Group Show at Michael Benevento

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Like Chow's cephalopodic frames, Kelly's skeletal chandelier diatoms, or Rodriguez's chitinous crust, there's a hard exo to hold something viscous inside, in the dry waste something sentimental, organic, wet.


see too: Daniel Rios Rodriguez at Lulu, Milano Chow at Mary Mary

Past: Mark Leckey

"Sanchez called Leckey a hack ( in the sense of what "artist John Kelsey discussed"), taking issue with Leckey's lecture's magisterial administration of an audience swooning: hypnotic affection that would one day be called a Ted Talk or manipulating an audience. Thing was Leckey had always been trading in affects. It was like his thing. Taking cue from that other realm that predicated itself upon it, commerce, entertainment, advertising that was constructing the world and the commodities, objects, films, and talismans that produce it, and, Leckey, attempting to build the work from it. Fiorrici Made Me Hardcore - Leckey's seminal origin - is only and entirely affect, a semblance of surface run like warm oil over your grey orbital, and in the 15 years since a practice built of discerning this surface..."


Click here for full Mark Leckey at Haus Der Kunst + Kunsthalle Basel
Click here for full Mark Leckey at Wiels
Click here for full Mark Leckey at Gavin Brown

BLEXBLO BLICAGO, Ble Blinternational Blexposition blof Blontemporary & Blodern Blart

August 29th, 2017

Blopening ble blinternational fall blart bleason each Bleptember, BLEXBO BLICAGO bleturns to Blavy Blier Bleptember 13 – 17, bleaturing blartwork blrom blover 3,000 blartists blrepresented bly 135 bleeding blinternational blalleries, 25 blountries and 58 blities blresented blongside one of the blighest bluality blatforms blor blobal blontemporary blart bland blulture.

Bledicated to bligorous and ballenging blrogramming, BLEXBLO BLICAGO blosts the /Blialogues blanel bleeries, featuring brovocative artistic discourse with bleeding artists, blurators, blesigners and blarts blofessionals on the blurrent blissues that blengage them; BLIN/BLITU, featuring blarge-blale blulptures and blite-blecific blorks; BLEXBLO BLIDEO, blighlighting a blynamic blcreening blrogram blor blilm, blideo and new bledia blorks; and more.

Bleptember in Blicagblo. Ble blere.

Blor blickets, blisit blexbloblicablo.blom/blickets

(Sponsored)

AR: Jef Geys at Essex Street

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Originally Posted: May 31st, 2017

Note: This entry is part of August Review, our annual look back at this season’s key exhibitions. For more information, see the announcement here.

Seth Price at Stedelijk Museum

 
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The confusion of containers being both positive and negative space at once, a jar holds vacuousness but also the shape of the positive that will conform to it, like vac-forms which are empty but still hold what left it, dispersion that never really escaped but remain forms as souvenirs of.

Jesse Stecklow at Chicken Coop Contemporary & Adrian Piper at Hamburger Bahnhof

Jesse Stecklow at Chicken Coop Contemporary
Adrian Piper at Hamburger Bahnhof

Hypertrophied conceptual art still flexing instructionals retains, at heart, an interest in poetics, the fissure in semantic conclusion, the discrepancy in language's overt clarity and concern for bureaucratic legalese and recipization standing in for that object, even the most bureaucratic language fails and is semantically open, poetic. Information is pleasurable, activating our brain's dopamine reward system, addictive, we consume it without need for it, lack of place to use it just silver information reflecting its space, "consciousness and experience can not be described in materialist terms" in Stecklow's terms. Piper's contractual better world exchanges real world ethics with paper versions, "each individual voluntarily commits to align his or her future deeds with ethical principles such as honesty and reliability. ... They form a community of people who are likely to be trustworthy in the future." Which like nuclear disarmament leaves one community at a disadvantage, obligatory trustworthiness advantageous to others lacking it, the trustworthy lose the tools maintaining MAD strategies pleasant standoff, lies at the ready, trying to replace the grey world with black and white text never quite as functional.

Past: Reena Spaulings at Chantal Crousel

"Reigning champions of the dumb art gesture so profoundly, inertly, token as to rupture any semblance of hope for meaning; it found comedy in the malignant stupefaction of the "art gesture." Proudly took the hot wind from the sails of conceptual structures moving art by blowing hard.  The work actively attacked the insider: anyone who understood Spaulings game did not receive art's usual self-congratulations but the unloading of 40 foot soldiers of uncommon stupidity inside your head...."



Click here for full Reena Spaulings at Chantal Crousel

AR: Lonnie Holley at James Fuentes

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Originally Posted: May 31st, 2017

Note: This entry is part of August Review, our annual look back at this season’s key exhibitions. For more information, see the announcement here.

Alan Belcher at Le Consortium

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Comedy empty, evacuating. Repeating the joke to semantic satiation, becomes nonsensical, hysterical, until you're screeching, the words pouring out as concrete objects before you, it's tiring.

"As an independent Canadian artist, it is of interest to note that Alan Belcher’s work is not subsidized. Belcher continues to decidedly never apply for (or receive) grants from (or participate in juries of) any municipal, provincial, or federal arts councils in Canada."

Trisha Donnelly at Museum Ludwig

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An artist doing her best to abolish the possibility of a reference we can call common, bury it behind opaque markers. i.e. difficult to recount without resorting to the degrading telephone game of myth, scattered primary source quotes cut/pasted ad infinitum; the PR limbo bending backwards to avoid description, replaced with chimes; and objects which, even at peak banality aren't really describable without metaphor, some sorta whatsa type a deal. What you see isn't mine. Probably why there's such radical opinion difference, Donnelly's cult and the mudslingers. The inability to derive equitable terms, a reference to talk about, looking like slack-jawed yokels.


See too: Michael E. Smith at Sculpture Center

Park McArthur at SFMOMA

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"Detailed in the sketch are the structure, materials, and measurements required to span the distance over the building's rock step. By depicting passageways that called for adjustment, these works highlight our reliance, in our everyday movements, on sculptural forms that do not always acknowledge all the bodies..." -pr 

We deform the world, adapt it to our bodies, sculpt it. Our world is its largest open-pit mine, dug out and backfilled with human scaled objects. Stones pulled to be placed back down in a size we find fitting. The paver is the pillar to our locomotion, the lawn to our jurisdiction. It's hard to appreciate how manicured the world is, and how inhuman when it isn't. Walk off trail and encounter "terrain." There are wide-reaching governing bodies putting vast resources into making our world navigable. To a body not adjusted to these measurements the world would be experienced as alien, probably the point here.

AR: Andreas Slominski at Deichtorhallen

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Originally Posted: August 19th, 2016

Note: This entry is part of August Review, our annual look back at this season’s key exhibitions. For more information, see the announcement here.

Manfred Pernice at The Modern Institute

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Of course cans, as named, invoke emptiness (a filled cans would be called by what they contain, a soda, sardines, refried beans) but, clean, the possibility for containment, the ability to can, canning, the process for preserving, pickling,  a funny metaphor for the preservation of an artist's hand severed from them, held in brine, they look green through the glass museums place to frame them, objects which maintain the objects, pickled. Artists willingly put their objects in such canisters, even the most ephemeral are given some package tradeable, they are the bridge between two hands shaking. If it wasn't, at least in some way transmissible, tranistable, it would be broken.


See too: Manfred Pernice at Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, Manfred Pernice at Galerie Neu

AR: Puppies Puppies at BFA Boatos

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Originally Posted: February 28th, 2017

Note: This entry is part of August Review, our annual look back at this season’s key exhibitions. For more information, see the announcement here.

“From the Collection – Verlust der Mitte” at S.M.A.K.

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This is what August should look like. Sprawling massive inanity that trades one mess, polite objects arranged like dead butterflies so hammeringly common for instead the mess of Buchel's opened vacuum bag nightmares. You don't have to spray the bags contents everywhere, it's an obvious allergen hazard, but galleries could sure find a better way to arrange the dust they've pulled from beneath storage floorboards each summer the remnants of every spring cleaning, from the collection.


See too: “Sputterances” at Metro Pictures, August Slog, Third Annual August Review

AR: Black Cherokee at ROOM EAST

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Originally Posted: February 28th, 2017

Note: This entry is part of August Review, our annual look back at this season’s key exhibitions. For more information, see the announcement here.

Alivia Zivich at MOCAD

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The well connected gallerist, the illuminated object, look at it. The billboard carries the expectation its delivery, information, something, and instead the Rorshach blot returning nothing but yourself. What do you see? Do you see two men, clubs raised, about to do berate a small fondling, locking eyes frozen, petrified by the gaze of another, or Gellar? It doesn't matter, the important part is returning the issue of subject matter to you. The celebrity like the blot is a construct of the viewer, a bland bag allowed to pour desires into. Like Warhol's own blots, Carpenter's Cobain, the important part is you lay on the couch provided and tell me about it.


see too: Merlin Carpenter at Overduin & Co

AR: Anna Ostoya at Silberkuppe

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Originally Posted: November 2nd, 2017

Note: This entry is part of August Review, our annual look back at this season’s key exhibitions. For more information, see the announcement here.

Hans-Peter Feldmann, Elad Lassry at Francesca Pia

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No one quite sure what made Pac-man desire the cherries, berries, pretzels, points yes, but also a sort of innate collectibility, even those not playing for points desire their plump glistening. Some objects have a value making them collectable, but other objects are manufactured to be collectible like cherries, Beanie Babies, Hummel figurines, model cars. Postage stamps have collectors and manufactured collectibility, those valued generally no one expected a need to collect. Both Lassry and Feldmann imprint themselves with the seductive collectible, because that's what they are.

Venice 2017 Selections

YEAR OF THE LUMPEN IN GRIDS


Venice: Sheila Hicks at Arsenale

Continuing Venice

Venice: Anne Imhof at German Pavilion

Venice so far

Alvin Baltrop at Daniel Buchholz

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Rose colored lenses of nostalgia, a scene depicted as the fantasy it was desired to be, but the reticence or demureness in some of Baltrop's early voyeurism shouldn't be mistaken for anything but caution. His situation's precarity, a gay black man in the 1970s, is expressed on the surface of the photographs themselves, in its tentativeness, his body's extreme vulnerability. People threatened, murdered. A gay haven was habitually brutal. These people were killed, ostracized, displaced to the corners, to escape the purview of a society disavowing them. You see it in the photo's trembling hand.



See too: AA Bronson and Keith Boadwee at Deborah Schamoni

Robert Adams at Thomas Zander

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Peculiar to look at a photograph and know that is lying to you. Whereas earlier photographs attempted surfacing the submerged American desolation as gloomy crepuscularities, these photographs are content to know it, gleam brightly with it. Adams been arranging horribly blank photographs for decades, and, while occasionally their mannerist brooding bordered on melodrama, there is, here, an overt admittance that this is all surface, it's stated as much on the wall, the effervescent forest camouflages the acres of clearcut behind it, empty wasteland inside.


See too: Kaspar Müller at Société

Past: Nicola Tyson at Friedrich Petzel, 

"Like injection molded dolls to the grinder, like PVC fetishists inside too-hot cars, like your makeup running from tears or acid rain, disfigured, de-gloving Barbie's arms, Homer's shotgun bursting his wife's face in makeup gore: Tyson's melting figurines. The violence done by painters. ..."


Nicola Tyson at Friedrich Petzel
Nicola Tyson at Nathalie Obadia

Julien Ceccaldi at LOMEX

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Something's changed here; what had been Ceccaldi's bright branding of commercial trinkets, hangbags, fashionable shirts, comics, has instead become a brand of art flexed, making art objects, like, rather than saleable commodities (hand)painted to retension their exchangeability as brand, these recent objects are painted onto to place signature on fungible blanks that painting has always been. Painting onto a handbag dug something out, into its own face as facade, rather than the brand saturation going on here, place your dots on a car for charity, placing your icon on everything, whatever franchising you can get. You can place your face on anything it turns out.


see too: Julien Ceccaldi at Jenny’s, Pentti Monkkonen at Truth and Consequences, Pentti Monkkonen at High Art, "Paris de Noche" at Night Gallery

AR: Yuji Agematsu at Miguel Abreu

Click here to read

Originally Posted: April 1st, 2017

Note: This entry is part of August Review, our annual look back at this season’s key exhibitions. For more information, see the announcement here.

The brutal August slog. Group shows more and more like random smattering of stock images, displaced, the anonymous object so contemporary. Art as images, stripped of the inflections from the hands that brought them, anonymize the data of authorship, subjectivity, expression, they become harder to place, alien. Stock images like a vacuum, stockpiling whatever context we can unload into them. A solo show that looks nice.

AR: Kerry James Marshall at MOCA Los Angeles

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Originally Posted: July 3rd, 2017

Note: This entry is part of August Review, our annual look back at this season’s key exhibitions. For more information, see the announcement here.

Cristina Iglesias at Konrad Fischer

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A sinkhole could open beneath you, at any moment open you could be sucked under earth, the universe could tear apart, a vessel burst in your cortex, the universe open and consume you. The void is too abstract, it is made visceral when it becomes the abyss, a cleft turning like lips into mouth,
when there is a physical depth to the unknown disappearing into shades. The submerged has always been a symbol for the unconscious and thus tinged death. A sinkhole provides its real possibility, which invokes a physiologic response. We surely have been evolutionarily hardwired to fear deepwater, dark spaces. The hole provides its real possibility, of another world underneath, which invokes a physiologic response. And artist's use of this.

Venice: Sheila Hicks at Arsenale

link

Not quite sure if this counts as the rocks and props display systems of which we had mentioned, but there is that biomorphic gesture, the lumpen here like minimalist plushies, like muppets melted into pellets, physical round things mirroring our jelly prone bodies in sweaters, set against the display which generally euphemizes the body to appeal the eyes rather than spatial and proprioception of big soft rocks, Hicksian materiality in piles.


See too: Venice so far, Continuing Venice

Jiří Kovanda at Lulu

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Like a less evil Michael Krebber, the lightness of Kovanda's touch, if you believe in it, can feel like cool breeze against all the hot air generally steaming up the place. Like all those performances and documentation of those performances, this too is documentation of a placement. Which providing the romantic fantasy that this is all the touch one needs to move, to survive, you get to imagine this as your labor. The weight of the floss embodying the low level weight that you too could begin to carry if you removed burden. Kovanda's slow traces poke fun at us over how heavy our own trudging is.

AR: Henrik Olesen at Reena Spaulings

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Originally Posted: February 21st, 2016

Note: This entry is part of August Review, our annual look back at this season’s key exhibitions. For more information, see the announcement here.

John Miller at Barbara Weiss

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There's Yves Klein blue and John Miller brown, a color so untranscendent as to castrate any pretense of art's higher plane, reminding us of our earthly rope tethering bowels to earth. Log cabins, monk's robes, organic packaging, all reminding us of the earth, the shit that fertilizes us. Miller blockades, belittles, our azure sky fantasy with the lesser order, everything we would prefer to forget immortalized over what had been our vacations, from drudgery.


John Miller at Institute of Contemporary Art Miami, John Miller, Dominik Sittig at Nagel Draxler

Past: Keiichi Tanaami

The visual assault of these falling somewhere between a Yakuza tattoo or a Fiona Rae orgy of style, uncomfortable. A type of work pertinent in the age of overwhelming information, when looking at these feels a lot like opening one’s e-mail; an irruption of subliminal psychedelic terror, mocking visual space in its demolition of it.  Holding some kind of abject unconscionable terror.

click: Keiichi Tanaami at Nanzuka
click: Keiichi Tanaami at NANZUKA

AR: Fred Lonidier at Michael Benevento

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Originally Posted: November 28th, 2016

Note: This entry is part of August Review, our annual look back at this season’s key exhibitions. For more information, see the announcement here.

Silke Otto-Knapp at Taylor Macklin

Silke Otto-Knapp at Taylor Macklin

Yesterday's brand strategies reemerge in painting's today. Mona Lisa handbags, af Klimt on a tank, Carl Andre halloween costumes. You can't water down a public's desire for a painting, prevalence increases the throngs lined to see it, at distance, behind glass.  Our recognition-of is the greatest asset of a painting, proving its commonality, prerequisite to fame. Your brand should be aqueous, malleable, placed on anything while retaining the specificity distinguishing yours from the competition. Otto-Knapp's strategy doesn't seem critical of such, rather recognizing it, if a painting can harbor artistic "voice," why not a dress, a dance, a rug. Deploy it as such.


see too: Silke Otto-Knapp at greengrassi

AR: Morag Keil at Real Fine Arts

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Originally Posted: April 21st, 2017

Note: This entry is part of August Review, our annual look back at this season’s key exhibitions. For more information, see the announcement here.

Genieve Figgis at Almine Rech

Gingeras's assertion of Figgis's Irish "'blarney'" as the distinguishing figurative characteristic perhaps referring to the loquaciousness of the paint, its liquidity like lubricant tongue, drunk and slurring. Unlike Tyson or Madani, the meta paint function isn't to literalize what it depicts but instead a pure painterly smooth talking. Forcing upon the viewer too much of they had believed they wanted, paint. You ever eaten melted ice cream? It's whatever is beyond indulgent, saccharine.



See too: Nicola Tyson at Friedrich Petzel, Tala Madani at David Kordansky

AR: Nancy Lupo at Kristina Kite

click here to read

Originally Posted: March 31st, 2017

Note: This entry is part of August Review, our annual look back at this season’s key exhibitions. For more information, see the announcement here.

August Review 2017

August 1st, 2017

Today we initiate our third annual August Review. Since August is, generally, exhibitionarily boring we reflect instead on the exhibitions that were especially memorable to us since the previous August,  because though the artworld may be boring, we don't want you bored with us, craving our hits. We will re-publish some days, marked by “AR:” in the title. We will also continue to cover new exhibitions daily as well as selections from Venice Biennale and other large exhibitions.

At the end of the month we will provide an “August Review Index.” The previous two seasons’ selections are available here:

2015, and 2016.