Piero Gilardi at Frankfurt Am Main

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Another artist who fled after disgust at his own commercial success, his astro-turf so in demand they were "at times delivered to the galleries in huge rolls and sold to collectors by the yard."  What was it making an industrial mockery of the land so desirous to the rich. Was it death-drive chic, or did we think then it so fantastical the notion of artificial earth, or were we starry eyed over the possibility: the earth produced on rolls by the yard, or at least something imitating it. The artist came back, to produce it in hermetically sealed rarified versions, probably much closer to our reality, "Our world's end, celebrate it with a commemorative lamp" still in vogue:


Cooper Jacoby at Freedman Fitzpatrick, “May the Bridges I Burn Light the Way” at STANDARD , Max Hooper Schneider at High Art, Amy Yao at Various Small Fires(OSLO), Nancy Lupo at Antenna Space

John Miller at Meliksetian | Briggs

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What was so flashy twinkling across televisual space is frozen as the wallpaper of painting and hideous: television zazzle becomes the bad struggle to taxidermy it. The Price is Right, running for over half a century, has done something right commanding midmorning viewers through a Vegas labyrinth watching guesses at the price of garbage, but Miller's focus on the chintz is as much an attack on painting as much as any politics of mass entertainment premised on the evaluation of commodities. This the point surely. Because the television game is no different from the majority of dealers and collectors also guessing the eventual price or status of the painting before you. The critic/viewer only plays into the game because the paintings are dead, and bodies assessing providing breaths for its life support. The transpositional point where glitz is equal to the stagnant monochromes.

Donald Judd at Judd Foundation

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Last week CAD you may have noticed went the entirety and a day without having to hear the pronoun "his" - a week without men - before a cruel about-face returning today to the cold metal schlongs of Judd at Judd. (Perhaps only softened by yesterday's Parsons's own stiff worldly segmentation, a toughness sure.) But too within Judd's megalomaniac austerity and attraction to hard rectilinears there seems way deep down some faintest window dressing, latent decoration, just slightly less than complete hetero-masculinty, a certain desire to see his contraption in new colors. Compared to some of his minimalist brethren Judd there are moments of Judd downright garish, almost camp.  Which doing some napkin math the series' dimensions - 15 x 105 x 15 centimeters - is, according the wikipedia page on the subject, within the statistically probable proportions of human penis length. Which now wondering how many sculptures would fit this description. Like Serras staggering concern for the erection set, something Judd's attraction to rigidness dressed in colors and sheens that feels just a little bit...

Laurie Parsons at Museum Abteiberg

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Parsons, like Cady Noland or Lee Lozano, our fascination with those who leave the artworld. Like astronauts who never return, what did they find out there? They live on other worlds, but their objects remain in ours like clues to their disappearance. Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer followed the evidence leading to Lozano's dropout in a complete detective novel, but even finding her still alive in new worlds left her there and returned home to our world to write about it. Parsons's are objects from the world she went to, we are the aliens.

Julia Dault at Marianne Boesky

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The process oriented abstraction that gave us so much overwrought and gentle wallpaper whose blandness that proved its conceptualism takes itself a little less self-justifying here and more somewhere between no two Charlene von Heyl paintings looking quite the same meeting Sarah Morris's every painting looking the same in a Bernard Frieze like system where the means only somewhat justify the ends: a programmatic delivery of a consistent experiment, not inventing new processes but new designs for that product, not quite responsibility evaporated but chance fun.

Kirsten Pieroth at Mathew

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Residuals, remains, ashes, essence, marks, history, artifact. Your own level of animism denies or allows belief in encoding memory into objects. Or be like an On Kawara painting, encapsulating the object by presenting its ghost. Our fingerprints are ours, but we cannot be created from them. We leave traces, deformations in the world in our shape. At the end, ashes; perhaps your name scratched in history, or a hint of your face in a generation of children, offspring who are getting the residuals. But the object is gone, and like all behaved conceptual art there is a story.

Louisa Gagliardi at Open Forum

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Painting has body but ink has that sheen perfect in fashion, surfaces whose shapelies have been excavated until mere skeletons hanging clothes and skin to glow. That like Gagliardi's paintings the body cut for their tubular photoshop skin, cartoon mirroring our model's own el Grecoing bodies into lanky warbling sticks, printed in advert sweat, inks, magazine glass. That wet look, pavement in the rain under sodium streetlamps, inky, in the surfaces where even the lighting appears moisturized. Painting adopts different vernaculars, TOM FORD FOR MEN, appearing new.  A whole exhibition today called PVC fetishism - that the youthful today, raised in glass-inflected magazines, slick cartoons, feed though plastic, eventually adopt affinities for that torrent of slickness, we start to print our dreams on vinyl.


see too: Tony Conrad's Glass, Olga Balema at High Art, Olga Balema at High Art (2), Nicola Tyson at Friedrich Petzel, “Puddle, pothole, portal” at Sculpture Center,

Trisha Donnelly at Eva Presenhuber

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Not quite the Ian Rosen whole-in-one, you can find more images on Presenhuber's website But Donnelly has made a career of limiting the availability of the document that feeds the current apparatus of art, instead edited into an esoterica through regulation, the Donnelly mythos floats on the inability to know, though even actually seeing them never helped answer anything, the nebulous otherworld aesthetic that like H.R. Giger channeled an techno/medical aesthetic for a decade before finding in the Alien its embodiment that Donnelly refuses, a ghost.


See too: Trisha Donnelly at Museum Ludwig, Ian Rosen at The Finley

Huma Bhabha at Clearing

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"often invoking the artifacts of art-history and civilization in primal, otherworldly forms. Huma Bhabha’s haunting figures can be viewed as a 21st century hybrid of ancient statuary and contemporary sculpture, while other works explore the poetics of abandoned and scavenged material" is perhaps one of the most honest depictions of our belief in sculpture's totemization of the art and the mystique of the runic object, stonehengification, perceiving a purpose we infer but cannot see, a culture that exists but denied to know to pour all our assumptions in big rocks.

Faith Ringgold at Weiss Berlin

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2016, MoMA finally purchased their big Ringgold - of her 14 works perusable online, the first non multiple or tiny drawing- but then there exists not a single Gee's Bend quilt-maker, a tragedy like many at MoMA, as collections everywhere glacially and retroactively update their ideology to reflect today's culture and sculpture as Chauvinist Painting melts away and the body is allowed to have touched the things we hang on walls as if it had always been so. MoMA no longer leading culture, its dinosaur cruiseship seeming to lag ever further toward falling over the cultural world's edge. There are quilts in MoMA's collection, almost entirely by men - most notably Rauschenberg's paint splattered Bed using one as some found artifact worthy of covering in his vital fluid - showcasing its endless aversion to maternal labor as opposed to quilting itself. Notably of Ringgold's it was not a quilt that MoMA bought but an oil painting.


see too: Susan Cianciolo at Modern Art, Jessi Reaves at Bridget Donahue

“Fantasy is a place where it rains” at Fanta Spazio

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Framed to the architecture rather than aligned to the artworks the document appears as looking off into some middle distance, gazing longingly out, some sea out there. The photograph looking at nothing in particular embodies your own moments interiorly lost and stuporous, half-smile leaking under your unfocused eyes, capturing all the air and aura of the gallery like a wreath.

Paul Mpagi Sepuya at Document

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Perhaps the difference from Tillmans is proven then by its flaunting the camera as possessor, the machine which embeds the photographic capture as loss, everything moving away from the machine indexing time we see now but was. These people, these bodies, moved away from this moment and its crux the camera, projecting the point. It's horribly romantic but it's true, time intransigently on, surely stupid to point out, but painful to see every-time we see it, this, our, present meeting some past and knowing now us too then. It's why so many photographers are want to document the youth, embodiment of the photograph's eternal nubility as we all die, see you then.

Lucy Skaer at Peter Freeman

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The diamond must be faceted, a value predicated on an ability to shine. You see it sparkle, present its interiority.

Past: Lucy Skaer

"...A good piece of jewelry loads the subject with meaning. A pearl necklace over breast, a man with a tramp stamp fetish, a single gold stud in the nose. These things load their subject. A pin stripe on a car, a chrome bumper, a piece of jade set into marble, vajazzaling its nude surface."


Past: Lucy Skaer at KW, Lucy Skaer at MRAC, Lucy Skaer at Murray Guy

Korakrit Arunanondchai at Clearing

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Making Matthew Barney seem sober, the YBAs subdued. We see the surrealism in theatricality stemming from, say, the carnivalesque sludge biomes vitrines of Max Hooper Schneider, Ajay Kurian, or Anicka Yi; embalmed trash of Yuji Agematsu; the Ikea jungle of Rashid Johnson; the faux/real haystacks Amy Yao, even the steaming shirt of Michael E Smith. I guess they were all stealing from Thek who stole from... who stole from.. , so maybe it is acceptable, maybe they're all friends. But the theatricality has been jacked to new heights, torn from a Chuck E Cheese. But the one thing we're maybe all growing tired of is the apocalypse presented to us in iPhone styles, the fetishization of our new trendbook, like its inevitable and your the first person to try and ride the wave of our demise by selling it back to us.



see too:“May the Bridges I Burn Light the Way” at STANDARD (OSLO), Max Hooper Schneider at High Art, Ajay Kurian at White Flag Projects, Kahlil Robert Irving at Callicoon Fine Arts, Ajay Kurian at Rowhouse Project,  Amy Yao at Various Small Fires, Anicka Yi at Cleveland Museum of Art Chadwick Rantanen at Essex Street, Michael E. Smith at Sculpture Center, Michael E. Smith at Michael Benevento, Michael E. Smith at Zero, Michael E. Smith at Lulu, Michael E. Smith at Susanne Hilberry, Amy Yao at Various Small Fires, Anicka Yi at Cleveland Museum of Art

Stefan Tcherepnin at Stedelijk Museum

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Like Rat and Bear before them their best feature is banality, their inertness, don't really do much of anything, the muppets grown and birdbrained, as boring as any of us, taking on the roles of young adults, drinking, watching TV, sinking Karaoke, acting as neanderthals, getting all the same shows as Tcherepnin.

Past: Oren Pinhassi at Tempo Rubato

"Oreo calls the white substance gluing together its cookies simply "stuf" and its an apt coining for a material vague and formless. It's just stuf, the building block of everything if we didn't know anything about the subatomic but rather formulating the corporeal junk that we might theorize underpins everything, stuf. The stuf we as children saw comprising the characters in cartoons and allowing them to take a hammer to the face. The malleable taffy we believed made up the world and allowed us the fantasy of it remade at our wills as slapstick."


Click: Oren Pinhassi at Tempo Rubato

Gina Beavers at Michael Benevento

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Appending painting the body it both does and does not want. Inflating it to bulbousness, we want body but not, you know... too much that would be a fetish, we want it sleek and slim for transaction, shipping, but here we find painting's brushwork metastasized and images become their nightmare: embodied. "How to achieve a flawless look with NO CAKE FACE."  There's an anxiety over the body, over the crust these harbor. We paint our bodies to appear as images and our paintings as bodied objects, a subject recently reoccurring in art but mainly through the things that infer it, euphemism. You see lots of chairs and innuendo, things to speak of the body but god forbid not show it, but in Beavers we find it explicit, too much, hanging out off its frame like a gut.


See too: Gina Beavers at Michael Benevento, Erwin Wurm at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, “Sitting Bone” at MAVRA

Vincent Fecteau at greengrassi

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Fecteau's like architectural navels, the "complicated pockets" like ears or industrial labia. They resemble, brandish resemblance, which morph in sinuous exterior/interior unsecured - aortic openings hint interior chambers, others skeletal - they twist in on themselves like an ouroboric muscle car. Like cutting open your abdomen to reveal a cathedral. These turns are important, they mirror our body's soft points, the vulnerable pink cusps. Notice your body shifting from exterior to interior, your lips, eyes, anus, ears, urethral opening, these twilight moments rolling into. Look at Fecteau's early work, even the architectural models or shoe boxes always explicitly turning inside before falling back into exterior, undulating, like Bird in Space that can be phallus or colon, the confusion of interior exterior is constant, they are rotatable, spin, find yourself wandering their curvature inwards to find yourself outwards again, inside-out and proleptic.


See too: Martín Soto Climent at Proyectos Monclova

“Before Projection: Video Sculpture 1974-1994” at MIT List Visual Arts Center

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An apt time for a reassessment of art's dealing's w/r/t televisual media as its new versions are given artistic gloss of "critically examine" or "recontextualisation" or whatever of their affective strategies and not simply deploying its effects in a sacred setting. Many would likely admit they were surely.  An exhibition cross-sectioning an artistic period by the genre of medium seems to place an inordinate amount of weight on that medium, but its true, television televisions cultural cudgel made and impact, and we developed feeling towards its taking us hostage. It was like Mickey Mouse appearing in so many paintings of the era, the bubbling up of our oppressors in the hands they helped mold themselves.

Cerith Wyn Evans at Museo Tamayo

Benjamin Reiss at Bel Ami

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Faced with what we don't understand our minds are adept at inventing stories, we see forests and invent gods. Under the hood a ghost, in darkness monsters. Art has never invented a fully functioning four cylinder engine or successfully refined petroleum, that is the space of industry, technology, science. Art's greatest technology was fancy dirts mixed in oil expelled from seeds crushed by hand and kept in pigs bladders for 500 years until someone finally invented a tube. If art has designed anything as complicated as an engine it is the turgidity of language used to scaffold certain canvases upright, our hot air the internal combustion keeping the whole thing running. Reiss's fantasies replace the complex systems with a cartoon which would seem sillier if they didn't mimic the diagrams doctors are using to perform heart surgery on your uncle. The diagram has always been a sort of slapstick on the notion of understanding or knowledge, the elision of certain nuances for clarity, vagueness removed and its hole filled with thick bright color. "our limited capacity to understand, or even the failure of understanding." In the margins of Leonardo DaVinci's study of a fetus, a note to himself: "Ask Biagino Crivelli's wife how the capon rears and hatches the eggs of hens when he is unplucked."


See too: Yngve Holen at Fine Arts, Sydney, Albert Herter at Koenig & Clinton,

Darren Bader at Andrew Kreps

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There was a small comedy in finding the glitches in new products, on the internet you would see mugs printed with masses of inane image as algorithms auto-designed them, dredging everything available on the internet and place it onto a mug. Walmart's website selling an iPhone case with a man wearing diapers. Everything onto everything. Exponentially increase to the products available without oversight, quantity above all. A tornado of reference and attachment, and the audience attempting to see in the whirl anything to relieve the anxiety of so much garbage, vertigo in feeling one's toes sense the full ocean of production.


See too: Darren Bader at Sadie Coles, Darren Bader at Radio Athènes, Darren Bader at Kölnischer Kunstverein, Darren Bader at Andrew Kreps

Past: Rob Pruitt

"to avoid the qualitative mess of "good" by supplanting the factual criteria of enough: measured, quantified, and no one can say the student didn't put in enough,"

Rob Pruitt at MOCAD
Rob Pruitt at Gavin Brown

Heji Shin at MEGA Foundation

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Explicitness is hard to deal with. particularly in the subjective: the photographs depict a new subject in the world. Looking away is not an option, the subject may die if no one cares for it and the human with it. You cannot deny this is literally us, you crowned the same as kings with photographs almost daring attempts at conversations of the aesthetic, over what is our most physically objective moment of personhood. What language do we have to deal with this. The glaring red gap in.

Cerith Wyn Evans at Museo Tamayo

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We've been staring at lights for a hundred thousand years, fire to hearth to television to phones, the light we arrange our living rooms around, surely finding comfort in our control, ability to channel and manipulate forces. We can now flaunt it, bend the tubes of capital to allow its flows to move through our neon, make it baroque to brandish it - its light as proof of our life, the lights are on, we are vital. Where once the fire was symbol of home, lights are now proof of capitalistic viability: an artist keeping the lights on.


See too: Cerith Wyn Evans at Galerie Neu, Sam Lewitt at Kunsthalle Basel

“Casa Tomada” at Calle 22 12BIS

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Folly the metonym for the whole exhibition, in a box. Like the robotic Terminator arriving amidst lighting and nudity encased in the flesh of Arnold to travel time, corrugate is the body allowing a virtual system of "online shopping," a physically sloughable stuff to allow transaction, a box like the gallery is the repository for global cargo, vacuuming objects across worlds for its networkization back at you to prove transactablity, coinage. You arrive in Berlin find American artists, America to find a retrospective of French, Mexico to see the globe liberally interspersed into the local, the world into franchises like the suburbs we all hated. These permeable body boxes whose contents seem less important than their ability to be moving weight. 

Gedi Sibony at Greene Naftali

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It had been exciting then, its barely-thereness, so slight, that "unfinished too soon" look we all at that point had craved, the provisional existence we felt stood in for life, a triviality allowing Sibony to package the feeling of noticing. Notice their niceties that felt almost moral in trash. You couldn't even have imagined a hued sculpture, that would have been baroque. There was something so charming about its lack of artistry, almost not art that it now just sorta looks like.



See too: Gedi Sibony at The Arsenale, Oscar Tuazon at Le Consortium & Paradise Garage

Rico Weber at Maria Bernheim

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Made in 1994, Hommage a Claude Monet feels a requiem to media that would replace him. While Seraut and the pointils may have better understood the RGB dynamics, Monet seems the true forebear to the overripe sex of televisual allure, the Media that would replace us. Weber's "3D Photographs" use photography's inherent elegiac, stasis and stagnation in time's drift: now television, once the consummate shift in media consumption - arranging our homes around it - now lags behind in several generations, from HD to digital to the internet, and now we see it projected though the pasture of CAD.