Lonnie Holley at James Fuentes

(link)

The prevalence of shopping mall semiotics, imagastic diaspora and attendant fracture, the crippling ambivalence of things just next to each other when they have no reason to be, the psychotic level of things touching in culture, diamond ads next to Syrian bodies, perhaps reason for our assemblage catharsis, mending our fragmentation by manufacturing it.


See too: Lonnie Holley at Atlanta Contemporary

Past: Andreas Slominski

"...they readily peel divergent threaded reference, until we have handfuls of palmed cheese chasing an artist trying to stay one step ahead in luring the viewer to a mire lost in. The will-o-wisp Slominski not above pulling the rug, or laying slick fluids. Tread carefully."


Click here to read Andreas Slominski at Deichtorhallen
Click here to read Andreas Slominski at Proyectos Monclova & Barbel Graesslin
Click here to read Andreas Slominski at Thaddaeus Ropac

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May 30th, 2017

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Florian Pumhösl at Meyer Kainer

(link)

Pumhosl always basing his objects on something, assigning a raison d'être, a reason for them to live on gallery walls based: an "engagement with a vocabulary of form from different historical articulations.." [😐] An assumed criticality, i.e. content, the rivers here, differentiating them from the more militant minimalists of history, their objects dumb on floors. This makes Pumhosl's conceptual, a framework which is then treated to a Kubrickian austerity, totemized as the monoliths, allowing the surrounding emptiness of space to lend all the pressure that the gallery symbolically can.


see too: Brian Calvin at Le Consortium

Karen Kilimnik at Eva Presenhuber

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Untold reasons why 600 telescopic install shots and 6 of the paintings; there's more on Presenhuber's website here.

But so, Last time on CAWD we heard arguments for and against the presence of critique in Kilimnik's rococo ostentation, sleeper cells or upstanding citizens of the gentry.  Hainley said critique, but Leiberman's struggle to ascertain where it may have lain railroaded by Kilimnik herself's swearing against.
Which of course the whole thing an expression of artworld assumption that art must critique, particularly the presence of wealth it must interminably distance itself from melting into. Assuming artists all smiling ascetics happy with their pay in high nourishment of art's gas, the beautifully ambiguous and ideal, Art, as opposed to any of the dirty ruses of social capital, vanity, or symbolic violence that art somehow totally aligned but distinct from by some high plane of intentions, the whole art world lacking some undergraduate Bourdieu.
But so for Kilminik the superfluous rococo absorbed, the paintings as lighthearted brushstrokes connoting but not being the 18th century's most unchecked privileges. Like Simon Denny making his panel mates bristle at aligning himself with enterprise's most valued assent, content, we seem to refuse to believe that Kilimnik might just like depictions of wealth, the vain objects we understand implicitly that 200 year old versions connote while objects of art today don't - who sells for more Kilimnik or van Loo, we flatly refuse to believe it, write dissertations spreading pesticides against, no matter how many time she says it.


see too: Simon Denny at MoMA PS1, Karen Kilimnik at 303 Gallery

Past: Karen Kilimnik at 303 Gallery

"Hainley's citing Kilminik's siting as IED mirrors in the halls of the rich, ready to shatter jewel's broken glass into their visages caught reflected in the decadence, as a giant "fuck-you" to the rich..." against "Rhonda Lieberman's 1994 cover confoundment, in which initial assumption of critique is continually railroaded by Kilimnick herself's brick wall amassed of unmitigated love for everything, including the blank facades of wealth and decor, and evidence of provided."

Sophie von Hellermann at Office Baroque

(link)

Such softness, it's abject. Saccharine. Like walking around with cotton candy between toes, sugary resolve to true grit. Till your teeth fall out your head. But their softness something of a ruse, a narrative lacking definition. So that the man who looks like burnt matchsticks and the angel who provides his splayed toe ecstasy in an embrace too ambiguous for the smile he beams. Everything we see in the paintings based on expectation, that we recognize an angel at all.  Low resolution.

Cameron Rowland at Daniel Buchholz & Etablissement d’en face projects

(Daniel Buchholz, Etablissement d’en face projects)

The critique of calling these Hans Haacke 2.0 would assumedly miss the point: it's more important to take up the mantle of real issues than to redesign its heraldry; the political real takes precedence over aesthetic peacocking. And that "Information" depicting, say, the lineage of certain institutions sketchy holdings as plain as possible might always look like that. And while Haacke's interest centered on the more poisonous assets of art, Rowland's purview concerned with the much larger systemically disenfranchised upon whose sweat these institutions were built and remain standing despite. For both artists the unadorned information/objects in both come across as ominous. Held blankly on walls and floors with little comment both artist's objects come across as simultaneous threat and dejection. No museum today would handle censorship the way the Guggenheim did with Haacke, rejecting his exhibition and firing the curator. Today with similar information you could hold a whole Museum PR department hostage or - and perhaps this where the dejection comes in - things would continue as they are. Maybe Fred Wilson's Mining the Museum is the better example.



See too: Jay Chung & Q Takeki Maeda at 356 Mission

Quintessa Matranga at Freddy

(link)

Where water once symbolized the psyche is now our subconscious toilet, our autumnal metal, hellish networks of pipes rusting like our blood, carrying shit beneath feet, behind our faces, our love, diamonds, repressions, whichever. The PR mentions the Guggenheim's storied tubes, queuing turds down pipes while visitors line up for the higher purpose of placing things beneath us. The symbolic paths manifold. The point being: this is no longer the romantic era representing ourselves as fathomless depths; we are now better represented as plumbing: neurons, serotonin, fluids directed, misunderstood as monsters. All plain in Matranga's very unromantic depiction, refusing to state how we should feel about these things except any way but grand.

(Sponsored)

Mmm. Pepsi-cola. That one of our larger "content plantations" CAD is reaching outside its own local economy, requiring economic imports from Empire, is perhaps a dire signal to our island of art's self sustainability. Trade Embargos with capital to maintain cool, symbolic cred, is a stagnant system. It's changed. "Socialism" can sell now. Bernie can be a capitalist. The art museum can be sponsored by Levi's. Make Chanel Bags. Our "radical art" is duplicating May 68's tools in a gallery, the safety levels set to OSHA, who requires the artist to wear orange. We shouldn't have to starve, but we are. We need to ready our production for scalability.  We need to get sponsored. 



see too: (Sponsored)

Camille Henrot at Kunsthalle Wien

 
(link)

Henrot's object incongruence: material tension whose fault lines irrupt laughter. It's a comedy, acting sculpturally stupid, where material images don't add up. Henrot stretches sculptural sense like a cartoon mouse avoiding the axe, inducing cackles in children, material truth replaced with a clown. Who represents us today.



See too: “Puddle, pothole, portal” at Sculpture Center, Alicja Kwade at Kunstmuseum St. Gallen,  Camille Henrot at Metro Pictures,

Lee Relvas at Callicoon Fine Arts

(link)

Like tangled Fred Sandbacks suspension given weight, delineating the space like glass you infer outlined in string, Relvas' outline infers a body confused, turned inside out, intestinal pirouettes, throwing up spaghetti into the air.


See too: Nicolas Deshayes at Modern Art

Bruno Serralongue at Air de Paris

(link)

A good photo should tell us something is the sort of mantra of photojournalism that edges and delineates its propagandistic subconscious.  Which Serralongue avoids by making not good photos. "offer little esthetic enjoyment" "all "studium" and no "punctum." "The images supply content, description and information, but rarely a piercing moment; the viewer is not "grabbed" by the image, nor seduced by one captivating element. Rather than feed us answers, the images make us do the work of analysis."  The blood-draining banalization of photography like switching the electricity illuminating the carnival rush off. No circus just moral bread. Taken this way, their depletion, looking like husks, becomes its own odd rush, realizing just how close photos once were to the high of entertainment, now the pleasure of withholding it.



See too:A.L. Steiner at Koenig & Clinton

Harumi Yamaguchi at Project Native Informant

1970s, duplicating Capital's techniques - with or without critique - that ubiquitous strategy of photography that would become postmodern legacy - the pictures generation - is all the more uncanny in painting, the craft of it, capitalist "realism" - more fantasy - making so apparent the latent desirous unconscious of the advert - the wrapping women in plastic like packages - all the surrealism that be made so stupidly apparent in Koonsian shine, years earlier.


See too: Peter Piller at Capitain Petzel

(Sponsored)

(link)


Now that CAD has corporate sponsorship we'd like our teat too. We're looking for people like you. So, if you'd like to multiply your network, if you think artists would benefit from wearing suits, if you believe the advertising of "systemic business coaching" in arts isn't signaling our creative end-times, if your pants are Italian, unironically been on Artrank, if your corporation has all the capital in the world except the symbolic sort, if you've never read Pierre Bourdieu, then you are our on our shortlist. Become a corporate sponsor today. Email us, or donate here.

Daniel Pflumm at 6817 Melrose

(link)

A picture has scale and resolution, a size. A logo has none; logos are "vector based," making them infinitely enlargeable, magnifiable, with no resolution loss, no file size gain. The logo exists at all sizes simultaneously because it is code.

Similarly, printed in the real the logo exists such that at any scale it speaks without information loss, i.e. the logo is a communicative binary, it is either recognized or not. A picture is "lossy" in the real world, it will magnify into pixels or become soft in the distance, it has an appropriate scale for viewing, similar to the real world. The logo functions without regard to scale by making legibility supersede sight, space, scale, all the tenants of sculpture.  Billboards attempt obsolescing space by, like turning sound into heat, turn scale into broadcast, converting space into a virtualization,  replaced with codes communicating, legibility tantamount to presence. You don't see the icon, it just unpacks it information in your head. "Mental buggery with the wet muscle of signification replacing the consensual."

See too: Amanda Ross-Ho at The Pit

Rey Akdogan at Miguel Abreu

(link)

What we aren't supposed to notice literally highlighted, brightly stripped, illuminated. Art's hanging hardware, the seams of garbage. In 2012, PS1, describing Akdogan, used the term "particularlizes," a verb apt for the then trend of what could have been called "feng shuing the institution" but probably more like "making compositions of space," i.e. offsetting objects to give the boring venue actual particularities, attributes, things that could be noticed when it was assumed we were all to weary to. Its lovely colored asceticness was a moral ethic, anti-ostentatious, "emphasizes that hard work, discipline and frugality," and predicting the trend for "presentness," or apps on your phone randomly pinging you reminding you to take in your surroundings because they're generally handsome. It was a lot like that.


Oscar Tuazon at Le Consortium & Paradise Garage, Ian Kiaer at Lulu, Ian Kiaer at the Neubauer Collegium,

Naoki Sutter-Shudo at Bodega

(link)

Trinkets, toys, and souvenirs, takeaway objects of little use but hold significance. The objects are total surface, tchotchkes are transactional objects made for the transference of the buyer's desire. The souvenir acts as a placeholder for tourists urge and must communicate this through look. The erotics of style, of desire, likely some vestigial expression of our sexual selection's wiring, which is why so many of them are cute. The distance from art is short, but a false canyon between.

The PR essay is good.

Michael Smith at Richard Telles

(link)

"That's what I love about these high school girls, man. I get older, they stay the same age"
reflects well the implicit anxiety of men and youth. Both predatory and pathetic.  Their "midlife crisis" or eyed with questions at playgrounds, office hours with required open doors. Then there's the "avuncular" Smith, like the guy failing to fill his quotas at the dealership. His softness a comedy. The aging man, while the youth remain.

See too:  Michael Smith at Greene Naftali

Past: Michael Smith at Greene Naftali

"...all the pathos of sodden cardboard, limp and dull in puddles. Our repulsion from it only strengthens the abject pathos to it..."


Click here to read full Michael Smith at Greene Naftali

Klara Liden at Reena Spaulings

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At best Liden's "examinations of the anxiety of urban space" demonstrates the fraughtness on which society often rests: flippantly publishing the keys to city, (e.g. bolt cutters and flashlight); implicit threat of artist's desublimating their professions higher order bashing a bicycle to death (see too: real violence); or the small smile of this exhibition's theft of things that delineate private property (i.e. stealing the things that make private property possible). Bristling the small hairs separating us from chaos. The giddy nerves of being in break down's presence. Feel the rush of anarchism from the safety of the institution that by allowing its entrance proves it isn't so. It is fun. At worst wonder whether the rich whose wealth rely on this power that Liden ostensibly undermines don't feel some sort of safety in the irony of owning these institutional white walls, proving their invulnerability.



See too: Claire Fontaine at Galerie Neu, Claire Fontaine at Galerie Neu, Jay Chung & Q Takeki Maeda at 356 Mission, Reena Spaulings at Chantal Crousel

Past: Ben Schumacher

"...its been a speed test of formal attempts to invent himself ahead of the wave of what is sure to be a new style of Techno-conceptuo. Simon Denny too. But it’s an accelerative model, one in which the formal gamesmanship, the hunt for the new october after an eternal september, must continually increase speed if not to be bogged in a style quickly homogenized as the spaces fill. An accumulative method against obsolescence..."

Clich here to read full Ben Schumacher at Bortolami
Click here to read full Ben Schumacher at Musee d’art contemporain de Lyon

Till Megerle at Christian Andersen

(link)

Megerle's earlier drawings with all their provisionality, like comic book schematics for inkblot architecture, retain some of that previous ambiguity here: the amorphous bulbs of lumpen potato people, forms of soft confusion, the graphic line replaced here with corpulence, a dumbness that flatters them, doubt as to what is taking place in them, uncertainty opens as possibility: art's usual interest in opacity replaced with a direct mystery.


See too: Mathew Cerletty at Office Baroque,

Jef Geys at Essex Street

(link)

Reflexivity in art, a long tradition of who can silver their mirrors with blank ham-handery best, e.g. Daniel Buren, Zobernig, Stella, Codax, etc. who strip content to make the bluntest blankest things forcing interest everywhere besides the art, is for Geys more a process of stuffing your navel elegantly full of mirrors to gaze en abyme into it, packing them tightly, pristinely, to see a hall of navels winking like eyes, the rules of Gey's objects - well indexed in the PR - redirecting you through this hallowed hall of art that supports so much of it, which if you look close enough through the mirrors you will see that its white skin walls are flush with blood.



Daniel Buren at Bortolami, Heimo Zobernig, Dena Yago at Sandy Brown, “Seven Reeds” at Overduin & Co.

Jacqueline de Jong at Château Shatto

Jacqueline de Jong at Château Shatto

Compare this to the tortured wranglings of most contemporary interviews, the breathless story of a life: https://frieze.com/article/life-and-times-jacqueline-de-jong

Steve Keister at Mitchell Algus

(link)

Packaging, those ubiquitous garbage shells and skeletons lining boxes, deprived of the commodity, is each its own Fecteau sculpture, enigmatic and otherworldly, carved with some idiosyncratic system inferring the subject carving it, the capitalistic pressures governing the commodity or the artist, similar systems. Appreciate packaging. So covering this artifactual content of packaging with Olmec heads is a strange choice, answered by the artist's statement: “the ubiquitous Styrofoam carton inserts which littered the sidewalks of Tribeca contained a kind of relief that echoed the forms which distinguish Pre-Colombian art" which lovely to believe some illuminati like conspiracy of mesoamerican symbologies latently placed into our refuse, and furthered with the observation, "Keister points out the significant influence of pre-Columbian art as a common modernist source, and the earlier" which we'd love to believe.

See too: Richard Rezac at Isabella Bortolozzi

Birke Gorm at Croy Nielsen

(link)

Our rising desire for materiality in a world losing it manifests in fetish for increasingly grotesque versions. Coprogenics. "Author Donna Williams [...] points out that fecal smearing serve many real purposes that are often overlooked by caregivers and medical providers:
"Provides a sense of control over one’s body and environment when other areas of life are out of control
"Provides a sense of ownership over one’s actions
"Expresses feelings of anger, frustration, helplessness and powerlessness
"Prevents unwanted social interaction
"May be associated with other comforting emotional experiences
"May be part of a personal ritual that provides comfort
"May be part of an obsession that is spiraling out of control"

Gina Folly at Ermes-Ermes

(link)

Boxes, models, architectures, aquariums, terrariums. Can we put the exhibition together? Mathis Altmann, Maggie Lee, Tris Vonna-Michell, Tetsumi Kudo, Paul Thek, Mike Kelley, Ajay Kurian, Tobias Madison, Robert Graham, Max Hooper Schneider, Anicka YI, et al.

The box is a headspace, and cardboard is like a reconstituted tree flesh, and the diorama is like an architecture, ventilated to breath, did you know a lot of planning into a building's breathing, it's HVAC, like lungs, controlling moisture, and soggy cardboard is like a rotting flesh, we are repulsed by it, and looking into the flesh pool in the grotto is like the oracle, shimmering like the laptop screen, whose lid can be closed, locked and sent, it is transportable, and it is like a transportable headspace, and these objects are like primitive waypoints between many boxes, models, architectures, aquariums, terrariums we've been talking about.



See too: Mathis Altmann at Halle für Kunst Lüneburg, Tris Vonna-Michell at Jan Mot, Matthew Zivich at What Pipeline, “Sylvanian Families Biennial 2017” at XYZ collective, Maggie Lee at Real Fine Arts, Brian Griffiths at Vilma Gold,

Ida Applebroog at KARMA

(link)

Liquidity for flesh, each of us a taut water balloon filled with blood, its hard not to see biomorphic anthropocentrically, and the drawing morph to relate their objects to our flesh, see postage think intestines.  Made while the artist was self-committed to an psychiatric institution its harder too not to see the drawings as waypoint thinking between the body and object constructed by a erroneous mind. How could the world not look psychedelic.


See too: Larry Poons at Michael Jon & Alan, Alice Tippit at Night Club, Nicolas Deshayes at Modern Art

Past: Pentti Monkkonen and Liz Craft

"Monkkonen's box-trucks literalize the metaphor: painting as commodity vessels in transit. What were rectangular become parallel grams sent for accelerating markets. The vessels are moving fast, the trucks skull cab and silver toothed grill portend their too-fast-too-young market crash. The flow of brand. Graffiti, produce, logos, brushstrokes, artistic identities all competing for recognition."

Click here to read full Pentti Monkkonen at Truth and Consequences Click here to read full Pentti Monkkonen at High Art
Click here to read full "Paris De Noche” at Night Gallery
Click here to read full Pentti Monkkonen at Jonathan Viner



"seance of meaning between two people joined. The nostalgia inherent in this, against communication's hyper-ecstasy and towards more primitive mode of communication still accepts the digital as a lot like witchcraft"

Click here to read full Liz Craft at Real Fine Arts
Click here to read full Liz Craft at Jenny’s

Jos De Gruyter and Harald Thys at Gavin Brown

(link)

Painful, de Gruyter and Thys' developmentally delayed style, filled with speech impediments, slow progress, and language drifting into nonsense, is, like von Trier's early film, an idiocy against social decorum, our socially vulnerable conversations, socially conscious movies, replayed by the slow and impaired, mocking our banal conversations we've had, transmute conversation into madness. Comedy edges total breakdown of sense, turning to a horror that seems to endlessly please dG&T. This banal horror of too-much, of waste, of, in spite of such, cruelly, maniacally plain smiles.


See too: Jos de Gruyter and Harald Thys at Wattis, Jos De Gruyter and Harald Thys at MoMA PS1