Jutta Koether at Museum Brandhorst

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because what you're looking at isn't what you're looking at: what you're looking at is cultural baggage, garbage piling your sentience, floating to the surface like diapers, clots, the noise of signal and symbols. You can't see purely, you are clogged with reference. "Koether’s own “battle” with art history."



see too: Jutta Koether at Bortolami

Justine Kurland at Mitchell-Innes & Nash

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or personal opinion that the youth should be left alone. Photography's inherent embalm and morbidity. Youth should be wasted, sloughed into bogs of our own autumns. Instead adolescence's preservation, feeling always like photography flexing its own ability to do so, holding its pearl while we are like strapped to dying animals, timers and all. Like Imhof's Faust, subjects are forced into becoming advertisements for themselves, for the thing they cannot hold onto but Imhof, advertising and Kurland get to reap; Kurland's light merely warmer.


See too: Venice: Anne Imhof at German Pavilion, Wolfgang Tillmans at Galerie Buchholz

Zak Kitnick at Ribordy Contemporary

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in line of Sears' full history and its intersection with Kitnick's own, for the then pouring into the Jello molds here which will contain it like good art objects as retainers for stories, no longer looking at the art but the little vacuous middle distance of. Objects don't exist anymore is the point, we have post-Marxed them to oblivion with fetishization into names as placeholders: at the end "Craftsmen" was merely an object containing all the distant echoes of its storied history of quality to coast on as its final form as junk wringing out this nostalgia as cash pyres (the story of many brands narrative arch from triumph to trash, Schwinn, Smith & Hawken, et al.) - which seems, Kitnick ever the melancholic, the point, "the highest score for both 'Brand Expectations' and 'Trust'" is more capitalistically leverageable than any use-value or beauty that these artworks portray themselves not as having but ostensibly able for you to take home and create yourself, again trading the ghosts - here the history as press release - we survive on, to do it yourself pal. Defeatist or just powerfully unhappy is what is at stake.


see too: Kyle Thurman and Zak Kitnick at Parapet Real Humans, Zak Kitnick at Clearing

Anne Libby at Night Gallery

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over the course of a career Frank Gehry made some fish and they are pretty much horrible. Kitschy blundgeoned ham handeries of what would be the shimmering skins of architectural circusry. They are completely obvious in a way that is painful, reducing nature to a mimickry of its lithe body for future extraction.  Libby's shimmering scales seem to gravitate towards this middle state of architectural decorum, a scales that could be placed over the whole, a fragment waiting to be multiplied, capitalized on.

Pippa Garner at Redling Fine Art

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creating fake products revealing the ostensible absurdity of capitalistic variation?  If we hadn't invented the lithium ion battery a gas powered vibrator an acceptable concession for many. We're already burning it and worse elsewhere to energize your battery there and with a lot of loss between so environmental concerns aren't as much at issue as the desire to keep exhaust out of our intimate moments. Parody is funny, but a form masking the pain of the content, often. But Pippa was invited on Merv Griffith's and Carson's - did you know? - and so its an ostensibly popular form, our self-mockery.

Julie Curtiss at Various Small Fires

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Domenico Gnoli in Christina Ramberg styles, we see the banal given a character and edge, a rippling read like tea leaves.

Lyle Ashton Harris at Participant Inc.

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The D that spreads across as both the Daddy of letter's address but also as a variable, D, placeholder, name, the thing we desire and the container to hold all we can pour into it spreading across us our histories tainting thoughts desires action dreams like a contagion or a fear.

Nathan Hylden at Misako & Rosen

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paintings were always trying to point elsewhere, reference their previous selves, point at the other, steal brushstrokes from each other, leave sprayed paint ghosts as traces of the other, overlapped and reinserted to another, silkscreened, printed, cut, traced, photoed and industrially processed, continually turning the heads every elsewhere until finally we are looking at the floor - that apparently gave rise to at least some of the paintings - looking for the original that Hylden tries to defeat, burying it under it reference until there maybe isn't, it is dead and in the pile that hides it, a mirrored floor showing something new?

“Tiger-Poems & Songs for Hurricanes” at Travesía Cuatro

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"If this so called pre-primitivism allows us to shake the foundations of our epistemological pride, then this “perspective” is a valuable one, that should be re-activated constantly in times of visual overconfidence."

visual overconfidence. The argument for painting "primitively" as a reaction against our new techno razzle dazzle's authority, presenting a frailer subject requiring a viewer's empathy and understanding rather than administering a visual flexing to stand in for validity. Like breaking your dog's leg before the dog show, you won't win the prize, but you might get a people's choice award.

Abraham Cruzvillegas at Kurimanzutto

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the excellent sculptures that particular regions of urbanites create to reserve parking places? Wikipedia's article calls them Parking Chairs, Chicago calls them "dibs" but you see many versions across the world less furniture orientated. Mexico City's particularly robust parking-object scene. The sculptural emergence from, seemingly, several requirements, first that they be of no particular value (negating theft), constructed of what's available, and, lending their aesthetic quality, must designate their intentionality and refute themselves as refuse or castoffs, detritus, but instead purposed, creating a particular design problem of how to use trash to denote property, the construction as symbol for intent, and all the incredible vernacular and jury-rigged beauty with it that Cruzvillegas pilfers.


see too: Mark Grotjhan at Karma

Orion Martin at Bodega

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the roughly two inches of depth that Martin allows as pans for the sifting of images, cultural gold, and perhaps owing to Beckman's claustro-orgies, updating that era's expressionism is for this one's iPhone sheen, both's cultural unconscious brought up and pressed against the glass for our peering zoological efforts. The "shreds of childhood half-memories made manifest, and fleshed out with so much lurid detail that it feels confrontational" with the images we have internally seared into us, cultural echoes rattling around inside your head's quiet moments occasionally materializing from the noise of your brain a jingle from 30 years ago. What we are forced to carry and not sure exactly what the surrealists were planning as the point of irrupting the subconscious onto the page when it seems to be a lot like dredging some kind of horrible cultural sewer pipe and we cramming snakes into it.


See too: Emily Mae Smith at Rodolphe Janssen, Quintessa Matranga at Freddy

Paul P., B. Wurtz at Cooper Cole

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or that the details aren't trivial. They are the attachments of care, sewing buttons to close coats around a warmth when a guardian can't. Paul. P's sensitivity in the liquid touch, it's a bit easier to explain, caressing faces in fluids, the pigments absorb into paper like blood into cheeks blushing, paper becomes skin to engorge. Wurtz's more homely space is all about knots tied, and buttons threaded, plastic bags hung to dry. They're dumb objects rescued by so much simple care like responsibility shown for them.


See too: B. Wurtz at Lulu, “The Crack-Up” at Room East (B. Wurtz)

Kate Newby at Kunsthalle Wien

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"deploys her fragmented gestures in the service of a greater alchemy," chipping away at the artistic monument, further granularized to finer and finer pocks and us finally all staring at noise like a church for sensitivity training - commanded to the virtue of noticing.  Like if you removed all the signs from the world asserting "scenic view ahead." As if we could consider it all so. There is no thing to see, no "main thing." Just a forest and trying see every tree for it, any sufficiently complex sidewalk is indistinguishable from art.


see too: Michael E. Smith at 500 Capp Street Foundation

Richard Rezac at The Renaissance Society

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but different from minimalism in their contaminating themselves in faint veils of cultural signifiers. These look purposed. Look like other things vaguely. As their power.  "the elusive mechanisms of interpretation," They appear designed but without a purpose we can ascertain. We are so accustomed to objects bent to our service that appearing without purpose we call alien. The power of the uncanny is to teach us what we expect from certain forms by removing the parts that would cause recognition replaced with mystery, instead all the doohickies and flimflams and us wondering why we expected it to begin with. The flux capacitor must only look like the expectations a public has for such an object.


See too: Alicja Kwade at Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, Richard Rezac at Isabella Bortolozzi

Zak Prekop at Essex Street

reverting impressionist attempts at revealing painting's construction that Prekop turns into a game, all the jazz hands of "how's it made." It’s easy to say what is good about these. There's a level of illusionism defeating their ostensible lineage - abstraction's - matter-of-factness. We have a trust in abstraction that it isn't attempting to "hide" anything from us, its paint merely there, that these utilize against us as bait. Set the parameters and run. To mess the usual temporal signifiers of painting, what's on top not necessarily laid last, making for a confusion of the hand and appearing printed. Flat Cubism. Painting as the interesting display of its information, solving the problem of painting by heaping more on, a less neurotically charged Hans Hoffman's "push and pull" theory, painting reduced to interesting conditions.


see too: Zak Prekop at Shane Campbell

Danny McDonald at Bortolozzi

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since semio-space is more and more dominated by cultural IP whose worlds are tightly closed by labyrinthian legal frameworks. What you can and can't do with Barbie on an advertisement is governed by at least 10 pages of legal, and 40 pages of "best practices." So, like Puppies Puppies for who the rearrangements of our mass-culture mythos are open-sourced against their proprietary wishes. A bricolage of symptomatic sense: The mass majority of children learn of good/evil from summer blockbusters more than any Sunday doldrumming. This is our culture's totems, gods, so why not rearrange them on poles.  Or an exceedingly cynical gesture, compositionalizing and converting to hieroglyphics a culture however unsympathetic that culture may be, like we weren't already scratching our heads at it. The inkblot was deemed to have little psychologic validity besides registering the general gestalts recognized on by a culture. Yet here we are.


See too: Merlin Carpenter at MD 72, Puppies Puppies at BFA Boatos

Past: Sarah Charlesworth

"Stripped of their container, context, the images mutate amoeba-like they abstract, branching for grasp reference, a fluid in search of conceptual container, they become Rorschach blots, meaningless shapes drawing meaning from the viewer who wishes to name them"


Click here to read full Sarah Charlesworth at Campoli Presti
Click here to read full Sarah Charlesworth at New Museum

Julien Nguyen at Modern Art

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carved with surgical precision, brandish the painterly like a sharp object. It lends a callousness to its images, figures, who, threatened by its scalpel, twist or elongate at the demands for painterly charisma. Like painting itself coerces the bodies into a marfan syndrome. One of Nguyen's closest counterparts might be Yuskavage overperformance of painting in colorful miasmas and overripe bodily distensions become here some masculine guile: doubling down on the biblical anachronism, stitching modern stylistics to old boards, a system for Nguyen to float brushwork as history unmoored and its ghosts redressed and cut up for today. Cartoon: Nail holes in flesh are instead rubies cut for symbols of blood, but there is none, no transubstantiation, only the artist's paint as the end game, bloodless, or this painting's aortic reds and blue chambers, like a diagram for heart.


See too: Lisa Yuskavage at Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis

Past: Julien Nguyen at Freedman Fitzpatrick

"...and ripple with sex. Variance in finish shimmer like veins in marble or cocks, undulating detail as arousal: detail is attention paid, stimulation, titillation. For anyone who ever found eroticism in the restraint of Piero della Francesca, here is your proof melting with Althoffian foppishness.  Hemorrhage sex like a bruise..."


Click: Julien Nguyen at Freedman Fitzpatrick

Amy Lien and Enzo Camacho at CCS Bard

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I said to him, I said look we've become fishwrap, yesterday's newsprint swaddling the sales of markets today. Is all text doomed to becoming wrapping paper? the metaphorical fill softening shipping through networks and padding CVs? Artists are given weird powers of sedimentation - they can objectify things, make coins of text, turn concepts into property. Krebber's painting the critiques seemed to quickly doom the blogs, one immediately, proving their word's impotence against commerce. No critique - however acerbic - was going to stop a transaction.  Dear Arjan, I was going to say that Schjeldahl's critique of Koons was important: "To stroll into the Sonnabend Gallery today is to be gang-banged by a crew of inanimate demons." "You can love him or hate him. Either way remember this: it doesn't matter." "He is going to be rich". The Krebberian stupidity of objectifying blogs didn't matter, it still gave them the physical chip that allowed barter, the thing writing can't quite give itself. Buy my book.


see too:  Henning Bohl at Karin Guenther, Calla Henkel & Max Pitegoff at Cabinet, Amy Lien and Enzo Camacho at 47 Canal, Amy Lien, Enzo Camacho at various locations,

Monika Baer at Barbara Weiss

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Baer playing her own game of painting, our fun is figuring out the rules. There are many ways to play painting acceptably - we, like canvas, can support both Merlin Carpenter or Caravaggio - ideologies that Baer seems to enjoy abutting in flat statements for all static they can generate. Mixed modes that present a sort of meta play of figuring out which boardgame entered. These churn Ryman's milk to cream: the monochrome nullification of the "picture" displaces content to the edges, surface, and hardware which are little comedy acts: "a moment of resistance that appears absurd in its utter ineffectiveness."These are bit more buttery than Ryman, a sensuous to the topography which refuses to totally negate the "picture" with color, comedy. Pleasures are denied and reinstated, the picture plane is mocked with cartoonified sweat but open to atmosphere, the viewer is asked to look in only to be pressed out by a little turd. I'm not sure how you win.

Juliana Huxtable, Carolyn Lazard at Shoot the Lobster

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Stomach tentacle impregnation sci-fi oviposition auto-immunity colonization fur, eggs. "There are different perspectives of everything, and Ovipositors are no exception. Many like to envision an alien creature that wants its eggs inside you. It can be a little intimidating or off-putting to those who do not fantasize about being the willing or unwilling host of alien beings inside them. It blurs the line of our own humanity to find sexual pleasure with something that is so far from human, and for some, just talking about it gets them."-LoneWolf

"How to be a Person in the Age of Autoimmunity" - Carolyn Lazard "This begins with the last meal I ate without being afraid. I remember it vividly. My friend Buyong was visiting me in Paris." "The experience of sickness is profoundly alienating. The difficulty of communicating illness is evident in the poverty of language available to us to describe our physical ailments. We express by simile: it feels like someone is stabbing me repeatedly with a sharp knife. It feels like someone is grabbing my intestines and squeezing them. It feels like I’m trapped in my own body."

"Finally, there is the very difficulty of finding a grammar and vocabulary to discuss shit and its metaphoric place within Disability Studies. Identity categories are notoriously liminal, and though standpoint theory offers some strategies for articulating one's situated knowledge, there is still a tendency to locate one's self within artificially rigid boundaries. Thus, Eve Kofosky Sedgwick can identify herself as a straight woman doing queer studies, and Robert Young can identify himself as a white man working in postcolonial studies. But I cannot identify either as "PWD" or as a "TAB" (person who is temporarily able-bodied). I am neither or both, depending on the moment and my state of health. Do I thus revise and articulate my identity category on an ongoing basis? Like shit, which disturbs so many cultural norms, people with Crohn's diases (and "disease" is itself a medical and existential category which often resists stable definitions), can disturb identity categories and raise complex questions of power, transgression, and the damning issue of the imposter syndrome which are hard to critically deconstruct."-Dr. Cindy LaCom

"the "oral invasion" functions as "payback" for the many horror films in which sexually vulnerable women are attacked by male monsters. On one level it's about an intriguing threat. On one level it's about parasitism and disease. And on the level that was most important it's about sex, and reproduction by non-consensual means. And it's about this happening to a man."[112] He notes how the film plays on men's fear and misunderstanding of pregnancy and childbirth, while also giving women a glimpse into these fears.[113] Film analyst Lina Badley has written that the design, with strong Freudian sexual undertones, multiple phallic symbols, and overall feminine figure, provides an androgynous image conforming to archetypal mappings and imageries in horror films that often redraw gender lines.[114] O'Bannon himself later described the sexual imagery as overt and intentional: "One thing that people are all disturbed about is sex... I said 'That's how I'm going to attack the audience; I'm going to attack them sexually. And I'm not going to go after the women in the audience, I'm going to attack the men. I am going to put in every image I can think of to make the men in the audience cross their legs. Homosexual oral rape, birth. The thing lays its eggs down your throat, the whole number."

"In several interviews as well as in her afterword to "Bloodchild," Butler explains the different situations that led her to write the story. To begin with, she wanted to "write out" her fear of her body being invaded by a parasitic insect, specifically the bot-fly. She also wanted to write about a human male becoming pregnant; about the risks to his body as well as what it would take for him to have maternal feelings towards his alien brood, and so she ended crafting a story about a symbiotic, loving relationship between two very different species. This is why, she insists again and again, critics read "Bloodchild" wrongly when they argue it is about slavery. Lastly, she wanted to write a story about "paying the rent"—of how a realistic depiction of human immigration into space would not just repeat the colonialist tropes of traditional science fiction but rather require some quid pro quo or "accommodation" from the part of humanity.^[2][3][4][5]

Themes[edit]

Imposition of female experience on a male narrator

Critic Jane Donawerth observes that " [i]n this short story...the conventional adolescent male narrator/hero is punished by rape, incest, reproductive exploitation by the dominant race, and anticipation of a painful caesarean birth--and he is expected to like it, as women in many cultures have been expected to comply with their oppression." Specifically, the narrator takes on the role of black females slaves in the United States, who were "forced to carry the offspring of an alien race." ^[6] Kristen Lillvis further argues that this reference to historical reproductive slavery allows the male narrator to have "access to the power of maternal love" that follows the "tradition of nonphallic maternal authority that developed out of black women’s experiences during slavery."^[7]

"

"Like Brancusi's bird in space both phallus and colon."

See too: Vincent Fecteau at greengrassi

Tony Cokes at Greene Naftali

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"Printing, having found in the book a refuge in which to lead an autonomous existence, is pitilessly dragged out onto the street… If centuries ago it began gradually to lie down, passing from the upright inscription to the manuscript resting on sloping desks before finally taking to bed in the printed book, it now begins just as slowly to rise again from the ground. The newspaper is read more in the vertical than in the horizontal plane, while film and advertisement force the printed word entirely into the dictatorial perpendicular."
Walter Benjamin, “One-way Street”

The dictatorial perpendicular enforced the decrees of the powered and wealthy, but now text is aerosolized, language appears from all corners buzzing up from your hand to see newscasts across the continuum. An economy of speech value is recalculated on the ability to harvest attention. And how many novels, even great ones, have come out in the last couple year that read like sporadic bulletins.  We make sense of the world in lozenge form. Compartmentalized by the feed, everything must self-contain. Cokes' amassments of others' don't make sense but sure read like poems of how text feels today, a glitchy attention deficit, while the videos chop longer texts into segmented, and affectually applied by music, chunks. They are difficult to read but they command attention.

Ken Okiishi at Reena Spaulings

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By throwing their stuff, themselves, into the ocean they were able to keep a freedom, their lives, a paradox that Okiishi has obvious misgivings over placing current lives back in the desert buried. Stripped of your heritage how free did you remain, the question. Now Okiishi, a new transport of history towards oceans which left the LA Times wondering what was in the puppet head box rather than the seemingly more pertinent question of this displacements of an Ames Iowa basement's catalyst. No one packs up a van without reason, a much less exciting white Ferrari of Okiishi's time vehicle, precisely one car load, kept, allowed into the future. The amount one can carry. What can be preserved as our possessions-as-selves eroding in time streamlined against current's abrasion. Which amass more in new homes. What will be the last object of yours finally cast into waste by your children? Objects carry briefly into tomorrow, but the artist is allowed attempts to loft their objects onto the generational ships of museums, while entire histories of others are and have been lost. Like Dahn Vo's attempt to carry Martin Wong's possessions, or even Cianciolo's corrugate time vessels, we allow a certain amount of artistic provenance into the future, and all the hope for it.


See: Susan Cianciolo at Modern Art

Charles Ray at Matthew Marks

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Finally finding a material to embody the mercurialness previously only conceptual seemingly allowing the more banal subject recent, finally treating the human as the minimalist cubes - forms nudged to psychedelia, reflective folds in aluminum just phantasmically melting before you. Terminator 2 spent an equally exorbitant budget to give the T1000 its technologically advanced look, seeing archetypal forms rendered in technologic detail exquisite. A certain mole mentioned in the PR. Think before how a circular partition of wall was - though seemingly not - spinning at speed. The formal becomes archetypes of antiquity frozen, like stock images with an abject specificity of a certain mole mentioned in the PR. They look boring in photograph because the gloss of expense occludes the humans as means. But “One could say I’ve spent a great deal of time making very little of my subject matter.”

“School of Chairs” at 500 Capp Street Foundation

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Generally faux pas to quote Deleuze and Guattari in art PR but done here sans quotational segmentation its easter-eggization kindly declines to brandish authority, a sort of refreshing removal of authorial heft, mirroring the experience of David Ireland and the 500 Capp Foundation itself in which the border between capital A Art from the much less authoritied world is fuzzed, like we removed parentheticals from the world, like if Art placed into the world simply became undifferentiated world, removed the differentiating potential of quotation mark's spell holding all the aura of all their respective authors and mediums with it. What if you mixed all Anicka Yi's sprayers with those of those of the hardware store. But instead the spell of an exhibitions checklist clearly delineating the objects in the room, those of art from those which, apparently, are not, and clearly establishing provenance, lineage. Which against like D&G's Rhizomes' whole point, don't follow roots, grow potatoes.


See too: Darren Bader at Sadie Coles, Michael E. Smith at 500 Capp Street Foundation

Liz Deschenes at Miguel Abreu

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A career spent negating the photographic window, pressuring the viewer out, left at surface, like looking out a window and seeing only glass. Early on Deschenes made landscape photographs of a spa town whose steam was eventually traded for silver, smoke for mirrors. And then there was also salt flats so grey and irregular they appear as mere noise, and the Moire patterns short circuiting your eyes and viewing, or the green screen years photographing what was intended to be digitally removed.  The photograms now are the result of a photograph without a lens, no focus but collecting all the light it touches into its photo-sensitive halides fixed as silver, photographs that feel like the information paradox of black holes: does the light that falls into the traps retain any of its information? Could you put back anything of the time or place? Maybe it doesn't matter, the point is to accumulate light for the gleaming of pressed diamonds.