Birgit Megerle at Kunsthaus Glarus

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Banality in painting makes tense a medium we think of as so inherently singular. Placing its original object in the neither-nor world of common. These are like staring at milk, an object of effort to make so plain, pasteurized, from a fount so specific and pink. Even the more particular subjects achieve some iridescent vague. Paintings you could find anywhere but fit nowhere, Megerle is diligent in boiling the paintings to something congealed, gelatinous, soft-firm, melting. Living with one of these would be like hiring someone to mock your individuality everyday.

Continuing Venice

(Venice: Kishio Suga at Arsenale)

Continuing from here. We've got more rocks propped. Though Suga has been propping potato objects for some time now, the rocks and sticks and lumpen things always seeming made to stand under pressure, like they're having a real rough go maintaining their uprightness. Their sort of dumb monumentality always human scaled. It makes them endearing. The lumpen always resembling us, or our eggs.


see too: Venice so far.

Venice: Anne Imhof at German Pavilion

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It's hard to watch bodies adopt ad campaigns. If Imhof's performances seem made for the documentation that echo them it's because they have our beautiful youth retension this conformity to the fashion that will transmit them. Move behind the glass of magazine pages. Identity is performance, seeing its most theatrical version, fashion, as art performance looking like a fashion shoot, is a nightmare. All of youth's beauty is wasted, by everyone, but now you can watch it be caged live in the clothing of another.


See too: Tony Conrad's Glass

Melvin Edwards at Daniel Buchholz

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Minimalism's infatuation for the industrial process, of say Judd et al, was, in part, premised on these industrial processes deletion of the body and its "expression" (if not a promise of subjectivity lifted entirely) in looking "pure," like objectivity, removing the human. Of course this was the lie of any commodity: that the clean aluminum sheets comprising boxes or laptops weren't simply wiped of their indentured sweat. Minimalism hid the body in the closet. Edward's balls coagulated these castoff bodies minimalism so desperately wanted to forget.


See too: Ajay Kurian at White Flag Projects

Past: Franz Erhard Walther at CAPC

"the look of functional objects: well designed packages, exemplifying - stand in for - its protestant ethic, morality. Packages as stripped minimalist looks meant, through fetishistic “functional” design of today’s REI or Muji, to impress functionality as a nebulous holisticness. Functionality is today’s fetish in a world already post-apocalyptically Capitalist dog-eat-dog. So when you stand with your head in a bag with a stranger or docent, the bitterness of its awkwardness is understood as medicinal, good for you."


Click here Franz Erhard Walther at CAPC

Candy Jernigan at Wattis

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Artistic power to make something "appear," be visible, is often abused with a beatification or worse aestheticization of a subject the artist predicts will interest nobody without their, the artist's, supple grace, i.e. the stylization, photorealist iconizaton, or whatever painterly reifications for aura redundantly affixed. Of course drawing is recording and thus proof of its seeing, document to its witness, made visible, and more accurate lines authenticating, but the drawing need not be "special." Jerrigan's accumulation proves a more a serviceable method in which the painter yields to the object, representation of it and not talent. Like all those tacos and kebabs painted on stucco to advertise the real thing inside, there is a functionalism in vernacular foodstuffs that often feels like a relief. If you want to show something you just put it there.

Albert Herter at Koenig & Clinton

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The cartoon - as the primitive manifestation of the virtual, the ability to treat reality as malleability - feels more and more aptly depictive of the world currently lived, a world governed by abstraction and rulers on whims swapping crutches for legs, swamps for politics, licorice for sustenance. In the future your head will be replaced by a pumpkin and this will be the will of hand we can't see but can all infer, sense will be destroyed and replaced with something much more billowing, slapstick maybe.


See too: Gijs Milius at Gaudel de Stampa, “Puddle, pothole, portal” at Sculpture Center, Mathis Altmann at Freedman Fitzpatrick

Janiva Ellis at 47 Canal

Janiva Ellis (link)


Jana Euler


Mathieu Malouf


Orion Martin


Jordan Wolfson


Caitlin Keogh

Venice so far

(Erika Verzutti)

(Cinthia Marcelle)


(Katja Novitskova)


Rocks with props. Organic Material and display systems for the trade show. Physicalness and the means to array it. Your body offered back to you.

Henry Taylor at Eva Presenhuber

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It's a odd property of most paint that you can't brighten the tones of black skin by adding white; brown's vibrance is muted by white. While the tonal value is "lighter" the chromatic intensity is lessened, creating confusion as to what is the highlight. An artifact in history's poor representation of blackness by mostly white painters in the paint itself.

Mandy El-Sayegh at Carl Kostyál

(link)

Pee-pee and poo-poo, blood and guts, body and news healed as the scabs we like to pick. Touch them. Make the body appear, human emergence through the grate, pulp laid to dry skins. It used to be that performance was that meat case, but that apparently wasn't enough. Now with graft it, produce it, spill the gelatinous across all to prove it against the virtual that would upload it,


see too:  Erwin Wurm at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Gijs Milius at Gaudel de Stampa, “Mirror Effect” at The Box, Ron Nagle at Modern Art, Michael E. Smith at Michael Benevento, Klara Lidén, Alicia Frankovich at Kurator,  Andro Wekua at Sprüth Magers

Past: Guy de Cointet at Museum Leuven

" Like all those interminable children's videos on Youtube, a woman holds up a ball and a voice narrates, "Ball" and transforms to a triangle and someone states, "Triangle" the child delivered the information of the semantic system that makes communication, taught; prior to this the world is "meaningless" shapes, colors. Language acquisition accrues through inference through existing in the world where those objects exist, and this is like de Cointet's plays, where slowly we learn or infer the meaning of large dumb objects and some we just never know."



Click here: Guy de Cointet at Museum Leuven

Torbjørn Rødland at Air de Paris

(link)

Photographers and fetish-film directors alike foster specific affinities, the subdivisions of taste and sensitivities, high heel egg crush for instance expanding out of your basic foot fetish, of which they develop film and thus genres of. Doing violence to celebrities, torture porn, neoteny, whatever heats your iron in the "Layers upon layers of perception and identification." Our sensitivity to art, seems a sensitivity to objects, not much different from fetish.


see too: Chadwick Rantanen at Essex Street, Lucy Skaer at MRAC, CAWD on Fetish

Che Lovelace at Eric Hussenot

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"He’s not afraid of pleasure and knows how much the soul craves color—a refuge during these dark days…”

Dark days, sure, but we don't lack color, and this "refuge" flirts close to us as refugees, following souls aimed at the more vibrant green of our neighbors' grass not yet turned concrete but still metaphors of escapism. Stop requiring grass, it's an invasive species, this vacation mindset.

Flannery Silva at Karma International

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Ah, the finicky objects of procreation whose any naturalism is disinfected by its immediate costuming, the stage dressing, theatrics, an ornamented Matryoshka that will soon be its own cradle for shells treated like the dolls we are taught to believe them to be, making a show of such objects.

Group Show at Essex Street

(link)

"Baer repeatedly crunches together heterogeneous visual registers to produce a kind of spatial-temporal pile-up." (-James Cahill) Temporal pile-up like Baer's recent resurgence with body of work difficult to discern if timely or anachronistic. The quote could describe Jana Euler work just as well. But later, "In recent decades, Baer has consistently straddled personal and cosmic registers." Baer a little more shamanistic in the deployment of symbols. But so maybe that's what this exhibition is about, the soft proffering of symbols through thin veils, the different means to do it, Smith's body stuck to walls, Vogel's thrifted objects, Smith's Munch touchups, Baer's past now tinging the present.

Venice 2017

July 13th, 2017

This summer, as we’ve done in the past, we will present selections from this year’s Venice Biennale on Contemporary Art Writing Daily. Our highlights that we will begin rolling out soon will link to a corresponding archival site, this one, we’ve built to store writing on as much of the Biennale as we can write.

We hope that you’ll enjoy perusing our selections on Contemporary Art Writing Daily throughout the summer and that you’ll look through the archive as it is updated as well. Thank you for visiting our resources!

Coverage of the 2017 Venice Biennale generously supported by [your ad here] – Specializing in [your copy here] the Art World. 

Gretchen Bender at Wilkinson

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The Darth Vader aesthetic, the almost imperceptibly slight shift required to bend our cultural images as though Empire's propaganda, the fascistic gothic version. Bender did, famously, design the credits for America's Most Wanted, probably the most explicitly authoritarian expression of US entertainment, in which the ostensible good of course skip judge and jury for exciting mercenary chase of the manhunt from the comfort of your home, call 1-800-CRIMETV, becoming themselves the long arm of the law, television which originated, strangely in Germany.

Roger Brown at Kavi Gupta

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Brown, along with all the Chicago crew, precursor(s) to today's painter-infatuations, the rendering and the digital and the surreal modernity that binds them.  Good to see their resurgence with. Imagists who seemed to predict the smoothness and cartoonification whose resemblance to our world we obviously identify with. From the bones of comics, airbrushed magazines, and wry smile of advertorial psychosis, predicting the look we would come to associate with internet's advent and smooth-muscle CGI, a repetitive cartoon cage, a future forecasted rather than appropriating its look now is impressive, absorbing all the nervous energy of today's iconographies, the stark clarity we cant't make sense of.

Suse Weber at Kienzle Art Foundation

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They're stark objects, so sharply there, lacking comfort for the functions they suggest. The cruelty of objects providing use without comfort, made for us without a care for us. The ergonomic slave conforms but these express themselves against, a sharp bar for your back. Objects which suggest function but not for us we describe as alien, such a thing exotic to us, appears foreign. They should bend for us.

See too:  Nina Beier at Croy Nielsen, Richard Rezac at Isabella Bortolozzi

Joel Holmberg, Tory J. Lowitz at Michael Benevento

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How remarkable now if Monet had painted a toilet then. More concerned with the effect of snow at Giverny, or Rouen Cathedral, than the dawn's TP. Bonnard and Degas, bathmen sure, toilets no. There was a different sense of the sublime then, but the affect is the same. Hay or toilet stacks, the concern of the impressionist for the modern vista. Like Holmberg's laptop landscapes previously, or CNN epithets even before, an episodic "project" artist, a genre, like Lowitz's Ikebana, adherence to rules bent well, painting me like one of your frenchmen.

Ron Nagle at Modern Art

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The question of the body, in Nagle's as well as Price's, exists in the limbic state, between base impulses and the brain's higher orders' attempts to suppress it, the libidinous uprising of nether regions in seeing cream relax. Brown leaking out your chocolate bar, on the edge of your bedspread. Hard things and soft things. It's exceedingly risky, committing language to such ambiguousness, you sound like a perv while the tight-lipped get doubt's benefit; let the decorous attempt it, the tension of many a comedy artwork, and everyone in the gallery saying no I'm sorry you're mistaken it's not so much that the artist is off-gassing it's that his technological reliquary is valorizing but your interpretation is valid, sure. We say part erotic instead. Not, a sensuous candy loosening over pink erection, over swollen tongue, glossitis. And the other one with the tree, it looks fecal. The words that assign more meaning to us than the sculptures which reflect them.


See too: Torbjørn Rødland at Henie-Onstad Kunstsenter,  Torbjørn Rødland at Kunsthall Stavanger, Alice Tippit at Night Club

Georgie Nettell at Lars Friedrich

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Both literal and figurative quotes around bullet holes vented into "My Opinion" and "Other People's Opinion" printed in positive+negative which, like the PR so rife with, refusal to designate which is which, pros or cons, advantage or disadvantage, a full spectrum ambivalence to evaluation. Lethargy in violence, bullet holes that sort of look like the assholes of opinions that everyone has, here printed with Cannon's new digital litho replacement Colorwave: "ColorWave 900 large format poster printer has a raw print speed of more than 12,000 square feet per hour and is able to print a run length equivalent to the height of New York City's One World Trade Center in just 30 minutes."  Reprinting someone else's last line: "the near-monochromatic lifelessness of a repackaged and repurposed disobedience."



see too: Georgie Nettell at Reena Spaulings

If you haven’t already, we encourage you to take a look at the three Quarterly archives we have released on Contemporary Art Quarterly: Quarterly come to pass, Quarterly 2, Quarterly 3

You'll find writing about the most recent crop of Quarterly sanctified artists here: Moyra Davey , Lily van der Stokker 

Please consider following our instagram account, @contemporary_art_writing_daily  which probably won't post much of anything at all, but it might, and then you can be up on something if it does.

Erika Vogt at Mary Mary

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A little too big for their own good, the sculptures exhibit the tendencies of the oaf, too present. "Proxemics is the study of human use of space and the effects that population density has on behaviour, communication, and social interaction." There's no space for you here, they put you on the stage of their theater: Vogt's objects all placed on the cusp of Personal distance (Far Phase) "for interactions among good friends or family." "Under circumstances where normal space requirements cannot be met, such as in public transit or elevators, personal space requirements are modified accordingly. According to the psychologist Robert Sommer, one method of dealing with violated personal space is dehumanization. He argues that on the subway, crowded people often imagine those intruding on their personal space as inanimate." And the sculptures you. 

Toy with human scale.


See too:  Erika Vogt at Overduin & Co, , Amanda Ross-Ho at The Pit, Amanda Ross-Ho at The Approach, Mark Handforth at Kayne Griffin Corcoran

Past: Erika Vogt at Overduin & Co.

"Big objects mock us."



Click here to read full Erika Vogt at Overduin & Co.

Kerry James Marshall at MOCA Los Angeles

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Marshall absorbs narrative painting's more modern languages, e.g.: illustration, comics, advertising. Using commercial clarity to sharpen images to iconic while not relinquishing the subtly, slipperiness or open-endedness that the commercial trades for bluntness. Midnight black of KJM's figures slides between transparent ghosts, starkly visible, and shared tone blurring its figures, aptly analogizing the (America's) paradoxical black body: Invisible Man, vivid targets, everyone fitting the description, everywhere and invisible. It would be stupid to call it not painterly, but it lacks the masturbatory juice that the painterly usually entails, far too fastidious, serious even, for that, trading the painterly for the power of an image well constructed, Marshall's wild inventiveness in making paintings that want to be so clearly seen.

“Life & Opinions” at Tanya Leighton

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It seemed for a while that copper was going to replace the buffed aluminum that replaced gold and Koonsian candy-coating as the eye-rollingly ostensibly critically-legitimate wealth-denoter in art, trends toward making the minerals-backing-art-curenncy-trope less obvious, every gallery had at least one artist nailing copper to a wall, techno-circuitry or Detroit detritus, and so interesting to see here the austerity of conceptual art's bureaucratic grey moving too towards texts pre-yellowed, a warm beige, interior design's highest selling color.

Guan Xiao at Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler

(link)

Of the Post-Harrison/Genzken object-orientated sort, finally able to polish themselves to the sexy level of Malls, toys and product packaging that they mimic.


see too: Rachel Harrison at Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler