Fred Lonidier at Michael Benevento

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Politics aside, which at time when a president-elect we don't like is one of few who thinks such trade agreements are up for discussion while everyone we do like thinks any discussion spells, like, imminent economic apocalypse and a current president who we didn't like but now do but as the opposite rears head and who promised to but didn't enter discussion of said trade - and so what a time for this exhibition - making a real ideological pickle indeed, the work which can't be read with any real ease here and who probably could have stood long enough there, and which proves the book it needs, and so can't easily be read anytime soon and so we interpret it at the level of surface, form becoming the content, the affectual, having all sorts of relation to today, like watching debates with the sound off and which we sometimes did, it looks pretty good.

Daniel Buren at Bortolami

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The ascetic refusal Buren's game of course eventually gives expression to Heimo Zobernig. Buren's game aimed outward as critique of the walls, someone would eventually see the opening and drive it at the art itself. Zobernig wetting the sand beneath feet to prove it was quicksand all along. The mental fart of Zobernig reairs in seeing these, Buren, in trying to ascertain the difference of one but tone. It's the Baderian question of a difference between fire bricks on floor and shrimp on foosball. Of the complete dumbness of objects, their utter asinity. Of course Zobernig needs Buren as his hostage in order to remain in negotiations, and Buren's calm cool continuation despite it, still striping away, is sort of endearing if not insane. The gallery, the institution, looks on with a smile.


see too: Darren Bader at Kölnischer Kunstverein,  Heimo Zobernig at Indipendenza, Heimo Zobernig at Kunsthaus Bregenz, Heimo Zobernig at Simon Lee

Pentti Monkkonen at Truth and Consequences

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"Blanks" is a production term for a material partially formed that has yet to receive whatever finalizing process will finish it, painting, milling, etc. The blank receives all type of process and treatments. The work formed work yet unfinished. They then recieve the processes of production, for Monkkonen the individual sign systems at play, the quasi-readymades applied the blank of painting. Monkkonen who has obviously been playing with painting as product for some time. The bug splatter, like the expressionist's before it, becomes the interpretable tea-leaves of the painting, the same as the cell-phone roach and patterning: signifiers that perform the interpretable content of "Monkkonen." Again treating painting like a blank, a material for production, vessels.


See too: Pentti Monkkonen at High Art, Pentti Monkkonen at Jonathan Viner

Jay ‘J Berd’ Keating at Freddy

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Freddy's low overhead model geared toward the internet and openings returns freedom from certain stakes and pressures making for all sorts of decisions at odds with normalized gallery modes socially reproduced - exhibitions in barns and second tier cities and artists lacking any semblance of social capital (becoming its social capital), unknowns, the tragically unhip amidst the tragic hip and the elderly, which is to say wonky curation separate from the usual sense - order from a different logic - and but still function well - which is what we find so endearing about the outsiders and self-taught artist themselves, including the odd infatuation with color, and - while Freddy is no outsider and - and while the playbook drawn from isn't totally new (like really at all) it's the fact that it's still drawn from by an insider that makes it important to its outsidery quality, otherwise I'm not sure we'd see it.

Amalia Pica at Marc Foxx

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Marble once stood as bodies, now here the prosthetics that infer the body. The space the sculptor once removed has become the more common cultural object. Like formalist lessons in negative space, the vacillation of passive/active object has significance, and metaphorical overtones towards all forms of speaking vs listening, active bodies passive bodies, protests and police: things inform their opposite, and we become the other, create it. etc. etc. etc.


Further inference of bodies by the objects that matter: Park McArthur at Chisenhale, Klara Lidén, Alicia Frankovich at Kurator, Nairy Baghramian at Marian Goodman, Yngve Holen at Kunsthalle Basel

Maggie Lee at 356 Mission

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Coolness is an affect and the point attempted to be made was that adopting these strictures to see the subject express through the grate of social coding was its pathos. Did everyone then just think they were cool then? The loss of self to the adoption of vernaculars. The objects here are the physical embodiment of the grate through which we express self at that moment of earliest self-expression in newfound self-awareness immediately confronted with the terror of self-consciousness. "Gigi is me in 2006." A teenage self-conciousness and the distance as adoption-of-another-subjectivity having a lot to do with art and its performativity.


See here: Maggie Lee at Real Fine Arts

Daniel Rios Rodriguez at Lulu

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The crust laden and the spiritual, it's hard to do sentimentality in art without being an outsider. You can't paint a flower without ironizing its loveliness, your desire to impress this. Sentimentality drips into its performance, theatrical, a too-much-presence and we blush for the artist having fallen into the trap of their own subjectivity for them, too often. Thick paint helps. It alleviates with its own paintertly over-presence, which provides, if not an ironizing, at least a solidarity. The paint expresses materially the same excess as the subject is. Confidence in clumsiness, endlessly endearing, a situation where you'll want to care for them.


See too: James Lee Byars at VeneKlasen/Werner

Klara Liden and Karl Holmqvist at Kunstverein Braunschweig

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Charming post-Naumanian displacers of content, the work's emptiness as interest (fun or dark?™) maybe finds relevance to current political situations in that one must find interest elsewhere: the contents of speaking is beside itself - nonexistent - and we must look around corners, to the edges of whited out posters, build our own shoddy unstable platforms, find the non-content of its rhetoric and ham-handed demagoguery as a new type of poetry we can't ignore it has steamrolled itself into our vision, just like our political leaders.  "In the video work Nhite Woise (2015), Klara Liden and Karl Holmqvist connect in a charming yet dilettante dance performance."



See too: Klara Lidén, Alicia Frankovich at Kurator, Karl Holmqvist and Ei Arakawa at Overduin & Co.

Camille Blatrix at Wattis

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The hospital aesthetic. How objects present themselves when encountering you in your vulnerable situations. Which in a Gallery is a pleasant change, to have an object soften itself to you, rather than brutalize you with austerity. A softening [that is] less the adoption of commericial interest in infantalising you [luxury car interiors that look as intestinal as they do sexual] and of which much similar art interprets but instead a vulnerable thing. The cuteness of Hospital beds, which are ostensibly sympathetic to us.  Like that other Camille, Chaimowicz, the look of object who wish to project their sympathetic nature to us humans. This is what iPhones will look like in the future. They are already starting to. Like baleens overturned and vibrating.


See too: Marc Camille Chaimowicz at INDIPENDENZA, Richard Rezac at Isabella Bortolozzi

Lynn Hershman Leeson at Vilma Gold

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CAD never explains why things are important but Hershmann should be paid attention to not for this exhibition but for her resurgence now showing in Dreamlands: her forecasting much of the renderstentialist video and robot art of today's youth. Skip these images and go watch a low quality online sample of her work Seduction of a Cyborg and then everything else and see all the foreshadowing of Moulton's mock techno-spiritual, Wolfson's sex robots, Atkins' authorial monologue and sound cuts, Rose's affective slippages, Steryl's anti-comedy, Cortright's digital Sherman-esque subject construction, James Richards affective collaging, etc. etc.  It's all there.

See too: Shana Moulton at Kunsthaus Glarus, Jordan Wolfson at David Zwirner, Rachel Rose at High Art, Ed Atkins at Serpentine Gallery, Petra Cortright at Société

Danh Vo at White Cube

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Vo, the interminable and loved symbolist, coming out of Gober into literalness. Whereas Gober invented his own icons self-filled - plumbing metaphors - Vo compositionalizes pre-existing signs to move them around in space. Sculpture becomes words, texts of an affectual sign space, so the curators can write their own on the wall. Bones ascended alongside Jesus into the higher plane extinction.

See too: Gina Litherland at Corbett vs. Dempsey

Emily Mae Smith at Rodolphe Janssen

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The trend couldn't be clearer at this point, the neo-imagists.

Mathew Cerletty
Orion Martin
Sascha Braunig
Emily Mae Smith
Alice Tippit
Jamian Juliano Villani
Lui Shtini
Milano Chow
Etc.

It's less the digitalization of painting than its conversion to iOS, then made surreal. Like Magritte's redesigning app icons, like surrealism for iPads, like Magritte's rupturing our expectations of standardized images. We today understand icon's intent to be informative with immediacy. Any delay on that causes produces the Magrittean dissonance. The new id eruptions from post-digital dreamlands. But then all those who all already sort of predicted this landscape then:

Christina Ramberg
Diane Simpson
Ray Yoshida
Ed Paschke
Roger Brown
Art Green
Miyoko Ito
James Rosenquist
Etc.

See too: Ray Yoshida at David Nolan, Sascha Braunig at Kunsthall Stavanger, Alice Tippit at Night Club, Lui Shtini at Kate Werble, Sascha Braunig at Rodolphe Janssen, Sascha Braunig at Foxy Production, Mathew Cerletty at Office Baroque,

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CAD breaking precedent. Interview with an Archivist.  Whatever thought of CAD's aggrandizement of the archive, of which it - of one sort - provides, the gesture remains. And while Self aggrandizing its worth through the intellectualization of it may seem a bit much in a day that many - as online posts claim - struggle to get out of bed, it's an argument that at least claims worth for its continuation on a day that many refuse to. Not really many can say the same. Art needs to recon with the fact that the world has - for a long time now - been turning to leave it here, wastelanded and self-ostracized. The implicit statement of the interview that collecting at least sediments a moment - a group or idea as (ideally) unrescindable - is perhaps wishful as it is necessary. Like, if we believe in art, then the archive is necessary, as a group, to prove - even if we don't continuously see eye to eye - that we existed, and antagonistic to whatever else. Events haven't yet shown themselves to be as dire as the Interviewed's AIDs origin was, but the point is beside. An affirmation that of course we are here. And while the outside prolly cares little at most we can look and see at least some - however warped - reflection of ourselves to know - however narcissistically - that we were at here and that is - however esoterically self-ghettoized and corporate - something. However flawed the system, it's a point of representation. “Trauma leads to collecting" not quite collectivization, but the root is there, at least it exists against the real bummer of a day.

Antek Walczak at Jenny’s

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PR: "The prevalence of icons, symbols, and glyphs across the screen interfaces interacted with on a daily basis, and their basic shorthand command work equivalent to the first steps of written language. To communicate, at a glance, tallies of river cargo hauled on the Euphrates (c. 3100 BC), memorable recordings of mastodon hunts and campfires, what gets attention on the App Store."

Humans are information processing machines with leg systems to move us toward the carrot of new information. Dopamine, long mythologized as the "pleasure center," instead creates seeking behavior, which, at the roulette wheel of digital feeds, scrolling news, and authoritative lists, causes all the odd psychological problems of lab rats given access to their own dopamine levers in humans. "After only a few days of training, the monkeys showed a clear preference for choosing the informative colored target." Walczak has proven for some time now, with paintings that prize information-as-legibility, that the usefulness of the information matters none: the complete arbitrariness of it here still invokes its authority.

Misaki Kawai at The Hole

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"Konrad Lorenz argued in 1949 that [cuteness] triggered nurturing responses in adults and that this was an evolutionary adaptation which helped ensure that adults cared for their children, ultimately securing the survival of the species. Some later scientific studies have provided further evidence for Lorenz's theory."

Victor Burgin at Bridget Donahue

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As early internet's de-motivational posters were antidote to the faux-enrichment of the office's patronizingly motivational own, the very first digital memes spread viral in forums and message boards in the new quasi-underground of workers' stolen snippets of off-time web-surfing, a small revolt-solidarity-communicado for the proletoid forced to do so beleagueredly under those signs and not hard to see the viral spread of such comedy and its big business as desire to own one's dark expressions rather than cover it. The point being: with the democratization of image making software and the ability to easily disseminate it the worker - as early as 1998 - immediately creates funny images revolting against its dominant structure asking for false optimism. Memetics are an intensely powerful form of social construction.
Victor Burgin's images arrive from the same period that another Victor gave us the original famous motivational poster, the "Hang in there, Baby" cat. And while Baldwin's markedly expressed positivity and hope (despite dark threat of failure's toll). "Memetics is also notable for sidestepping the traditional concern with the truth of ideas and beliefs. Instead, it is interested in their success." Burgin's instead, with their elusive and meandering political sentiments that couldn't be more obviously intended to deny easy authority or expediency, seem to exist as a radical stop-gapping of message production and instead desiring suspension of the image/text consumption/construction of meaning (a more culturally/politically apropos Baldessari), the blurbs of authority and manufacturing ideology in which everything is related with succinct tautology of demagoguic ease that we find so alluring today.  In the same way de-motivationals were an ironic detachment rupturing the facade of their motivational counterparts, Burgin's exist oppositional to the consumptive force as anti-memes. Which of course has all sorts of relevance to today, Burgin's underground expressions of anti-ideology held hostage in a gallery.


See too:  John Baldessari at Marian Goodman, Henry Flynt at Audio Visual Arts, CAWD on Fetish,

Past: FLAME

"Reinhardt’s dictum of his as the last paintings taken as a challenge rather than rhetoric, certain artists since race to end painting in an escalating torture-porn of it, sending their innocent child paintings to be forcibly taken in all the imaginative ways of the market, ready to prove - by forcible insertion - its shiny new neo-liberal critique to teach it know better, horror as ethics."

Past: Flame at 576 Morgan Ave Apt 3L Gallery

Anna Ostoya at Silberkuppe

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Ostoya takes images of historical, political, personal significance and runs them through the office paper-shredder, into abstraction. The overlay of "art" atop the images, both absorbing and destroying the initial significance, a conceptual gesture, making its futurist and Sheeleresque overlay a quasi-destructive act that reviews of Ostoya's paintings spend most space ignoring to tell you about the images buried because its usually easier to elucidate history than art, at root an act-as-question of what reason if any aesthetic overlay performs in creating significance or just aesthetify them, which in the ex's title reference to the New Objectivity who had no issue in caricaturing the object, this old objectivity still given to enjoy birthing a grotesque.

Past: Maria Lassnig

"It’s the ones that run near amok that are best... [the] subject-object problem permutes as prescient proto-version of Sillman’s bodies-that-matter imbued formalism, and many others..."

Past: Maria Lassnig at MoMA PS1

Leidy Churchman at Rodeo

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Painting representation fails. The plainness of Churchman's depiction is a respect to the source material, a non-compete clause showing deference to the object it can't fully contain or conjure. A fish swims, it shouldn't be the wild fanciful object of some painter's heinous desire. Showing it some respect by leaving it well enough alone, plainness acknowledging the representation that can't do justice to it. Painting treatments like massage to soften the body presented. Like any of Paul Thek's paintings of the Earth hovering over black unarchival void, the distance is homage. PR:"we are so afraid of the brilliance coming at us, and the sharp experience of our life, that we can’t even focus our eyes."

See too: Trevor Shimizu at 47 Canal