Past: Fred Lonidier at Michael Benevento

"making a real ideological pickle indeed, the work which can't be read with any real ease here and who could have stood long enough there, and which proves the book it needs and so can't be read easily anytime soon and so we interpret it at the level of surface, form becoming the content, the affectual, the look of information, having all sorts of relation to today, like watching debates with the sound off and which we sometimes did, it looks pretty good."

Frances Stark at Museum of Fine Arts Boston

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Stark's, like Lecky's, a shared concern with the bedroom posters of adolescent coolness, the affective strategy of marketing that often form subjectivity under. And each poster/film a new and effective marketing strategy of coolness, the exhausting inventiveness of the painfully cool, picasso of teenage cool. Cool of any merit expressed with vulnerability: the manufactured cool of Vanilla Ice has nothing on the supreme empathetic but-also-if-not-manufactured-at-least-laying-the-blueprint-for-its-future-pruduction-line cool of, say, K Cobain. But, the point being Stark's cool is a self-manufactured, small business production. They're her own bedroom posters, rather than those of a post-Leckyian sort willing to post those they grew under as some cultural "criticism." Pay attention because even though its exhausting its an outline of escape from that, subjectivity can conform to the vessel without losing its shape, or so Stark would wager.

Past: "[Stark's] a gesture towards admitting the cultural disposability of an art practice of images today that stands over the face of the Deep, Instagram, that Artists can’t get over, blasted in an unstoppable deluge of culture daily. With so many “dealing with it,” detourning it into art  (as if that was meaningful) launching conventional artist weapons in atomized age, Stark’s insistence in the form's cheapness itself, its mixtape assemblage of a disposable music video, affirms her as one of the few who actually get it." Click: Frances Stark at Daniel Buchholz and Daniel Buchloz


See too: Mark Leckey at Haus Der Kunst + Kunsthalle Basel, Frances Stark at Daniel Buchholz and Daniel Buchloz

Sonia Kacem at Gregor Staiger

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Elegant sticks, folded; like origami they, through simple steps followed, make a goose. The transparent invoked skin not hiding the skeleton of fabrication here. Instead simplicity and plainness, a sort of protestant ethic, finding interest in the job as its result. You see the construction, are forced to appreciate all the effort that went into it, none of which is hidden, witness the effort expended.

See too: Oscar Tuazon at Le Consortium & Paradise Garage

Ella Kruglyanskaya at Sant’Andrea de Scaphis

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Now, and having been trending, the world's craving directness, the assertive image qualifying nothing and instead saturates itself in plainness, a matter-of-factness. Straight-talk has, in-fact, steamrolled several countries. The painter caroms off the directness of the sign-painter, of the slogan maker, of the one with such clear thoughts they can can be said in 140 characters or less. It's all there already perfectly plain everything to see, a still life.


See too: Etel Adnan at Sfeir-Semler

Oren Pinhassi at Tempo Rubato

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The chair becomes goo to remove it from the strict realm of functional objects to something more bodily, tongue-like, and palms like green boogers spraying. Oreo calls the white substance gluing together its cookies simply "stuf" and its an apt coining for a material vague and formless. It's just stuf, the building block of everything if we didn't know anything about the subatomic but rather formulating the corporeal junk that we might theorize underpins everything, stuf. The stuf we as children saw comprising the characters in cartoons and allowing them to take a hammer to the face. The malleable taffy we believed made up the world and allowed us the fantasy of it remade at our wills as slapstick.


See too: “Puddle, pothole, portal” at Sculpture Center, Chris Burden Metropolis II at LACMA

Hayley Tompkins at Lulu

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Schmutz and stuff, and schmutz on stuff, Tompkins' practice endeared to the goo, the stuff, like all those edges of Jasper Johns, or encaustics, the stroke into hyperbole, like its own totem.  Like painters who manifesto'd their unneeding to hide brushstrokes, a literalness conflated with honesty, we find schmutz to be authentic, anti to the glitz and glam of the advertorial and mass, instead its the personal we trust, the good neighbor, the mom-n-pop, the trustworthy crust of the rustic intentional.

Anna-Sophie Berger at MUMOK

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Coming from a Bochnerian indexical or Kosuthian ontological fashion design to now what is firmly looking like art: diaspora of objects, parabolic playthings, affected benches, weight-pinned jester, Frankenstein's hat, warbled whites, set peas, objects admitting nothing but a clue like game of whispers across things. It's a fun game if you got someone to play along with, otherwise you're just sending words across space, luckily Berger seems well-attended so the objects get the attention. Ten art experts invited seventeen artists to apply, an international jury consisting of mumok director Karola Kraus, Georg Kapsch, CEO of the Kapsch Group, Eva Birkenstock, director of the Kunstverein Dusseldorf, Yilmaz Dziewior, director of the Museum Ludwig, and Stephanie Weber, curator for contemporary art at the Lenbachhaus Munich, selected the artist Anna-Sophie Berger as the first prizewinner of this new art prize.

J20

On January 20th, 2017 CAD did not post an exhibition, assumedly in solidarity with the J20 strike protesting the inauguration of Donald Trump as president of the US. Silence as protest assuming that your silence matters: your power existent such that not speaking means something, that you aren't already one of the millions without voice, the subaltern that cannot speak, silence is instead a privilege, death. Those that already cannot speak not even given the privilege of such a protest. Silence = Death.

Jessica Diamond at Team (bungalow)

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Reading is like relinquishing control of thought to an author's temporary marionetting of yours. How odd that my words voice in your head. It is a base human disposition to "read" our environment, to make sense of our surroundings, and advertising takes advantage: a byline appears and before you can stop yourself it is read, allowed briefly to control you, its message passed, its transaction complete, and its sign expended.


See too: Matt Keegan, Kay Rosen at Grazer Kunstverein

Yui Yaegashi at Parrasch Heijnen

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The tiny painting the illustrious gem, faceted like jewels, cut, edged, given intricacy and surface. At such close range the paintings become tactile, physical lumps, etched with strokes. The efficiency and craft of them promises if not to organize your home to organize your thoughts, its aura its own simple organization. Like the now international Muji, or ikea before it, objects which through their own clever construction promise you their better efficiency, an object that promises you its perfection, something so cute you just want to grab it, own it, hold its cuteness so tight you wring its carefully constructed lovely little neck.


See too: Tomma Abts at David Zwirner, Misaki Kawai at The Hole

Alan Schmalz at Truth and Consequences

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Stupidity, enacted with enough impudent glee, begins to edge the psychotic, pathologic, wasting resources, occupying space, and of course its just a gallery so its already a waste of any productivity (depending on who you ask in the artworld) and maybe half of that is point, the Kourus figure here mirrors you and your viewing it: Look closely at its face and tell me its not mocking you. The stupidity here is more comical than the most and the wasting of semiotic resources is more economical than, say, Helen Marten who these share at least some contemporary sensibility, save that these are ready to bring the whole ship down instead of bolster it's tumescence. The PR as poem is pretty good.


See too: “Mirror Effect” at The Box

Etel Adnan at Sfeir-Semler

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Directness often hides. By removing the decisions that brought it to be, clarity is edited and terseness a political strategy that is inarguable. It strips the handles of which one could control the thought. Making a sleek delivery belying its concealment. And the emptiness of Adan's paintings speak to this. Like so much said in 140 characters or less, there is a loss. Occasionally this loss is elegant, occasionally brutally fascistic.

Wade Guyton at Friedrich Petzel

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Guyton began as the perfect Warholian*: a slacker drawing Xs, and killing content in service to the machine of its reproduction, the production proved it and this alongside the fantasy of eruptions tugged from our subconsciouses plugged into the machine and pulled from. Eventually this got boring. The machine wasn't so much able to manifest our subconscious as provide brief illusion that this was possible, that we could print our dreams, creativity, whatever as a perfect reproducible commodity. Instead, they were just commodities potentializing dreams as any other. And so the next perfect Warholian step was to print the newspaper, which itself was like the manifestations of the Giant subconscious of earth people, the newspaper printed was in fact the eruptions of all those subconscious desire's added up, a real freaky thing indeed.

* even perhaps moreso that the direct illusions by the race rioting Walker, Kelly

Furthermore: Wade Guyton at 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."

Lucas Arruda at Indipendenza

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Keeping the list succinct, Turner, Caspar D. Friedrich, Rothko, maybe Monet, Celmins, the painters and expanses lit from beyond. The self-enamored creating space, letting there be light, like gods, separating the sea and the land, they can paint it, conjure it. Schopenhauer, "Fullest Feeling of Sublime : Immensity of Universe's extent or duration. (Pleasure from knowledge of observer's nothingness and oneness with Nature)." And Arruda's primordial stews both past and post, sunset and sunrise, beginning and end times and all the land inbetween, finding common ground between the heady romantics and the spiritual expressionists and painters between. Recent trends in sci-fi have too increasingly used primordial and lush expanse from Prometheus to Rogue One as locale signifying a shift in representations of "future" no longer mechanistic and barren but luscious clean worlds like Apple ads, the primordial space no longer past but future and become once again acceptable.



See too: Lucas Arruda at Lulu

Gaylen Gerber at Emanuel Layr

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The Gerberian support's proposal of a third party in the usual object/viewer duo, a middleman standing watch to serve you the art, introduces the many others standing watch to bring this to you. The general supports of art - walls, lights, pedestals - are cold inanimate and, generally, ignored, and Gerber's proposition, their filling with blood, sedimented subjectivity, makes the walls seem alive and watching, that though they are painted white they contain just a different behind in them.


See too: Brian Calvin at Le Consortium, Sophie Nys at Crac Alsace

Mary Reid Kelley at Museum Leuven

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You know how your body feels after working an eight hour day. Like this. The cartoonifaction, or puttying, of the body.


See too:  “Puddle, pothole, portal” at Sculpture Center

Judith Hopf at Museion

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An sculpture of bricks hyperbolizes its thingness: functionless and heavy and constructed that way. Each brick lain representing a decision by the artist to continue. Emphasizing some of sculpture's more stupid aspects of raw difficult to transport material in a world of virtual connection. It's comedy to give so much weight to such banal objects. And in the background those concrete boxes we read as cute sheep as a joke on our desire to attach ourselves to such dumb objects, the pathetic so obviously endearing. They are very cute, those concrete rectangles.


See too: Judith Hopf at kaufmann repetto, “Puddle, pothole, portal” at Sculpture Center

Past: Sarah Morris at Museum Leuven

"Programmatic expansionism..."

Josh Mannis at M+B

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Like Bonnard having grown up on the Simpsons, or Junji Ito by way of Matisse, or whatever the references listed in the PR that collapse into today's soup like bits of flavor in the overall story; the return of various forms of figurative art seems to be clever structures from which to hang painting strategies: The structures seem to be slightly infected comical situations overstretched with the representative style. Avery Singer to David Rappeneau, Jonas Wood to the interminable variations found in art fairs and group shows.  The comedic underpins to all these hold the paint at reasonable distance, a distance overtaking the same way flatness once did. Flatness was the "truth" to painting that these paintings today create so much distance from.


Jonas Wood at David Kordansky, David Rappeneau at Queer Thoughts

Richard Hoeck and John Miller at Meliksetian | Briggs

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The stupid comedy of our anthropomorphized figures meeting grizzly dismemberment cast down cliffs, their odd hollowness standing in for all the blood and guts that should be splattered. That we actually identify, sympathize, with them, these reflections we adorn our stores with. What use does a culture have for fake images of ourselves. The Doryphorous has a reason, an idealization, a mannequin, devoid of his saleables, none.


See too: Jordan Wolfson at David Zwirner, Peter Piller at Capitain Petzel, John Miller at Institute of Contemporary Art Miami, John Miller, Dominik Sittig at Nagel Draxler

Barbara Bloom at Capitain Petzel

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You see son, it's emotional impact is its inability to tell you.  It can't fully delineate, er describe the thing it references, which makes you imagine something beyond what it's capable. You try to imagine a potentional, son.


See too: On Kawara at the Guggenheim, Oscar Tuazon at Le Consortium & Paradise Garage

Paul Thek at Hannah Hoffman

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The scraps and remains of his practice. An artist who formulated his own death, his tomb, lost and the grave robbing plunderers the institution would take a page from the book of, assembling artifacts. Much of Thek's practice was already fragmentary, funerary, reliquaries, so it makes sense now to steal a notebook page and place it behind glass. How peculiarly prescient Thek seeing all the methods of preservation and archive and entombment. The warmth of the page now resembling the boxes of meat then.


See too: Paul Thek at Mai 36

Oliver Payne at Overduin & Co.

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Payne' treats ideas as objects that can be held, manipulated, attached. Each object illustrative of a concept. The PR's Miller's Law, you can hold all seven in your head and juggle them if you like. The main theme of them is macro to the individual to the commons, swarm intelligence and so on and so forth. This like Conceptual Art itself where objects become representations of concepts, where objects are not individuated things governed by a rule set and thus exchangeable. The opposite of the object oriented oncologists. Not the drawing on the wall but the instructions which allow it to be placed.  Certificates of authenticity governed by critical mass of belief, and bitcoinian Blockchain. Watch the one man rave. The singular object becomes representative of the concept and manifests the commons, the Dance Party. The psychoactive element is seeing the singular and knowing it as concept, manifesting the dance party without it being one, the thing as only a representation of concept, Platonic Psychosis.

There's another Miller's law, oddly of the same Miller:

It instructs us to suspend judgment about what someone is saying so we can first understand them without imbuing their message with our own personal interpretations.

The law states: "To understand what another person is saying, you must assume that it is true and try to imagine what it could be true of."

See too: Nina Beier at Croy Nielsen, Darren Bader at Radio Athènes