Allan McCollum at Mary Boone

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McCollum's brute force attack on "creativity," ironizing uniqueness with its interminable variation, like try and stand out in this crowd kid, pulling out the cornerstones of value with machine made uniqueness, the scary "algorithm," and handcrafted replaced with stand-ins, surrogates, and stage props. Making uniqueness bland. How cruel. Showing on the doll where the creativity hurt him. It all ends in death. Did you think your bones were unique. etc.


See too: Rob Pruitt at MOCAD

“Sputterances” at Metro Pictures

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No myth that curators are beholden to a "conversation," one that manifests by reinscribing and working around the general pool of artists we see commonly. Curators show certain art/artists to prove (and thus renew) their access to the structure that legitimates them. Reciprocal legitimization by no single curatorial/artist node but instead the conversational majority, arranging consensus by those delegates already given authority, e.g. curators, institutions. Access starts to look like legitimacy. This insight why CAD took off. Read Sanchez's "Contemporary Art, Daily."  This why we see artists/exhibitions in triplicate, the same ones proffered around the globe. You proffer 3 givens, and one unknown.  And so maybe artists make more enjoyable curators because they're freed from the profession's need to prove the contemporaneousness of the vision, you get something a bit more idiosyncratic, interesting.

Michael Krebber at Kunsthalle Bern

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Remember when this was fresh? was fun?  Krebber's "preferring not to" the herald of his artistic progeny, fantasizing that maybe they wouldn't have to either. And so artistry's lack became a claim of radical "protest," artist's claiming "strike" on the walls of the institutions that would have them, taking sumptuous bites of the hand that had become feed.  Promising the academic artist a taste of social cool, and the socially posturing a pen of legitimacy. All very radical then, yes. Then we saw video of cops killing people. It's clever writing trope to then ask if a world where these are still interesting is better or worse.

Maria von Hausswolff at Johan Berggren

Maria von Hausswolff at Johan Berggren

Recalling deep sea photography above ground of course estranges. Blackness, depth, unknown. The trick is adept, the cinematic isolation of terrain turns it to vignettes of a dreamed world, us tourists, Planet Earth or Alien. They're both the same film, same worlds. As the title implies. Ours is a lovely world, so deploying it as its spectacular self, a fine filmic conceit. And its made almost literal here, moralistic, the cinematographer is the tourist, is the alien. We should probably all be.

Dorota Jurczak at Kunstlerhaus Stuttgart

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The reproducibility of artwork to fit not necessarily CAD's but all documentation framing as an object denoting and connoting its own meaning among an order of objects, it's ability to stand as icon for what it represents, iconic, gives it worth. Some exhibitions don't wear CAD well. The ability to spread through social mechanisms now more relevant ever, a pressure on art that increasingly resembles survival of those most fittest to reproduce.


see too: And so Quarterly has finally come to pass., Brian Calvin at Le Consortium, CAD

Andrea Crespo at Downs & Ross

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The Deviant Art and similar holdings of niche communities, of which Crespo has spoken, and cautions against exoticizing, i.e. the "longtail" populations coalescing around alternative and often subaltern formulations of identity and outlets for expression of desires/needs outside dominant frames, not necessarily just alternate sexual aspects of futanari or furry et al, but growing niche groups seeking alternative expressions of sensitivities - similar but not inclusive to fetish relations to sexuality - and their aesthetic experiments in alternate systems of visual expressions for such sensitivities that are so attuned as to be outside the given framework for acceptability, niche communities exactly, we can be obviously very sympathetic, is very similar to art, and which Crespo draws from.

Morag Keil at Real Fine Arts

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Passive aggression, that everyone knows, that operates on the affectual level, sublingual, by screwing tone and denying the target a substantive system on which to respond, functions well too for art in discombobulating the viewer whose reaction to such discrepant attitudes can only remain uncertain, the perfect art fount, the new psychedelic experience of the RFA brand updating conceptual art for a new generation of well-versed conceptually-high-tolerant semionauts, the new drug the complete meltdown of conceptual sense.



See too: Carissa Rodriguez at Wattis, CAWD on Desensitization, Michele Abeles at 47 Canal,

Josh Smith at STANDARD (OSLO)

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What was with our fetish then for exaggerated manufacture remains a question, for since we've grown tired of zombies that Smith and the gang had some hand spawning, Guyton, Walker, Price, a group for whom production was theme: recycling, automation, dispersion and Smith's prolificacy spamming himself into consciousness with grotesque versions to prove the mass, beating his name and himself in the head. That Smith is now making painting that are fine, pleasant even, a sort of radical gesture of normalcy, norm-core - aside from the PR excused "heavy handed" imagery - out-pleasanting even the most decorous of painters, the face of death even looking like the Scream.



See too: Ann Craven at Confort Moderne, Ida Ekblad at Herald St.

Mathis Altmann at Freedman Fitzpatrick

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We've been talking for a while about the model, the physical metaphor of our world's increasing virtuality as it becomes abstracted by capital, computers, etc. Built to code: the blueprints and plans allowing the capitalist's virtualizing the world as its representation.
Recall, Rachel Harrison's screwing of semiological space, objects that felt like suburban malls destruction of good sense. Now the hypothetical of that abstraction entering physical as opposed to semio- space. We become lost in scales, the map now producing the territory, etc. and questions, "From which vantage are we seeing" type confusions so prevalent in Altmann.

But so anyway, Past:

"...The Model becomes predominate as the world's point of scale becomes unmoored, and reality floating between the virtual and material conditions abstracted by floating points of enumeration etc. etc. "Housing" replaces "houses," which replaces "house" distinct from "home," which is bombed out. The model encapsulates this world governed by virtual features, the planning, projected statistical everything, abstraction of everyday..."

      -Mathis Altmann at Halle für Kunst Lüneburg

"...which is why we are seeing them everywhere as sculpture today, proving virtuality always existed: the world abstracted by money, power, plans. The children grown on building blocks eventually see the world as such object... juvenile megalomania grown to find their imagination justified and fueled by capital. Children's fevers eventually grow and sediment as reality... reality as abstraction underneath, toys."

       -Matthew Zivich at What Pipeline

"...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..."

      -“Sylvanian Families Biennial 2017” at XYZ collective

"...The bedroom as terrarium..."

      -Maggie Lee at Real Fine Arts

"...the still obviously recurring theme of the exterior as phantasmagoria: blank surfaces for projection and the psychic cruel comedy of visage as facade. The use of architecture as representing psychic space has become a major motif in art, but whereas it had been usually literary or filmic as physical metaphors for memory or dreams or whatever, art's use has recently become much more concerned with its meaty resemblance to a skull, reminiscent of Deleuze pointing out that Francis Bacon didn't so much paint portraits but heads..."

      -Brian Griffiths at Vilma Gold

"....properly weighted, the iPhones will levitate..."

     -Ajay Kurian at Rowhouse Project

Dean Sameshima at Peres Projects

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It's like, the closer the reproduction of its subject the harder gleaning meaning from the painter expressing it. We look for warbles, imperfections in the representation, as some sort of clue, some sort of drip as content declaring its expression. "...appear to be silkscreened when they were in fact hand-painted." But the painters lack of "expression" leaves the information all the hamfistedly plainer. "Look" declares the painter. "But surely something else, too!" responds the viewer. And we become anthropologists to a receipt, what we've recieved, deciphering for the overflow of content we expect must be there. Like On Kawara, the reaching attempt for the sign to fully contain what it denotes and the distance from it actually, a single day or a free coffee, is the pathos of its content. Open your own wallet and see the days. This distance, this nostalgia, is the loss, the pathos deployed.



See too: On Kawara at the Guggenheim

Tomoo Gokita at Taka Ishii

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You can do incredible violence with a painting, with a stroke you can mutilate. The horror film and the painter implement similar meat. Spielberg: If I wanted an emotional reaction from I audience I could merely kill a cat. And more than one way to skin one, Gokita runs the permutations of it, taking the Borremans or Tyson turn here, the paint as flesh. Watch a body be melted, a face cleaved. A flower erupts a deformity or berries, it's difficult to tell, something the horror film cannot do: a painting's wayward stroke contains an ambiguity that is interpretable, abstract, like previous Gokita paintings.


See too: Michaël Borremans at Dallas Museum of Art, Nicola Tyson at Friedrich Petzel

Deana Lawson at Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis

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And not necessarily treating her subjects kindly, the best light remains Lawson's, the photographic adeptness bending subjects to her. There's plenty of content to be unpacked, the inference: the long legs of prey draped over the predatory face, couch covers torn and exits obstructed. A couch cushion rotated so many times as to expose the seams. Exposing the seams. These are what photographs live for, the construction of a subject, here a person. At least these curtains seem properly adhered. Does this reflect the woman in the photograph or the photographer, a question we answered long ago, but none really take it as such, our inference already passed a judgement. And the photographs are indelible.



See too: Barbara Probst at Monica De Cardenas

Rick Potts at Greenspon

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Ull Hohn or Asger Jorn, the brashness in the soft decorum, monster in the Bob Ross, a fantasy that turns up frequently, of our world but - you know - different. The desire is pervasive, billions spent yearly on computer generating such for our darkened room fantasy machines. Potts are bit more drugged out than the average mainstream film producer would find acceptable, and the distinction of mass-market allowability might be an interesting one, but the most interesting painting might be that without monsters at all, instead the scene's subtle fissures of its reality cracking, painted already the world as its own caricature, the allure of every Bob Ross, difficult to ascertain what's fantasy at all, no need for monsters at all, orange creatures already erupted, go look.


See too: Ull Hohn at MD 72

Becky Kolsrud at TIF SIGFRIDS

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Grid becomes gate, grate of pixelation fracturing the view. And heads across looking through the keyholes of other heads. Like Sherrie Levine's women peering through American Presidents, the window becomes the silhouette of a second content. Levine's felt threatening, these feel pretty fun. The hollow chamber of the second head, like the sieve of the gate, a formal amusement, a soft sided castle, motif as seatbelt to secure whatever comes in, to bounce paint around in.

Chadwick Rantanen at Team (bungalow)

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Rantanen's torturing robotic animals, enacting their death throes, recall watching, young children, neighborhood kids, pressing electrodes to the white of a frog's belly, hand-cranking current to the animal's body tightening, rigid in convulsion, seize, immobile, repeatedly, until the frog was permanently immobile and thrown overhand back to the pond, one of three markers of sociopathic behavior, the frog in the air.


See too: Chadwick Rantanen at Essex Street, “May the Bridges I Burn Light the Way” at STANDARD (OSLO), Nancy Lupo at Kristina Kite & Yuji Agematsu at Miguel Abreu,

B. Wurtz at Lulu

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The American Gym Sock. Tied to teenage boys, normally repositories of filth, seed, and feet, normally locker room attire, a pubescent attire, pimples and athletics, is here given an absurdly fastidious clean, highlighting its cotton and comfort, restoring purity, virginal phallus and receiver of course. To say nothing of their wonkiness, bent, queer. The most apparent quality though always the cleanliness, cleanliness in the face of such plainness, fixated on such trivial details.


see too: “The Crack-Up” at Room East (B. Wurtz)

Sarah Ortmeyer at Potts

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The nubile object of Ortmeyer, the protective eggshell layer which holds the virgin contents. The commodity's perfection, eternally virgin, before the expense of it purchase, lifting it from the realm of reproducibility and turned into an object.

Robert Grosvenor at The Renaissance Society

Amongst the sterility of minimalist forms Grosvenor's like the subtle bulge in the zubaz of propriety it reminds us of. Grosnevor's doesn't feel naturalized, but constructed, affected, conjuring the sweat of effort and work that minimalism tried to avoid through industrial process and design. Grosvenor's minimalism reminds us of work and sweat and bodies, of the designer, the sun baked engineer. Grosvenor's minimalism reconsiders the earthliness that minimalism tried to disavow, work.

Robert Grosvenor at Karma

Violet Dennison at Jan Kaps

Violet Dennison at Jan Kaps

Moments become quasisubjects, they take on their own personalities, objects become subjects we feel willing to converse with, perhaps a strange effect of art, our willingness to talk with objects.

Sadie Benning at Susanne Vielmetter

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Despite Cartoon's hard edges their bodies are taffy, manipulable to an extreme. Abstract a human you get gore, abstract a cartoon you get comedy. What this transition means, real to cartoon, and our want for it remains to be seen.

Dylan Spaysky at Good Weather

Dylan Spaysky at Good Weather

Say what you will of their formal concerns, smuggling the objects into their afterlife - museum heaven, landfill hell - seems the main goal of it. But whereas the drug lord cares not the for virgin Marys he casts his product into, Spaysky desires an object whole, or slightly altered. You shape an object into what will pass inspection of the tightly-controlled sectors's better opportunity, disguise your wares to get there.


See too: Dylan Spaysky at Clifton Benevento

Past: Dylan Spaysky at Clifton Benevento


"For Bennett's hoarder the world is a little like Toy Story 3, in which the cheap and mass produced must be saved from the incinerator, kept indefinitely and experienced with connection... trash,  like the drug smuggler casting his contraband in the shape of Jesus and painted to escape the prying eyes of men seeking to ruin them..."

Raimer Jochims at Jacky Strenz

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The sign/icon that isn't there, and the emptiness stemming from. Shapes generally denotes an object that should be telling us something, instead a vacancy.



Raimer Jochims at Jacky Strenz

Nancy Lupo at Kristina Kite & Yuji Agematsu at Miguel Abreu

(Nancy Lupo at Kristina Kite, Yuji Agematsu at Miguel Abreu)

"Our growing attraction to garbage makes a psychologic sense as we become hostages to the trauma of dealing with it, the deranged images of garbage spewing, animals asphyxiated, learning of its intravenous networks sprawling across unstoppable leaky pipes, garbage moved though our landscape sprawling veins..."

Continuing our interest in making Stuff as a technical word. Stuff is the eye goo of objects. Like eye goo, stuff's service is its waste, a continual sloughing, so we can remain fresh, clean. Stuff accumulates, piles, is shed. Stuff is quasi things, is transient, transactional. A disposable fork is, like, quintessential stuff. Stuff depletes, frequently, though not always, disposable. Stuff is like object-food, a storage of energy for consumption, use. Stuff differentiates itself from things because everyone is putting energy toward it not being a thing: Companies/consumers press for stuff's cheapness, the user wants it only for what it can do, then to get rid it of it as soon as possible after, a pressure for stuff to be biodegradable. Stuff's thingness is a problem.

If there is something abject, itchy, about the Lupo's installation it is because stuff is being forced to become thing, stitched like rafts, like the The Great Garbage Patch, which too is stuff becoming thing, object, and anxious.
If Agemtasu's trash is comforting, lovable, it is because the stuff has been already digested to waste, paradoxically less anxious than stuff because it doesn't have the anxiety of stuff's thingness, just waste, and repackaged in the safety of cellophane to return it once again to product, we find comfort in products.



See too: “May the Bridges I Burn Light the Way” at STANDARD (OSLO), Nancy Lupo at Swiss Institute, Nancy Lupo at 1857, Yuji Agematsu at Real Fine Arts,  Yuji Agematsu at Artspeak