Günther Förg at Barbel Graesslin

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It was hard to argue with the slightly stupified version of Forg's modernism. Awkward buildings colors and installations, scribbled pleasures later. Rendered dumb, it didn't speak to anyone, rather happy with, instead, simple existence, becoming a stone in the modernist pathway, a weighing down ideals of transcendence, like attempting to see a Rothko with a pile weighing heavy in your bowels, the work refuses to lift one beyond the limits of your earthly human presence, the usual higher pleasures lifting spirits instead hamstrung to leave you right where you already are.


See too: Heimo Zobernig at Kunsthaus Bregenz, Heimo Zobernig at Simon Lee, Heimo Zobernig at Indipendenza, Heimo Zobernig at Petzel, Krupp, MUDAM

Roger Hiorns at ELI Beamlines Center

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The burial of the machine. A proxy for our bodies we can continually imagine with earth pressed against metal. The rate of erosion is slow, it will never quite go away, for a continuous mental image of a corroding body. It's there right now, bacteria bumping against skin cold and metal, moisture leaking and permeating micro-fissures in the impervious coating. Objects buried, skeletons in closets. Hiorns concern for metal and meat, the infiltration of each other now an act of myth-making, storytelling, creating an oral history for our moral tales of art, the wall text.


See too: Roger Hiorns at Annet Gelink

“Soil Erosion” at Altman Siegel

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Erosion, de-territorizing the territory, trans-, slippage, sliding out as the rug under ones feet to find oneself estranged, decontextualized, recontextualized in a new alterity, with the "other", alienated, freaking out the square's box we're thinking outside growing potatoes, er tubers, er rhizomes in a new light of the distance effect of Brechtian modes, and seeing them having forgotten the name of thing one sees, but waking up with a perspective shift of the forest for the trees of artworld ways to say it.

Kahlil Robert Irving at Callicoon Fine Arts

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"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 the landscape in unstoppable yet leaky pipes, garbage moved though our veins, seeing trash everywhere, [...] there's just stuff everywhere, stuff here a technical term for the quasi-differentiated mass, confusing a tarp, a trash bag and a tent."

Trash will become the fossils of our culture, picked through by deep future anthropologists foretelling the past what we didn't want to become part of our future. To see what we had no interest in bringing with us. Cast away. Like Melvin Edwards who reasserted the industrial body while minimalism pretended some purity in it, there's usually political content to the things we try not see.


see too: Melvin Edwards at Daniel Buchholz,  “May the Bridges I Burn Light the Way” at STANDARD (OSLO), Nancy Lupo at Kristina Kite & Yuji Agematsu at Miguel Abreu, Dylan Spaysky at Clifton Benevento, Ajay Kurian at White Flag Projects

Alastair Mackinven at Reena Spaulings

Something on our faces.

Alastair Mackinven



Jana Euler


Mathieu Malouf


Janiva Ellis



Orion Martin


Jordan Wolfson


Caitlin Keogh

Picabia, etc.

Judy Chicago at Jessica Silverman

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As ambiguous abstraction and bio-innuendo makes a stunning return to art, it would make sense Chicago comes with. There's been a resurgence of cats too. Orifices and cats, pussies, the feline, Schneemann, Carolee, and her cat kissing. A long history of cats in art, Bonnard, Manet, Egypt, etc. The dog doltish in comparison. The cat more sly, artistic, essentialistically feminine.


Literally, Cat butts: Autumn Ramsey at Night Club, Autumn Ramsey at Park View, Alice Tippit at Night Club, Trevor Shimizu at Rowhouse Project

Mary Corse at Kayne Griffin Corcoran

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Perceptuality in art feeling like a fossil dragged into the 21st century. Trends for "presentness"already been subsumed by our yoga practices and then trend the phone-films of airplane interiors and whatever other banalia which too aggrandized plain "experience" wondrous as any ice cold lightbox. Air and space focused on place which turned to "site-specificity" treating museums as church to it, turned by the young into experience as transmissable blips to light up the networks we all spent most of our experience more and more on anyway. Personal attendance seems like a morality, a penance to drag your body across.

Adrian Piper at Lévy Gorvy

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Looking through, there are facades and appearances and reflections of subjects. There's, like, layers of appearances, look at these two competing wikipedia entries, the en.wikipedia version and the version Piper corrected. You can read them through each other like glass overlays which look but don't touch, a drawing over a photograph of a subject:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Piper
http://www.adrianpiper.com/removed-and-reconstructed-en.wikipedia-biography.shtml

Ruth Asawa at David Zwirner

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"David Zwirner is pleased to announce the gallery’s first exhibition dedicated to the work of Ruth Asawa since having announced the representation of the artist’s estate earlier this year."
And like that the Asawas sprout all over Manhattan, in group shows, in windows, on CAD, museums, the Whitney, recently acquired by MoMA, moved out of backrooms as though its suddenly now time to care when there's something to be made of it. The collective rolling of eyes goes unharnessed.

Wilfredo Prieto at NoguerasBlanchard

 

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The Rorsharch tests that nature makes. Predators don’t search for meaning. God gives them to ours to mock us: the more inkblot-like mammals resultant from human domestication; wolves, foxes, and bovine undergoing human selection make Rorschach blots appear. Like God putting an easter egg in genetic biology. Messing back a message to those messing you. A good God joke. Whats are cows but a human technology for dairy. A narrative which our artist, well pedigreed in conceptual art, deploys in good conceptual fashion, using objects as representations for talking points. The best of which mutate in the beholder's eyes, an object as phantasm, visions for whoever is seeing it, to then be concretized in words like these, beautiful.

John Ahearn and Rigoberto Torres at Alexander and Bonin

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1992/12/21/whose-art-is-it

Matthew Brannon at David Kordansky

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The decision to represent the mess of history with the cleanliness of silkscreen graphics - opposing the usual hair representing its miasma - commendable if symbols and things didn’t present their own interpretive vague, a tidiness become question of what’s been scrubbed. “the war from which my generation sprung was rarely spoken of.” cleaned to ominousness.  The “short timer” calendar, explained in the pr,* becoming glyphs for the artist object, interpreting another, the “soldier-‘artist’.” The “soldier-‘artist’”, the object-subject, the theater pieces Brannon has continually moved into, an interpretive scenery invented.

*“someone with less than 100 days left on his tour. During the war, some would draw calendars, often lewd, to count down their time. Brannon’s research led him to compose fictional renditions” 

Past: Matthew Brannon

"Midcentury graphic design made as stifling as the era's social mores, Brannon's cleanliness hasn't ever felt nice so much as overbearing hypochondria. Cleanliness the expression of repression, and the clinicalness of printmaking anality becomes suffocating, even the friendly ones seem without air, ketchup like terror, nostalgia cleansed till the skin dries


Full: Matthew Brannon at Casey Kaplan

Pope.L at What Pipeline

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If art is some alchemical process for value creation from nothing, then turning poisoned wells into monetary venture is proof; snake-oil sold as a souvenir to the ruse, the artistic swindle is absolved by irony, the buyer "in the know"enjoys the hoax of uselessness: "Flint Water ain’t for drinking, it’s for thinking!" Flint's water is unique afterall, an object of contemplation if there ever was one, lead transmuted to gold.



See too: William Pope.L at Steve Turner, William Pope.L at Catherine Bastide

Lisa Ponti at Federico Vavassori

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There isn't a single photo of a painting, just install shots where white space crowns, a frame of real estate stands in for gilding, lighting like a halo. Then weirdly you can find some of them here, a 95 year old artist on A4.



See too:Brian Calvin at Le Consortium, Florian Hecker & John McCracken at Künstlerhaus KM- , Midway Contemporary Art

Mindy Rose Schwartz at Queer Thoughts

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Preciousness is difficult, overripening it bears whiffs of sentimentality, that saccharine brown fruit. [Byars probably our greatest in converting sentimentality, tempering his preciousness with a crappiness, a sort of poor man's gilding, funner to believe.] "craft methods that, although not lacking charm, are commonly dismissed as trivial or irrelevant." Which is true, we do symbolic violence, Distinction, through our tastes which we presume are some objective reasoning, not wanting to believed as a reproduction of class, its partitioning. Chintz is the realm of the agrarian, provincial, of the insipid populists, and dolts of whose outer-realms we prefer to flyover, that we, aesthetically astute, must continually decor ourselves and our realms in aesthetic objects against this, them, hang like hexes against; much of our aesthetics are built upon this.  To see craft and react.


See too: James Lee Byars at VeneKlasen/Werner

Niele Toroni at Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen

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Doing already what everyone had been then wanting to, at the time everyone evacuating subjectivity, cutting of their hands to meld with their electronics, printing paintings, graduating Staedelschule, designing algorithms to produce them for them, and then Toroni there plodding ad infinitum, as if the painting could stretch on infinitely, each work a piece cut from an infinite universal cloth eventually spreading onto everything like some hellish pox. Toroni's pox will die with him, which is more than can be said for many. The signatory brushstroke, labeling meaning and value. Like so much art it achieved credibility by being just so maniacally stupid, undeniable. It's hard to refute such stubborn insistence.

Kara Walker at Sikkema Jenkins

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[A press release to melt steel girds.]

The silhouettes lacking color were assigned it through expectations of their inhabited shape: Colorless and projected with a hue-as-designation through our own cultural assumptions, achromic yet colored, the metaphors manifold and rife. Now Walker paints in the colors like an assignation, assigning of her own hand what had been ours to.  What is noticeable is the umber never touches its outline, it's held within or smeared on top. The pale fleshes melt, meld with their surroundings, perhaps simply because paleness is considered to be standard, the backdrop, blend into it.


 

Ari Marcopoulos at Frank Elbaz

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We started appending porn as a suffix to images that though chaste employed its visceral surface, white crystal light, even the more vile forms of pornography still bathe their slews in clean shadowless light. As style to its subject, “-porn” was to the candification of an thing, slathered in photographic glaze, like a plastic wrap protecting it from bleeding, the packaging of the product-subject, contained, a photograph for exchangeability. It was an advertorial strategy placed onto subjects that needed it not - food, ruins, “others” - allowing them the transactional ability of commodities, the advertorial token trading. “Ruinporn” was attacked when the spreading economic recession the photographs were then currently objectifying reached people who mattered enough to care as commodifying pain - like anyone had ever heard of Sontag - ruins been photographed for centuries labelled as sensationalist and “foodporn” as some part of FOMO commodification of our human experience, everyone doing it, increasingly in every aspect, as even the artworld relinquished to its ability for social advertising, “-porn” was the commodification of any such affective object in a way that amputated the subject from any means of communication beside genre as an offering. Of course all advertising had been “-porn” for decades, extracting youth, beauty, whatever loveliness it could get to give desire to its object, the difference was now people rather than ad agencies were seeking out its affective rush, the human experience encapsualted as drug, as deliverable pleasure.

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Katharina Fritsch at Walker Art Center

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The exhibition views show everything inside acrylic cubes like diamond ring displays for the you-can-not-touch sort, a barrier reflecting your meaty visage obscuring the objects. The documentation of the object themselves made in a photo studio sweep under day-glo lighting of product photography - they look like advertisements, a virtual form that doesn't exist, even for Fritsch, anywhere but the virtual image, like the perfect commodity you can't buy, the digitally reconstructed hamburger that looks nothing like our besogged meat IRL, its just an ideal, one that marionetting desire long enough to get you purchase the idea. Look at the the grey of the exhibition views, and the white crystalline radiance of the product photography. Are these not diamond adverts? The point of it surely.

Trevor Shimizu at 47 Canal

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The frame had once aggrandized its painting haloed, a gilded crown of thorns, calcifying its divine radiance. Here a painting frames to single out, brushwork to excise from the multitudes, make singular, uniquification, a continually more common process of art for objects that too easily reproduce unchecked; the frame becomes the mechanism to restrain an object from free agency, shackling it to an owner, a place, a home, no digital viewing offered. That the effort enacting such scarcity is dumb matters none, it might as well be.


See too: Brian Calvin at Le Consortium, Trevor Shimizu at 47 Canal, Trevor Shimizu at Rowhouse Project

Pentti Monkkonen at High Art

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The package as product, medium masseuse, the vessel which projects its internal object, which here isn't anything, instead the subject of art, the artist.

There's been a lot of liquor art of recent. Box and buildings too. and of course the eternal art and smoking.



Gina Folly at Ermes-Ermes
Pentti Monkkonen at Truth and Consequences
Pentti Monkkonen at High Art
"Paris De Noche” at Night Gallery
Pentti Monkkonen at Jonathan Viner

Ida Ekblad at Max Hetzler

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Ekbladian horror, the confidence of antagonist, of clowning amok, berating sense with maniacism. Composition used to have a sense, a logic, it genteel and formed, now the kids these days they spray kat litter, kick at walls, crust manga felines. The fun of this willful negligence, that, if those in power can be exonerated for gross incompetence, rise to the highest upon guilt free souls, it feels good to be an artist an able to do the same, love them for it.


See too: Ida Ekblad at Herald St. Joanne Greenbaum at Crone, Michaela Eichwald at Silberkuppe

Luiz Roque at Mendes Wood DM

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Music videos were commercials you wanted to watch, in darkened rooms a flickering sales the subject/object created by the stream of images that swaddled it: the musician car object, attaching you in emotional and affective hooks humming strumming. When removed the sales-object removed
instead just silver celluloid, sexy form, of shiny surfaces rotating.



See too: Mark Leckey at Haus Der Kunst + Kunsthalle Basel

Josh Mannis at Eric Hussenot

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Style, the overlay to depiction, seeing through the warbled glass of another's eyes, allows the artist to appear in his subjects, artist's view of the world, how they see or desire it: people appearing scalded to the magentas reflecting in their raw nubility, fontanelle soft heads, pink eraser people, hair burnt. Soft buds holding stress positions against the cold metal tech surrounding. The painting's boiling light becomes the drawings pervasive texture like sandpaper, style appears as a pain, an uncomfort for those subjects in the glass you see as Mannis.


A lot of painters are cruel: Josh Mannis at M+B, Miriam Cahn at Meyer Riegger, Tomoo Gokita at Taka Ishii, Nicola Tyson at Friedrich Petzel, Michaël Borremans at Dallas Museum of Art