Black Cherokee at ROOM EAST

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Choosing the outside artist on FDR drive at 125th street for 20 years right in sight emblematic of NY's short purview, it's experience fortified as singular by all the capital of NY's cultural megaphone. Luckily Black Cherokee is good, the serial collages over long periods of collecting cultural detritus accumulating all the juxtapositional irrationality of the time's moments and the surrealists these challenge for political ambiguity. Looking like google image searches missing the operative terms that organize, they feel automatic, the patterns emerging through the grate of images available for cutting. One common theme repeated: of people resting their cheek in their in their palm, looking off, and whether is this a cultural meme or an artistic one.

Yuki Kimura at Wattis

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The Double is a strange fascination of many, and PR's referencing the duplicitous 4th dimension, time, and spatial slippage everpresent, and our holographic space/time proves gravity an illusion? positing perhaps that the double is less as a conceptual predicament than a material one: pieces of clean metal in a vacuum will auto-weld together, atomically unable to differentiate their objecthood and so confused become one. Mathematical quandries of whether or not "2" exists, or "1" for that matter, is saying 2 silicon atoms true, or are all silicon atoms unique clouds that aren't mathematical abstractions stripping unique properties, particularly when today and tomorrow don't particularly exist. Tricky questions, sure.

Jill Mulleady at Freedman Fitzpatrick

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The soft colors of today's representation in Absinthe era greens, Toulese Lautrec with modern drugs, ennuis and colors.

Contemporary Art Daily

So either CAD was hacked by Swedes, or there is a really interesting artist project going on at the moment. Update: CAD appears to have cleaned up the Swedish fish.

Karla Black at Raffaella Cortese

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The adolescent, in darkened lectures, Art History, being taught the conjunction of phrases "Claus Oldenburg" and "soft sculpture." Google searches for "soft sculpture" produces a lot vague definitions, no definitive history, and a particularly egregiously unsourced wiki. Had all sculpture really been rigid before? Despite the inanity of the moniker, soft sculpture probably matters in its expression of a development in how we best see ourselves represented, and the materiality ever since still of course representative of us, of our our world as we see it, the softest garbage in the wind.

Past: Eric Wesley at Midway Contemporary Art

"...to mock what contains him, a laughable institutional crit whose assault is the brilliant dumbening of art dialect. The Burrito is hot right now..."

Dan Attoe at Peres Projects

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Do you ever wonder if turns toward despondency in painting are mere symptoms of the loss of modernist grandeur, of the castration complex sort, of fathers having handing down a impotent device for communing. Seed no longer fertile as the sadness painters endure. That Verne Dawson expectancy, a composition where something central and monumental has been lost. A lot of Attoe's paintings deal with this central space removed, or mountainous.



See too: Thomas Eggerer at Friedrich Petzel

“Flying Moths” at Carlos/Ishikawa

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Stadia; the audience awaiting our, us, the actors, agency. A politcal ploy- the topical displayed commentless as tabula rasa awaiting its commentary- and its manipulation of our desire for political idealism if it weren't sorta so explicit: people turned political effigies gathered around with blank looks in wait of our response.

“Sylvanian Families Biennial 2017” at XYZ collective

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Increasing prevalence of the diorama, the miniature, their vessels staging us as onlookers to worlds as sandboxes. A dissonance between our interior worlds that of course we find increasingly virtual and beholden to our godlike control of drag/drop materiality conjuring our desires that the outer world increasingly doesn't reflect, the world steamrolled at the whim of other's control. So our turning to dolls and miniatures and virtuality makes symptomatic sense, fulfilling our need for control over a world we increasingly seem to not have much over makes psychologic sense. The world providing ever further customizable habitats to busy ourselves with while remaining deaf to our desires, a lot like playing with dolls.


See too: Maggie Lee at Real Fine Arts, Mathis Altmann at Halle für Kunst Lüneburg, Max Hooper Schneider at High Art, Tris Vonna-Michell at Jan Mot

“Grounding Vision: Waclaw Szpakowski” at Miguel Abreu

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Hermetic and self-contained. The line begins on the left and ends on the right. "Szpakowski worked in complete isolation, indifferent to the art of his time." Architectural engineer, working for the Polish Ministry of mail; the flight paths of letters and our fetish for Bureaucratic Transcendence, Kafka. Etc. Continuing Abreu's Borgesian commitment to the fictional realized, self-reflexive, sovereign, autarchic. Szpakowski, precursor to the Stella-bot and self-indexing now found in likes of Cheney Thompson (weirdly not seen here), all of them a sort of reveling in the psuedo-automatic processes that less and less we believe to be revealing some underlying universe and more and more comforting for their adherence to the fiction, their self-imposed autonomy somehow proving a new world, however cold.



See too: Cheyney Thompson at Raucci/Santamaria, R.H. Quaytman at Miguel Abreu

Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison at Various Small Fires

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Upward estimates 90% of the artworld’s potato-heads can’t grow their cranial’s cognomen. Having watched them grown on Mars last summer perhaps preventing widespread artist famine in the eventuality of. But so obviously not the best viability judges, us, and, though we never intended to be rationality's assessors, in these logistics before us we become ecological arbiters, hoping to find our judgements of art equitable with judgements of viability. They're not. Luckily the brine shrimp and worm farms come in aesthetic packages, colored and shaped in higher orders than the mere quadrilateral. It doesn't matter if Eliasson's garden is productive, HUO is still going to hire him for his because it won't merely look viable it will look like the future, like there is a future.

Past: Nora Schultz at dépendance , Nora Schultz at Reena Spaulings

"...whose early misuse of materials to create impromptu painting machines involved lots of rigging raising awkward solutions to the made up problems of needing to produce a painting to achieve that sort of elegance captured by outsider architecture, redneck repairs, and the whole meme of "if it look stupid but it works, it ain't stupid" captured by the internet, thematizing the absurdity of the problem's demands as a whole to begin with..."

Manfred Pernice at Kunstmuseum St. Gallen

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Concern for the sculptural erection, height and constitution, of which Pernice so at pains to make apparent, the stacking as its major form of construction, complete upon attainment of a height passable for sculpture. They build a thing only to stop short of figuring out its use only to start over, a manic hesitation, ideas half concluded. Rather than a cold opacity of so many of the Contemporary's blank objects, Pernice's instead denote an empathetic shyness, a slovenliness evocative of its care for self-comfort. Its an old trick now, an affected reticence annoying, exhausted, that Pernice continues these endless cans that are still somehow so endearing.

See too: Manfred Pernice at Galerie Neu

Barbara Probst at Monica De Cardenas

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Here's how: The photographic "moment" of, say, Cartier-Bresson and his decisive example shown to photography's infants, is here manufactured, produced as a synthetic version, aligning cameras to prove the decisive singular. The moment obviously never was real - profs the world over lecturing students about the HC-B "moment"'s effort in staging if not the puddle jump then whichever - and in its explicit production line here still functioning. The authenticity of the photographic moment's manufacturing doesn't seem to deplete it, its effective punctum remains, the "the wounding, personally touching detail which establishes a direct relationship with the object or person within it" can be synthetic and we still look, whatever was corporeal about it long gone.

Luis Camnitzer at Parra & Romero

Who would have thought that a bowl of old water by a 79 year old Uruguayan conceptual artist would be this week's most resonant image.

Karl Haendel at Susanne Vielmetter

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Drawing is record as proof of having seen. Like the intricate engravings underpinning currency by making its redrafting more labor-time-intensive than it's worth, drawing authenticates with technical prowess to render sight as detail, having seen. Mostly. And the interview with the HD videod sex-offender is also an act of sight or seeing. Technologic reproduction acceptable alongside an "unedited" interview which replaces the ostensible "life" that these drawing contain? The computer reproduces without seeing, the obvious fear of someone striving to assimilate a machine without actually being it. But the desire to assimilate the machine, rather than actually becoming the machine, seems the actual problem here. Detail as labor-time impressive and drab.

Past: Brendan Fowler at Richard Telles , Brendan Fowler at Mathew

"But time falls apart. That Gildan's Heavy Cotton 5 pack is 9.97$. The entrepreneur increasing stitches per time's inch warps our fabric into the non-Euclidean space, a lettuce-like frill adorning our cuffs and cravats. Yet everyone desperate announcing, "but I don't want to be a pirate" capitalistically but everyone secretly is, artistic enterprise."

Lena Henke at Kunstverein Braunschweig & Louise Bourgeois at Cheim and Read

(Louise Bourgeois , Lena Henke)

Bourgeois never gave up the latent content of physical depiction, sculpture, its materiality, even the virtual, the way so many, say minimalists, wished they could and instead drew out what those Greeks left implicit in the linea alba, their white soft marble line, of men, and these latent expressions in physicality crop up in her progeny, apparent in those like Henke for whom physical things act as moments of duplicity, locus for multiple apparencies, big black table eyes. There is too many things to say about these things, looking like too much, their genericsm becomes strength. A low poly mesh provides metaphorical possibility in its low resolution. The harder it is to define things the larger their aqueous potential, and physical material experience (of which CAD is no real good at imparting) is a real wet thing.

Kyle Thurman and Zak Kitnick at Parapet Real Humans

Kyle Thurman and Zak Kitnick at Parapet Real Humans

I've been mocked by robots before. And surely you have too, what is that feeling? The deployment of cuteness and POP to deliver a cartoon you. Technology's desperation to build robots which mimic us, arts' beginning with mimesis, desiring the mirage. This drive for reality's illusion seems technologic equivalent of a death drive, to somehow replace our realm with its own version and us looking into a technologic mirror to see robots dancing to resemble us horribly. Whatever; fuck robots. Thurman&Kitnick's lab table and the exponential ticking and alcohol empty perhaps signaling our own ennui relinquished to the inevitable, watching from the behind the balustrade, the real human's ivory tower and a glass window to new robot overlords, some godless spawn we've created. A common theme in Sci-fi to look through a window: the scientists at the petri dish beyond their control.


See too: Peter Piller at Capitain Petzel,

Mickalene Thomas at MOCA Los Angeles

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God bless CAD for hosting these walls, may they be forever archived. For all the artworld's (investigation/mining/appropriation) of (cultural/power/identity) (structures/preconceptions/notions) it sure loves a good authoritatively blank wall text filled with the hammering jargon of publicitized madlibs. Not so much to speak, but to have spoken. A form so omnipresent and invasive finding themselves returning as so many "reviews" and critic's picks padding the glossed backs of magazine pages. Description itself is political and yet nothing is claimed in the ostensibly neuter language of institutional rhetoric, a handwave to its caricaturesqueing and compartmentalization. No word why artists, good ones, put up with this. "But its target audience is for a possibly under-informed public!" claim those who have little respect for the average viewer's intelligence, as if onslaughts of words could stand for a statement. And you see its reactionary verse in PR from Berlin the world over, concrete poetry and watery-Whitman releases of their press concretizing the institutional voice prizing words accumulated, like nonsense is the only form we have.


Artists too: Peter Wächtler, Sam Pulitzer at House of Gaga and Reena Spaulings Fine Art

Henry Gunderson at 247365

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Gunderson's interest in the showy slickness of brand icongraphy in the gloss of technique turn into a fantasy fashion. "Fashion is means for representation. Fashionable would mean representation of a moment, pejoratively implied that the moment is fleeting. Speculative-fictions - Sci-Fi - fashion, perhaps misguidedly, attempt projections of futures to distend its transience by destroying its moment." The shoes are fine.
Trying to parse the difference in all these icono-render-realists of Juliano Villani, Orion Martin, Braunig, etc etc. (See: Emily Mae Smith at Rodolphe Janssen) "Its less the digitalization of painting than its conversion to iOS, then made surreal." (Gotta give the PR credit for at least calling out one Magritte reference.) Now to ascertain what our interest in all this, like, is. Obviously believing the digital's ability to somehow superpower the imaginative potential of painting and all its irruptive unconscious desire. Wasn't Guyton already tugging paintings from this unconcious-potential machine to prove his and its impotence? They just be paintings of course, but it is the trends' power as perhaps representative of a social-unconcious desire for digital potential that's interesting.


See too: Emily Mae Smith at Rodolphe Janssen, Stewart Uoo at 47 Canal, Sascha Braunig at Kunsthall Stavanger

Megan Francis Sullivan at Mathew

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"At the beginning of her book, [Johnston] asks a question that seems to me to belong more to the realm of sociology: whether art, “as exercised and commodified in our society, as seen through the prism of the most successful living artist in America today, is a good medium for encouraging human interpersonal development. Or does it provide an enclave for one class of people, artists, to dwell further on the their alienation from society in general?”

Past: Mai-Thu Perret

"The process takes about 10 days. At the time of the announcement the bone was being tested in sheep and there had been no signs of rejection. Particles from the sheep's bodies have migrated to the "wood bone" and formed long continuous bones. The new bone-from-wood programme is being funded by the European Union. Implants into humans are anticipated to start in 2015" [...]

"And thus our global domineers providing dystopian furniture to the masses and our futuristically repaired bodies are made of the same object harvested from Indonesian labor."

Peter Wächtler, Sam Pulitzer at House of Gaga and Reena Spaulings Fine Art

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Interesting, the discrepancy in images from those on CAD versus those on Gaga/Reena's site. CAD heavy on Wächtler's material pups but containing none of Pulitzer's drawings that the gallery itself hosts. E.g. looking at CAD alone, don't get any of the Avocado replacing its face, the sprue and puzzled home, the Twin-Peaks-like stoplight. Instead loads of install. An inconvenience since the drawings of both are illustrative, showcase a similar interest in iconography and information as formal devices that lead the viewer in providing nowhere to go. So clearly defined, and yet entirely without context they self-alienate. Sure you might right recognize the PBS kids logo, and a Volcano is a volcano, but set into this cold world of ironized art (I mean the display racks jeeze) they contain a sort of neuter uselessness that doesn't mitigate an ability to still point however vacuous it may be. Images which lovely connote but don't mean.


See too: Sam Pulitzer at Real Fine Arts

Tobias Rehberger at Gio Marconi

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The European Jorge Pardo, expelling the libidinal into the shiniest vessels of capital, a release all over the walls of the museum, again and again, brightly colored amounts, a real garnish to your museum or home. But the point is to just release. The question "what else?" confirms the redundancy with itself concretized as a neon sign and its implicit answer, it already too. If you enjoy the bedazzled and glitzed, the "fun" and friendly you'll love these mens' jouissance, their maniacal enjoyment of all things glistening and large. It's so fun! "At Giò Marconi the artist surprises with the choice of works: more than 30 differently sized framed works on paper." But its no surprise, drawing has always been that perfect expression of unconscious desire. Drawn up: “'Prejudices against white males (15)' shows a cooked chicken on a plate with bent, spread legs and folded arms, very much resembles a tanned headless reposing woman. Other drawings openly play with political, racial and sexual stereotypes and prejudices: the girl with the protruding bottom upon which she balances sweets and a glass of milk; the man checking the contents of another man’s pants; the all naked girl band which epitomizes every man’s wet dream." 
Such obvious libidinal expression comes already with a second answer, the exhibtion's title, "tous pour les femmes".


see too: Daniel Lefcourt at Blum & Poe