Mark Grotjahn at LACMA

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Production itself becomes interesting, massing it, output. As Bayrle, his own resurgence now, called it: "The quality of quantity." Remember Josh Smith hammering his name into our heads, how villainously insipid it seemed, and now here we are, assaulted again with a man hammering his signature at us. We're not even post-warhol because opportunely someone is the keeping the corpse artificially warm for all these artists to wring it for one more drop of blood, standing in his Shadows, except there aren't any here, instead how white those walls, how pushed to verge of overblown, photographically enhanced to candy. A Museum for Ice Cream. Neapolitan! Mint! The sugary libidinal to quench our thirst.


See too: Josh Smith at STANDARD (OSLO), DAS INSTITÜT at Serpentine Gallery

Ann Craven at KARMA

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Unsure what means, finding Craven's paintings almost pleasant now after so many years thinking their abominableness was surely the point. Is this Stockholm syndrome, or has Painting simply filled with her derivatives making Craven's appear buoyant, floating on her lineage. Even what had seemed so saccharine, seems now somehow tastefully polite. Or a literal process of desensitization, Craven's endlessly repeated imagery eventually producing "diminished emotional responsiveness to a negative, aversive or positive stimulus after repeated exposure to it."  You can learn to feel a coping apathy toward any repeated stimulus, called "learned helplessness in rats."

see too: Ann Craven at Southard Reid, Ann Craven at Confort Moderne

Geumhyung Jeong at KLEMM’S

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Painters do violence to faces, but sculptors love mockery the body, its forms, bulbous. Tragedies we have been given, our corpulent throes. And comedic our attempts at preserving that, "transformative props of body optimization:" our treatments to spas, acupunctures, health tonics, facial plumbing, giving facelifts to the homeless. Look at these medical forms of us, how Medicine represents us, physical embodiments of how doctors perceive us, dummies with occasional articulate forms, our comedy, dying animals all of us.

See: Erwin Wurm at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Park McArthur at Chisenhale

Atsuko Tanaka at Galerie Buchholz

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like scratch pads for some diagrammatic traveling salesman problem more than color arrangements, look more like information instead of mere aesthetics. It gives them an air inferring organization, a suggestion of reason, some inner working, lending that mystery we love trying to assess like sly smiling portraits. Big color come bearing the brand of Gutai, no wonder suddenly everyone wants these now.

Jason Dodge at Casey Kaplan

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The wild and intractable world of stuff, everywhere stuff, like an oil's irridescence expanding over the land. Accumulating like eye goo, gathering as the city is asleep in its corners, basements, entryways. The PR urging us to imagine of the amount of computer cables currently aloft in airplane compartments, heavenly aspirations before their eventual burial in mass graves, landfills, cross sections whose bedrock supports hills of garbage our children will throw balls upon.
Stuff must continually be wiped away, its piles building continuously. Several thousand factories are right now generating more, new, stuff, moved on conveyers and stored en mass in warehouses. We understand this staggering mass implicitly now. We briefly got mad at plastic straws, though the majority of ocean trash is fishing gear, 46% by mass is fishing nets alone, strangling an estimated 100,000 marine creatures a year. We no longer need only acrobats or doctors to sleep on them to make our pillows interesting, our stuff itself has become a pathologically gratifying, artistically developing under an abusive household of stuff emerge in maturity to express "material issues," fetishists gratified spreading its pain.


stuff stuff fetish stuff: Chadwick Rantanen at Essex Street,  Nancy Lupo at Antenna Space, “May the Bridges I Burn Light the Way” at STANDARD (OSLO) Kahlil Robert Irving at Callicoon Fine Arts, Melvin Edwards at Daniel Buchholz, CAWD on Fetish, Nancy Lupo at Kristina Kite & Yuji Agematsu at Miguel Abreu, Dylan Spaysky at Clifton Benevento, Chadwick Rantanen at Secession, Yuji Agematsu at Real Fine Arts,  Yuji Agematsu at Artspeak, Pamela Rosenkranz at Karma International

Math Bass at Mary Boone

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Like billboards they virtualize space, reaching across it through simplified forms until they are no longer lossy in scale, they become vectors, translate over space. Billboards are designed for distance. Designed for your phone. But them in a big wet space and yet they shine.

Math Bass at Mary Boone

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Like Halley, the expression of the day becoming compartmentalized, rigid. Expressionist language set to cels. Painting becomes the transactional language of advertising, images are streamlined to the force of icons, they are said to "pack a punch" a wallop of the virtual in physical space. It makes for paintings that can be painful, sensitivity traded for force. Bass somewhat retarding their transactional discomfort with an ambiguity: that though they may trade in the blows of advertising they're only trying to sell themselves, there's no unloading of some tiny salesmen in your head, just the painting. Like von Heyl, haywiring the blitz of signs today, their address is perfectly suited for the transactional pipes of the network, ads for themselves.

see too: Charline von Heyl at Capitain Petzel, Charline von Heyl at Gisela Capitain, Annette Kelm at Gio Marconi

Past: Math Bass at Michael Jon & Alan

"Painting in the virtual space that our world increasingly appears. Space becomes an information deployment system, and layout becomes highly organized studied and manipulated. Style becomes a corruption of the subject. Reflecting the increasing prevalence the interface over the image."


 Read Full: Math Bass at Michael Jon & Alan

Elaine Cameron-Weir at Dortmunder Kunstverein

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We use the language of fetishes because they are displays of alternative sensitivities, symptomatic expressions of a culture. Desires transferred, rerouted into others. Metal bars as alternatives to comfortable arms, steel tubing as both safety and repression, of course someone is going to develop some odd affinities toward it, would want it to restrain some silken flesh. The bondage community has long been attuned to black leather and clean skin. Art premised on its cultural associates, the feminine and flesh, WWII paratroopers drifting through the heavens, their death: Art's survival on the ability to innuendo itself. A material we call stainless. Instead like tofu absorbs the flavors of everything.


See too: Chadwick Rantanen at Essex Street, CAWD on Fetish

Pae White at greengrassi

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like nature, White's both immaculate and arbitrary, rearrangeable, customizable for your space. It has no turf but program that is expandable to fit your needs, almost printable. White could make 400 of these of every size, and they would all be equally beautiful, lovely. This puts her in line with most painting made in the last 20(?) years, modes that already contain their expression and are run like programs. I guess the difference is these look like my Grandma's quilts compressed into jewels, like Babylonian cylinder seals you can roll out their patterns to any length, threatening a mass production of precious moments.

Pamela Rosenkranz at Karma International

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As ostensible critique of pharmaceutical, technological and advertorial strategies, Rosenkranz deploys them to great affect in art, using their strategies in consolidating attention and maintaining lure over the viewer. The attractive pink, the technologic jargon. This exhibition showcases among other things "Anemine" "a new generation of medical products" that are synthesized chlorocruorins, oxygen-binding hemeproteins found in many annelids, manufactured green worm-blood essentially.* A portion of the afternoon googling substances, phylums, blood hemotypes, the only results for Anemine are Rosenkranz and a German electronic artist. Maybe Anemie really is that medically cutting edge, but noted about earlier of Rosenkranz by Abreu itself: the substances are often fictional, and Anemine appears an artistic bruhaha of long long line of products and "doctors" with liminal connections to good medicine, from InfoWars guy to Tom Brady's longtime personal trainer hawking products with vague but powerful claims. So long the as the promotion outspeeds due diligence the product will remain valid. And they are fun to say: NeuroSafe, Anthroplex, Brain Safe, Myco-ZX, TB12, Super Male Vitality, medical leeches, all seeming to counteract the very real issues of Atrazine and xenoestrogen, though Obama did not turn the "frickin' frogs gay." Look at the Bosch-like extraction of Horseshoe Crab blood chopped in half and bleeding out in dungeon apparatuses into jars for highly valuable medical technology, for blue blood, so it's not hard to imagine research extracting green worm blood for sport, and for an artist to get the good idea to make paintings with. "gives consumers a sensation of security: the less they understand the terms used to describe the product, the more reliable it seems, because it's at the cutting edge of technology." Horror film foreboding, green blooded insectoids, the large company willing to make money of its extraction, everything there for a real good narrative.

*Synthetic blood is currently being developed and has actually been created before, though though never approved for use anywhere outside of South Africa. A side effect was noted to be flatulence. 




See too: Nancy Lupo at Antenna Space, Nancy Lupo at Swiss Institute

Puppies Puppies at What Pipeline

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expression through other's forms, the works cited accounting its ideation board if not entirely readymades. In fashion we express through brand, we stand behind labels to represent our better selves. Express through cultural containers, languages of mass culture, and the subject dies metamorphosing into its branding, adorned in its collection. Behind a hostage of the forcibly public-domained. You get to disappear behind others'. A system of drag (drag as corporeal parasitization, cosplay) but too the dirty and cruel world of bodies forced to adopt the identity and means of the larger cultural empire that oversees it, i.e. Adorno’s conform or perish: and that there is a sadness at the base of PP’s comedy that involves the body adopting not its own subjectivity but the the larger culture's as its means of representation with the implicit and ostensible threat to not be seen at all. Purell evaporates leaving your hands covered in a vast wastelands of bacterial corpse.




see too: Puppies Puppies at BFA Boatos

Tyler Coburn at Koenig & Clinton

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We somehow trained for emptiness. Animism, the occult, remote viewing - tools we take from other industries to make sense of the white walls before which shimmer in colored noise because we've been staring so long."too little signal, too much noise" the PR states. In noise we see ghosts. "Upton Sinclair was convinced that his second wife Mary had telepathic abilities" which seems like the intro to a sexist joke, but instead him attempting proof: experiments communicating drawings by mind 40 miles away. 22% accuracy. Here try this one out: I'm sending out what I really think about this show right now. Got it, didn't you? It was inside you all along.


See too: Yngve Holen at Fine Arts, Sydney, Ei Arakawa at Kunstverein Dusseldorf, “Being Thing” at Centre International d’Arte et du Paysage & Treignac Projet

Marie Angeletti at Atlantis

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exacerbating all the annoyances of images today, Angeletti's are always claustrophobically opaque, too close, dim. Not quite sure Angeletti has ever shown in a completely lit space, and the once maybe had had lots of photos of rotational laser lighting, the sort of whirliwig mimicking the driftlessness of her own floating so contextless unanchored. There's an interest in the roving light. Without didactic we see Three Seascapes, possibly, but in another a didactic for painting we cannot see. Herbert saw it early: "If pre-existing, these photographs meant one thing in a catalogue, museum or wherever, and now they signify something else or, intrinsically, nothing at all: detached, rivulets in a larger directional flow. ‘Thanks, Internet,’ such work murmurs." because the work does feel like the internet, forced with lips glued to feed, like we all are. You can assemble the parts to de-crimescene what's on display here, or wait for the another writer to mutate to docent, to explain, but that'd be beside the point to be at a loss shuffling through image that Angeletti seems determined to maintain in limbo, contextless. The breadth of Angeletti's work looks like a google image search for a long string of arbitrary numbers, irrational, an array of the world's arranged by a search term we cannot see, which, in an era of almost total fuck-all of contextless images, our cognition is molested by daily could make an art practice mirroring such seem a brutal finger but at some point we have to be trained for this, we could attempt to make sense of, it all, if we wanted to start lifting.

“Tour of the Artist’s House” at Reserve Ames

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The documentation becomes its own photographic art. On Reserve Ames own website the documentation is gray, but sent through other waters - CAD or Artforum say - they usually turn colors. A strategy preserving exclusivity. Now not even the pipes stain them. Ostensibly an exhibition as tour of the artists' home, the important part of the new documentation is that it is actually an announcement card.

Allison Katz at MIT List Visual Arts Center

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the two subjects to painting, the thing represented in paint and the artist-as-subject rendering both. Painterly "style" is the sediment of an individual's subjectivity accumulating in the granules of their decisions eventually garnering a pile: identity. Look through the glass of another's eyes to see their world through them. We - despite all - trust art to tell us something about subject, and Katz's "self-portraits" make this mirror between painter and self-subject anxious by threatening this trust: painting that feel like fibs, competing styles that delay any coherence in its subject, the painter, our trust for the text to tell us something about the author. Others have called them palindromic or Janus-like, expressing this anxiety over the mirror. An irritant in our lenses, the paintings.


Leidy Churchman at Koelnischer Kunstverein,

Past: Anne Neukamp at Greta Meert

"Our brains, wired for recognition, are berated with this: icons forcing recognition of themselves. Painters begin adopting this as their history, the magrittean version of objects as linguistic symbols. These paintings delay the force of recognition as a palliative, lessening the slap of apprehension.."


Anne Neukamp at Greta Meert

Elliott Jamal Robbins at Kai Matsumiya

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discombobulating the characters, Snow White and the black protagonist cultural antipodes, forced atop each other, its Disney surely dissonant with black male experience: a snippet plays stating that a lot of women were roused to voting early which would have felt reassuring then had we not later learned white women voted Trump. Sadness feeling most intense when there is nothing to be done with it, can't be channeled, and the depression of your body on the mattress becomes sinister cave, stuck to National Public Radio's days before the US election, an anachronism replayed in your head, is made worse in actually having the recording. Enough emotional dissonance eventually causing psychologic desensitization, feeling a lot like living slumber.

Ei Arakawa at Kunstverein Dusseldorf

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artwork's origin dates as astrologic charts, your level of trust in the celestially telling matters less than the overall strategy: turning an artwork to an interpretable state and blinking, tea leaf divination in sporty Vegas-odds inkblots. We're primed to see meaning in information, in art, particularly when so bright and shiny, and thus here's lots to be said about these works, interpretation to be done, they'll pour forth all you are willing to extract from them. Perfect analysands. Like the wacky inflatable arm man drawing eyes to dealerships, Arakawa understands the qualifiers for "art," performing them with wacky panache, theatricalizing the artwork as a caricature of attention, art played to show its now quite standardized set of rules.


See too: Ei Arakawa at Taka Ishii & Peter Halley at Modern Art, Ian Rosen at The Finley, And so Quarterly has finally come to pass.

“Water & Power” at The Underground Museum

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by which then us feeling art's critical function better at surviving commercial shipment while the spiritual arrives less intact. Like preachers made richer than the Gods they represent through the thankless loaning their congregation's credence, the Eliasson's "worth" for reinventing the funhouse as some sort of ecological imperative could beget an equal crisis of faith. Particularly when the package is the world outside set in a different box. A critique of any art surely. Maybe the wealthy preacher is just really good at what he does, attracting congregations. But somehow the spiritual should survive in commodification, everything else must. Seemingly why we gave up on it.

Manuel Gnam at Noah Klink

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or the couple of Gnam's press releases invoking generational clashing and the cultural culling of those without political use make one wonder if these aren't, comedically enough, Gnam's attempts at proving himself a viable artistic candidate for cultural preservation. Which would make them funny. To think of these as attempts at cultural relevance. At some point we did adopt demands for art to prove its usefulness, possibly through the seepage of cultural theory into it, art was suddenly to be extracted for some sort of insight we had, tautologically, proven was there. We believe in art's ability for insight into, well, something, that when the above is delivered to us, we choke on our inability to read it, we choke.

Ramaya Tegegne at VIS

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or that history is a process of consolidation, the enclosure of rectangles around its boxes, the eras vogues histories artists etc. the little territories as blanket of wares meaning Artistic turf that Tegegne attempts to keep frayed with discombobulated exhibitions of historical process's detritus, found appropriated and reproduced, as palliative against, or occasionally with, art's boxification - forcing what would be left behind in the move back into the box as her career.

Glenn Ligon at Thomas Dane

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or that painting something white would restore it, return its virginal character, but talking of blackness as an accumulatory inescapable, occluding, the eclipse on legibility and meaning, but then in there, on it, the occlusion itself, blackness. I guess you could make the arguement that Ligon isn't once again destroying' the legibility of Baldwin's text but restoring it, bringing it back to its blank pure slate.


See too: Glenn Ligon at Regen Projects

Art Record

We all believe in arts' ability to supersede the market, to transubstantiate its commodity into a spirit, but realists too. You need to keep your objects separate from the order of the ordinary, of the things yours could suddenly disappear into, the earth, you need tracking, spreadsheets, the markers of provenance that govern the validity of art. So we've developed a product for those without a gallery to aid such immanent concerns extracted from theirs' celestial. Eventually a gallery will do this for you, but for now, adopt the future, dress for the job you want, tracking product, rep, failure, success with this handy - and award winning designed - tracker for what you value as your life, us too. 

-CAWD

(Sponsored)

Torbjørn Rødland at David Kordansky

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or meaning innuendo can only circle its prey for so long before we can infer its total, it is no longer suggestion but fully encircled into the arena of practice for a well thought circle or rut.


see too: Torbjørn Rødland at Air de Paris, Torbjørn Rødland at Henie-Onstad Kunstsenter, Torbjørn Rødland at Kunsthall Stavanger

Past: Torbjørn Rødland


"The PR’s refusal to acknowledge the sexual themes leaves the perverts guessing. Erotic coupling, miscegenation of binary masculine/feminine, phallic/soft. Everything touching, lightly.""...posing problems for categorical restrictors like the MPAA for which Rødland presents a real European nightmare, Most of the photos are G or PG but feel PG-13, and while the penis is R it’s the sneakers on the otherwise nude man that really require Parental Guidance."


Torbjørn Rødland at Air de Paris
Torbjørn Rødland at Henie-Onstad Kunstsenter
Torbjørn Rødland at Kunsthall Stavanger