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Sunday, October 9, 2016
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.