a vagina. We have waited to see if he would eventually evolve… if eventually he might become interested in communicating something besides other people’s genitalia, and move onto a more relevant topic- his obvious and continued mid-life crisis. It only takes thirty seconds on Saltz’s instagram to see how destructive and trivial his interests are. How he is using his power to openly fetishize female bodies, in lieu of actually presenting valid cultural critique. [O]ne out of every three of his posts is a vagina."

--> JERRY SALTZ- THE DONALD TRUMP OF ART WORLD SOCIAL MEDIA

Shadi Habib Allah at Reena Spaulings

(link)

The metaphorical potential is there, poetic reading of the viral clone system's invasive colonizing and laying waste to natives by blanketing them - kudzu kills by heavy shading, eclipsing the plants whose structures uphold it, a "structural parasite - though other of Habib Allah's projects seem less reliant on explicit metaphor and instead finding some geo-political point to wrest a myth from, an unseen point of destruction, dark communications, or self-lubricated sliding of the fat, i.e. the dislocation of the point, contextual slippage, the lack of a point here, spreading metaphor.

Valerie Keane at High Art

(link)

The capitalist equivalent of bodied-objects coughed up in the night, the night terrors of Haegue Yang shopping spree, they assemble the technologies of display that here become streamlined, spined, and injectable. Sharpening the garbage of post-ford CNC driven custom-ordered world, the grosser parts of the capitalistic buffalo, amassing the plastic neurosis that gives men breasts dissolved into micro-slush of our eco-systemic foodchain: we have plastic fears. And all the sharp points here remind us like swallowing jagged metal Krusty-Os of the possibility of bodily harm on all those sharp points against our bodies. Inverting Genzken's blind-beautiful speed of production to engender the nightmare of its waste. A real nightmare.


See too: Isa Genzken at David Zwirner, Yuji Agematsu at Real Fine Arts, KAYA at Deborah Schamoni

David Rappeneau at Queer Thoughts

(link)

“Henri Matisse painted pretty pictures during one of history’s ugliest eras" and Rappeneau draws apathetic youth in one of the most disquieting. Further references: The Pieta, Starry Night and Tamagachis: the youth are bored, despondent, they are nervous and pallid, but worst they're nostalgic. Cylindric reference reflects in anamorphosis to project history as bigger than it, in a point that culminates here.  Looking back to see yourself reflected in the glass already containing all the gold you can fish, to find yourself trapped on the silver side of the mirror, your reflection. And Rappeneau's endless inscriptions in this silver surface, this hypertrophied advertorial ennui embodying all the post-manic fallout of DISmagazine, its fatigue, is brutal, tiring.


See too: David Rappeneau at Queer Thoughts

Peter Shire at Derek Eller

(link)

These are like comedy for the eyes. Absurdifying the visible. Like if god made flowers as a joke.

Erika Landström at Federico Vavassori

(link)

Fatigue of "provisional painting" against its inability to die symptomatic of its comfort. The fragment projecting inconclusiveness. Allowing a build your own aesthetic adventure of possible completions, denying the definitiveness whose edges we could possibly find distasteful. Placing information on the table. "You complete me,": a surer sign of attraction. It's nice to know a painting cares about you. Not to instruct you, but be with you. Friendliness in painting. This is all on you.
It's that prophylactically-sexy glass wall behind you that's the scary thing.


See too: “Seven Reeds” at Overduin & Co. , Tony Conrad's Glass,

Reena Spaulings at Chantal Crousel

(link)

Reigning champions of the dumb art gesture so profoundly, inertly, token as to rupture any semblance of hope for meaning; it found comedy in the malignant stupefaction of the "art gesture." Proudly took the hot wind from the sails of conceptual structures moving art and blowing hard.  The work actively attacked the insider: anyone who understood Spaulings game did not receive art's usual self-congratulations but the unloading of 40 foot soldiers of uncommon stupidity inside your head. A virus affecting only those in-the-know while the blissfully unaware remained free of its belittling folly. Writing this, I've actually needed a thesaurus for "dumb." That the work draws heavily on Kippenberger's "paintings as excuses for their titles" or Club Paint's even more beautifully perfectly asinine paintings matters less than none: the derivativeness actually aids in amplifying its flat hammed power, the more you get it the more it evacuates.


See too: AA Bronson and Keith Boadwee at Deborah Schamoni, Martin Creed at Hauser & Wirth Somerset, Merlin Carpenter at Overduin & Co.

Cooper Jacoby at Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden

(link)

The Microbial Home, on which these are based, is a fantasy fetishizing design as control, and already, hubristically, forecasting this control onto the Nature it assumes will yeild to it. It's a pretty fucked up proposal, surely. Bees are lovely, but not lovely enough. They must be sold, and thus must be packaged. Jacoby's recasting the bee houses as foreclosed slums would seem to be a critique predicting the ends of these best intentions as in the production Detroit hive like a colony experiencing its own collapse, the ends of production utopias, if the art weren't so sexy too. Like Timur Si-Qin or any of the other techno-fabulists, critique of power often comes with the fetishization and deployment of it, with all the sex that sells in a sort of post-apocalyptic gloss we all seem to have some type subconscious drive toward, this death.


See too: Timur Si-Qin at Carl Kostyál, Simon Denny at MoMA PS1, Ben Schumacher at Musee d’art contemporain de Lyon

Luigi Ghirri at Mai 36

(link)

Which always making reference to its framing, to the vision of its photographer, and reflexively photography itself, and thus its artificiality, casts the photos as rubber substance of malleability rather than the hard stuff of "documentary." Rather than the total staging of Wall, or the total rendering of today's, Ghirri's photographs stress the elasticity in the making the real, an otherworldliness manifested by the photographer which, like Ghirri always taking photographs of other photos irrupting new dimension in our world - a strangeness if there ever was one - the view is the subjectivity of the viewfinder, not what the photograph saw but what they made reality be, or something, a weird and rubber world. It's a subtle and hallucinatory effect to see continually see the subtle distortion of the world by its photographing.


See too: Peter Piller at Capitain Petzel

Avery Singer at Stedelijk Museum

(link)

Remember that scene in the Matrix when, readying for climax, they enter the blank void of the virtual and conjure a Babelinian library of weapons? Whatever the power of its virtual blank slate - despite its seeming infinince - it couldn't conjure a rifle outside of what any American police force would already own, revealing severe limitations of its virtuality to the pre-existing commodities already found in its prison-like realm. Whether this digital limitation was an artifact of its virtual script, or the inability of the actor/agents to themselves think outside their commodic prison* it showcases an inherent issue with the power of the virtual as still limited to human ability to think outside itself.

The virtual "White Room" is obviously a metaphor for a blank canvas.
This impotence in manifestability still inherent to primitive modes as it irrupts again in new technologies.

Like Guyton, the digital expression comes with the promise of fuller possibility that anything thought can be rendered, that the blank white space can be filled with anything you can dream, printed direct from our subconcious but reveals our dreams to be mostly the same but with some effects added.

*and thus tragically reveal themselves to be stuck in their own learned form of The Matrix's prison, i.e. never truly free having already internalized the dominant order.


See too: Wade Guyton at Academie Conti & Le Consortium, Tala Madani at David Kordansky

Dorothea Tanning at Alison Jacques

(link)

Symbols fraying into the abstraction that nurses innuendo. Is Frida Kahlo not forebear to Alice Tippit's ambiguous buttholes; is not Tanning and the ambiguity premising its surrealism, more than Frankenthaler, prescient in Sillman's bodied abstraction.

See too: Alice Tippit at Night Club, Lui Shtini at Kate Werble, Gina Litherland at Corbett vs. Dempsey, Amy Sillman at Sikkema Jenkins

Bergen Assembly

(link)

The Oldenbergian lump is back. A practice once reactionary to such rigid sculptural it bore its own genre categorically opposite: Soft Sculpture, representations closer matching our own corpulence we fear liquidating, rotting, in bags atrophic as we flex only smooth intestinal muscle and connect with wires to a white light cloud.


See too: Jessi Reaves at Bridget Donahue