Terry Adkins at Institute of Contemporary Art Miami

(link)

The NYTimes said they "evoked vanished histories," which seems accurate to their strange floating connections to the figures, and performers who like Adkins were intended to activate them, are no longer around. "Columbia (2007), for instance, is a circular piece of wood painted with as many layers of black enamel as LPs that blues singer Bessie Smith released on Columbia Records." Is information retained in after being destroyed in a black hole seems an apt question. The "recitals" label that he often used in place of "exhibition" is left to youtube-documentation, reinterpretations, stories. "An animistic approach to materials... when working with found materials I wait... for instance in my early stages I would go to junkyard. Junkyards have a lot of junk in them... identifying themselves has having potential to do something else... that is potential disclosure." Like attempts to carry forward history, connect the past, it all feels like lost civilization attempted to be touched.


see too: Melvin Edwards at Daniel Buchholz, Park McArthur at Chisenhale, Yngve Holen at Kunsthalle Basel, Cameron Rowland at Daniel Buchholz

AR: Tony Cokes at Greene Naftali

Artist: Tony Cokes

Venue: Greene Naftali, New York

Click here to read

Originally Posted: June 6th, 2018

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.

Brud at Kunstverein Munich

(link)

There seems to be two "Bruds." One a collaboration between two artists and the other the virtual influencer startup creating online fictions recently backed by Sequoia Capital for supposedly 6 million. The two Bruds would only be an interesting coincidence, if it is, if the two didn't seem to use the same heavily hyperbolized tech marketing jargon and quasi-fiction corporate facades and both started in 2014. Both are self-aware content generators. The 6 million $ Brud best summarized by this Buzzfeed article describing their solution to the fractured mirror of instagram by creating something faker, literal simulated drama among artificial images, think the Kardashians as computer renderings, which works with those disenfranchised and well plugged in because irony allows ownership of one's pain: the project is stupid and obvious but that doesn't matter relating to the self-fiction instagram forces creation of. A computer rendered teen states: “In trying to realize my truth, I’m trying to learn my fiction,” before going further:

"I’m not sure I can comfortably identify as a woman of color. “Brown” was a choice made by a corporation.“Woman” was an option on a computer screen. my identity was a choice Brud made in order to sell me to brands, to appear “woke.”I will never forgive them. I don’t know if I will ever forgive myself."

AI self-awareness of course mirroring teens' own coming into the world and "self-consciousness," those adolescents currently dealing with their own living fictions and digital facades and with it the fantasy release of "coming clean" breaking out of the fiction. Which leads back to art and it's interest in fictionalized and false corporations, Broodthaers' Eagle Department or more recently Bratsch's DAS INSTITÜT, a sham "corporation" whose fiction was useful until the paintings started selling and then irony needn't excuse them, so everyone stopped mentioning the sham. "The goal of Brud is to replace Brud with better Brud" rings like Simon Denny's "[critique] is not my goal. My goal is to make interesting content." Or who could forget Bernadette Corporation, and Reena Spaulings, the use of the ironic corporitude to market itself until finally it was just art in a museum. "Brud is pre-occupied by the psychology of tricks, gimmicks, apparitions, illusions, scams, & cons." At a certain point we just started calling it, all of it, content. Every exhibition timed with several dates for you to come back for the performance, reading, talk, live painting, dance, DJ or all at once. You were a content producer, a content manager. An abstraction leveling all types of literature/culture into one encompassed concept that simply meant some thing, anything, exchangeable for views/clicks/shares which we started calling engagement for a platform. Eventually just spamming yourself into history, the audience is invited to binge.


See too: Simon Denny at MoMA PS1, DAS INSTITÜT at Serpentine Gallery, Kerstin Brätsch at Gio Marconi, Bernadette Corporation at Stedelijk Museum

AR: Jana Euler at dépendance

Artist: Jana Euler

Venue: dépendance, Brussels

Click here to read

Originally Posted: March 28th, 2018

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.

“Kinship” at Jessica Silverman

(link)

The bowels of August. How's your summer going? Are you strapped to a chair forced to gorge upon the group shows the artworld has brought like stale pancakes that purport to show tomorrow's young?  But then a press release in such deadpan earnestness, its plainness appearing almost offkilter for all its straightforward detail cutting summer haze. In a sea of overwrought excusing that is summer press releases, this offers a lifetime for it. Really no excuse at all. This and then that and here now.  Our heart recognized barren in its several sizes grown. It's grouping of art that doesn't have to make sense, or be made sense of; it's a personal collection.

Philipp Timischl at Neue Alte Brücke

(link)

Timishcl's sculpturification of photography is on one hand full of cheeky little moments of puncture - the objectification, fetish, and bejeweling of hyper-beefed men who unwittingly take part - as well as the need to sediment the more transitory elements of photo and video in an object original. Louisa Gagliardi's pierced and vajazzled painting comes to mind. But then thinking of 2004 when Bjarne Melgaard and his lover shot up anabolic steroids and fucked each other and the resultant photographs were shown as I'm sure we've all heard Kelsey tell it. About the level of risk involved and who bears it in what situations. And how Kelley Walker was recently and finally taken to task for not really being able to answer questions about his appropriation of particular cultures, like pushing on the sliver he wanted to finally drew his blood. How it was no longer this cold cerebral thing, and art's problematization actually was problem, our carefree objectification.

AR: LaKela Brown at Lars Friedrich

Artist: LaKela Brown

Venue: Lars Friedrich, Berlin

Click here to read

Originally Posted: February 13th, 2018

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.

Candida Höfer at Kukje Gallery

(link)

Taking photos of jewelry would have been clearer. The act of appropriation here attempt subversion of the institution by spotlighting it. As if a highlighter critiques its excised words. The Bechers, as post Sander taxonomists, prophesied a world that was complete document, threatening the world with their cold camera whereas their now even-more-famous students wielded this mechanical coldness  to excise from the world the blank jewels that undergirds so much contemporary art. Blankness becomes the lure for the viewer to feel rewarded for the ability to backfill the emptiness with everything they can throw at it: there's a thousand things we can say about these because they are illustrations without text, use them for anything. We invent ghosts inside machines, or architectures without people. The "technical perfection" that Höfer is always by writers rewarded for is the very thing that negates any fingerprints for more perfect mirrors, creating a perfect duplicate of the architecture it wishes to encase in glass. We fill in the rest.

Past: Ruby Neri

"'Fertility goddesses for the contemporary imagination;' the objects are a 'fun' ironizing of femininity's tropes, of the goddess, a winking jest mocking the less progressive constructions of 'woman' with comic timing of still being shackled to it. Whether we've moved past patriarchally constructed versions of woman (we haven't) we still get to feel some small relief of casting here the equivalent of a semiotic hex against it..."


full: Ruby Neri at David Kordansky

Jumana Manna at SALTS

(link)

Do bones sweat? does the Venus of Willendorf pour? Question wondered in a sauna filled filled with body porcelain, your fragments heated. "...these structures seem like archeological fossils sweating out some tension."Mark Leckey's Big Box Statue Action has been an influential artwork.  You activate sculpture like almonds, place fans blowing at its feet, heat it, electrify it, give it a massage all in pretense to the possibility of its life, sprouting any moment.  The littlest suggestion of sculpture not being just object. Treating it as life. Naughty for its quasi spirituality and animism in an age of capitalist enumeration, how transgressive we're being, treating objects to spas.

AR: Lin May Saeed at Lulu

(link)

Making art that expresses care for animals by carving it out of material that if left uncared for would quickly degrade and release poisons to harm those animals depicted is sort like selling artworks as pulled-pin grenades in a puppy shelter, "here, would you mind holding this?" Sort of expressing the suicide games pretty much everyone believes we're playing now in the anthropocene's foot-to-the-pedal towards brick walls type of time period. Why not take a grenade home, why not bring back some of this asbestos to protect the earth if not your home, these animals need you.


See too: Cooper Jacoby at Freedman Fitzpatrick, Piero Gilardi at Frankfurt Am Main, “May the Bridges I Burn Light the Way” at STANDARD, Nancy Lupo at Antenna Space, 3 Shows: Julia Scher Lin May Saeed, Fernando Palma Rodriguez

“Painting: Now & Forever, Part III” at Greene Naftali & Matthew Marks

(Greene Naftali, Matthew Marks)*

"Painting Now and Forever I-III"
"Painting Forever!"
"The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting"

"Painting Now" is unfortunately a book though.

and "Now that's what I call painting" seems also to have been a show in a Chicago gallery Scott projects.

*Interestingly the first "Now that's What I Call Music" was released in the US shortly after Part I, in 1998.

As Frankel said of Part II in Artforum it's sort of like "blowing your trumpet in the middle of a marching band." Painting, then as now and possibly forever, isn't in need of cheerleaders, painting sort of auto-blows itself. "But there's some good paintings in here!" as the reviews state. A survey, taking stock of the land so as to produce a map. Great. There's more figuration, color, surrealism, goo. Go look at 2008 here or here. Remember that? Guyton, Price, Smith, Walker, the concentration on the production as excuse to the product? The market was about to fall out the floor in 2 months but it was built back up on the mindless dead who took the 2008ists at their word: painting meant a concept for its execution, pressing print, spraying paint, screen-printing bricks to prove the wall you were looking. The fallout left a vacuum to be filled with those picking up the remains, and we were berated by it until someone finally assembled a figure. So now, 2018, we have the peak of figuration. Guess what is probably going to happen next. Can you short the market for figuration?

AR: Judy Chicago at Jessica Silverman

Artist: Judy Chicago

Venue: Jessica Silverman, San Francisco

Click here to read

Originally Posted: October 24th, 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.

Paloma Varga Weisz at Sadie Coles

(link)

Like life, so hot right now. How long have we desired a living marionette, an automaton, a mechanical Turk, a sculpture so authentic our love would be able to make it real, become a real boy?  The desire to figure such a thing, to be able to envision and draw it. Now that we feel close to actualization of by libertarian tech-dweebs rather than benevolent artistry, we hang them up, disused. There are Real Dolls now. If all artists work in creating naturlist beauty was all for men to be able to fuck silicone dolls... Set the anatomical pencils down. No longer dreaming of drawing, just sort of left in the air, maybe we shouldn't erect anything else.

AR: Juliana Huxtable, Carolyn Lazard at Shoot the Lobster

Artist: Juliana Huxtable, Carolyn Lazard

Venue: Shoot the Lobster, New York

Click here to read

Originally Posted: June 7th, 2018

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.

Mathew Cerletty at Karma

(link)

like the Back to the Future retro-avant we see currently dominating fashion and politics, nostalgia is candied. The "again" of greatness we are implored to make becomes unhinged from any particular time the imperative could point at. "Again" becomes merely reactionary twist to flood cliche with the nostalgia fueling it. "Again" never was but today repainting the past. These paintings are that "again:" signifieds ripped from referable time. Painting translates into into some anachronistic slide of retro-present, between icons, CGI renderings, "photorealism," illustrations: whatever their means of referring to any realness is lost, and this loss of reality ironically allows the viewer or voter to inflate with their interpretable own. Depictions have all but become completely untethered from physicality, and Cerletty has seeming captured the balloons adrift. These are fake images, but inability to determine the level of artificiality makes them unnerving. Cerletty's stripping the metadata turns everything into clues pointing as interpretable evidence to a time that never took place but in the speakers allowing you to formulate it yourself.


see too: Mathew Cerletty at Office Baroque 

3 Shows, Julia Scher at DREI, Lin May Saeed at Studio Voltaire, Fernando Palma Rodriguez at House of Gaga

(link)


(link)


(link)

The security camera, early exemplar of the our proprioception lost to digital realms as your body could be distended in mirrors sent through ethers appearing before you, behind you, and Magritte's Not to be Reproduced no longer surreal but our reality, walking into department stores. On facebook you reach out to poke, instagram click to like, your body a ghost appearing in other's mirrors. You appear everywhere. Like deafferented monkeys in lab experiments we lose control of limbs at the researcher doing studies on our psyche attempting to maximize engagement, a word which now means clicks, their hands in our gloves. Animals living with open brains.

Animals in environments degraded by plastics, EPS, Styrofoam. We with some idea rolling around in our heads about how long these foams last, largely abstract, largely uncertain, a million or a mere ten thousand, years, the foam will persist longer than paintings. In the presence of light it very quickly experiences photodegradation breaking down into a powdery substance that will chemically persist in the lungs and bloodstream of animals moving up the food chain. A fragile body, naive, that requires our protection. Sculptures which if improperly cared for become time bombs of their environmental toxicity, careful with them, leaching chemical into the fish they depict carefully, a preciousness we must protect.

The deranged mechanicals. Robots acting stupidly, uncaringly. A world we've designed as such. See the video here. Motors are dangerous, they are inhuman, lose track of where your body is, get your hand caught, its inability to discern the softness of flesh air you experience a rapid what is called degloving.

AR: Juliette Blightman at Fine Arts, Sydney

Artist: Juliette Blightman

Venue: Fine Arts, Sydney

Click here to read

Originally Posted: January 11th, 2018

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.

Group Show at Witte de With

(link)

It was nice of them to include not one but two photos of the 3D glasses. A hook to hang your FOMO around, proving the virtuality of your experience with glasses you cannot don. Most art experience is at least vaguely similar to IRL, visual snapshots taken by meat cams. But taking a photo of the thing you could have physically grasped exposed the glass between you and its object. And doubly strange since the glasses should allow for the virtual experience you also can't touch, en abyme our relation to images falls further and further into abyss of distended frames mirroring.

Andrea Bowers at Capitain Petzel

(link)

Surely the protest sign is a means of a populace's ability to steal back the language of advertising for its own self generally subaltern to the messages that those in power have the ability to broadcast at volumes stuporous. No one likes advertising, the brusqueness of messages to amplify through clipping of thought, but the protest sign attempts to recoup a voice that has been disenfranchised by a powerful who can drone it out with turn a monied knob. The protest sign requires streets and people to amplify. When it already has all the coronating volume of white walls and press packets and being sold in a blue chip gallery as a commodity it may no longer be protest sign.


 Peter Fend at Embajada

Past: Pilvi Takala at Centre for Contemporary Arts

"...children given fantastical power faced with the continually dwindling possibilities of real. A child's unfathomable wealth, 7000£, quickly grinding down, halting the committee at the realization of its limits: One child equates the once impossible amount to a mere 7 iPhones. The fantastic cannot be realized.  It's not enough for everyone. Unfazed several children move quickly through history proposing different schemes to generate profits with websites and business models (already envisioning themselves receiving discounts on fees) to sustain their wants, and the whole thing moving from open possibility to well-trod territory with a patterned timing. Watching the death of the possible in people so young raises questions of whether this is simply precocious social replication of the status quo, or whether capitalism is just natural to us..."



click: Pilvi Takala at Centre for Contemporary Arts

AR: Amy Lien and Enzo Camacho at 47 Canal

Artist: Amy Lien and Enzo Camacho

Venue: 47 Canal, New York

Click here to read

Originally Posted: February 2nd, 2018

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.

Peter Fend at Embajada

(link)

Protest art is hot right now, museum footage turned over to it with populist ease. Who doesn't want to take down Elon Musk, the cartoon villain extraordinaire who painted himself green to hide the robotic machination of his hyper-capitalism, neoliberal as savior. Musk is dolt. It feels good to curse him. It feels good to send out the rhetorical curses of the protest sign's curtness. The retort of his loyal followers, "what have you done to compete?" always coming with the implicit understanding that one wants to do something, and further that one wants to do something that panders to markets deeming it marketable. How can one invest in getting Musk to stop? To take a break. How could we invest in shutting off the wheels for a day, and we could all go outside. The internet shuttered. The lights dimmed, the rare earths would stop being mined, iPhones depleting their charges, and the capital would be stored in whatever vaults they now use for dust. The fossils we burn as fuel could be temporarily cooled. We could stand blinkered at the sun we haven't seen. For a while, we could erect giant balloons, for the firefighters to watch the world be set afire. It feels good to take down, to erect fingers.

AR: Pope.L at What Pipeline

Artist: Pope.L

Venue: What Pipeline, Detroit

Click here to read

Originally Posted: October 10th, 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.

Kate Newby, Daniel Rios Rodriguez at Nicelle Beauchene

(link)

Both's attention to naturalism, to the brown you may have noticed in stores having enveloped our packaging to stand for its green, the ecological concern signified by "brown." And "Natural" you may also have noticed has no FDA governance and can be, without recourse, stated about things like gasoline and high-fructose corn syrup, maybe steel nails. Natural, like nature, creates a negative distinction, we are said to go out "into nature" to pretend we are distinct from it, to pretend there worlds distinct from mankind. Like the trend in homes, bars, everyone hauling reclaimed wood by the tonnage deep into the city, West Elm mass producing it, in attempt to reclaim some authentic experience separate from the glass we touch all day in pocket. But the glass like the gallery can bring us anything, it appears on screen, in white fields, in front of you, your touch of nature, your finger grease smeared on it.


Kate Newby at Kunsthalle Wien, Daniel Rios Rodriguez at Lulu, N. Dash at Casey Kaplan

“Unexchangable” at Wiels

(link)

Long discussed as ironic kitsch - literally: "These are some of the worst paintings you will ever see" Searle - Shaw's thrift store finds have been slowly encroached by contemporary painting circling it. See "“Pharmacy for Idiots” at Rob Tufnell. Paintings' last five years seems close, if more proficient, to these vernacular imagists. The surrealism of today's painting mirrors the fact that any of the medium, in quantities vast enough, begins plotting points of the cultural unconscious. If you amass enough hand made images you begin so see dreams emerge. Painting, a virtual box that you fill with what you desire, but the desire is, if not caged, steered around themes that can be inferred by the collection circling around them. You can't see the pier but you can see the fish circling around them: the nude, Jesus, the phallus, pink things, us. Shaw's collection is like Wade Guyton's ostensible promise of printing our dreams, the conveyer of painting collecting like flypaper a civilization's subconscious. These are better much better most.


See too: Wade Guyton at Friedrich Petzel, “Pharmacy for Idiots” at Rob Tufnell, Tala Madani at David Kordansky

AR: Lutz Bacher at 3320 18th St

Artist: Lutz Bacher

Venue: 3320 18th St, San Francisco

Click here to read

Originally Posted: September 4th, 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.

AR: Ramaya Tegegne at VIS

Artist: Ramaya Tegegne

Venue: VIS, Hamburg

Click here to read

Originally Posted: July 6th, 2018

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.

Ser Serpas at LUMA Westbau

(link)

Hoarding as a sort of extended compassion for the derelict neglected of culture, a sympathy moving to material itself that a world simply would like to rid itself of. Composing it into art objects becomes a blessing for sending the objects into the "heavenly" afterlife, a means of delivering them to the majority white institutions to get them to care for them in perpetuity. Hooking the hose from the expelling parts of our cultural body to the part that feeds, getting it to eat its underwear.


see too: Dylan Spaysky at Good Weather, Dylan Spaysky at Clifton Benevento

AR: “Mechanisms” at Wattis

Artists: Zarouhie Abdalian, Terry Atkinson, Lutz Bacher, Eva Barto, Neïl Beloufa, Patricia L. Boyd, Jay DeFeo, Trisha Donnelly, Harun Farocki, Richard Hamilton, Aaron Flint Jamison, Jacob Kassay, Garry Neill Kennedy, Louise Lawler, Park McArthur, Jean-Luc Moulène, Pope.L, Charlotte Posenenske, Cameron Rowland, Danh Vo

Venue: Wattis, San Francisco

Exhibition Title: Mechanisms

Click here to read

Originally Posted: February 4th, 2018

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.

Roger Hiorns at Faena Arts Center

(link)

I'm tired of our body mocked. Not as cruel as women compared to meat, setting men next to machines bears a similar titillation in objectification. You, a machine, a corruption of the sublime, in repetition awe becomes bullying mocking the human for its meat. Stop this. We are but flesh objects, barely cognizant stupid creatures, morons in search of hope, and nailing us to crosses of our trash seems a brave act but it is impish, pornographic, unneeded. Are we not aware enough of our mortality? Young boys who will rust as any other. You oxidize, we take antioxidants. I rust. This isn't forcing hamlet to consider his skull but forcing him to consider his waste, hulking, of his culture. A brain at room temperature, horsepower.


see too: Erwin Wurm at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Geumhyung Jeong at KLEMM’S, Venice: Anne Imhof at German Pavilion

AR: Faith Ringgold at Weiss Berlin

Artist: Faith Ringgold

Venue: Weiss Berlin

Click here to read

Originally Posted: May 21st, 2018

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.

Miho Dohi at Hagiwara Projects

(link)

Sort of lovely against assemblage's vogue for the abject, bodily, Dohi's like jewelry brazed from trash. Against assemblage's interest in serial speeds Dohi's seem attuned to individual, something so fungal about them, lichens atop autonomous crust. Against the current vogue for assemblage's absorption of all wounds, scrapes, and damage intentionally accumulated, feel fragile, like cripple ducklings we wish to care for because they can actually be wounded.

AR: Park McArthur at SFMOMA

Artist: Park McArthur

Venue: SFMOMA

Click here to read

Originally Posted: August 23rd, 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.

Frances Stark at Gavin Brown

(link)

You have to admit, artists are grass to the hammering of cultural winds, growing sternly against it while sternly whipped with it.  So more text in space, the billboard space of advertising, of ad copy, of slogans, mottos, quips, of the ability to deliver a phrase into you. Clipped from its context, it floats, wafts with a sort of empty vigor. The blunt brunt of the advertorial, slapping you with words you can read, recognize, but fail their handshake of emotional resonance, whacked with a Whiffle bats, the lack of becomes its main force. The bathos of artistic text, failing, becomes the means of overcoming that hollow form of advertorial address by embodying it, deploying it for all its tragic cruel means.


clipped words: Matt Keegan, Kay Rosen at Grazer Kunstverein, Hanne Lippard, Nora Turato at Metro Pictures, Gene Beery at Shoot the Lobster, Karl Holmqvist at Sant’Andrea de Scaphis, Sue Tompkins at Lisa Cooley, Jenny Holzer at Blenheim Palace, Barbara Kruger at Sprüth Magers Peter Fend at Essex Street, CAWD on Fetish, Frances Stark at Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Frances Stark at Daniel Buchholz and Daniel Buchloz

Joëlle Tuerlinckx at Centre International d’Arte et du Paysage

(link)

"that explore the power of form to appear and disappear" apt to a current vogue - of which Tuerlinckx is a forebear - for the anxiety of stuff. The quantity of objecthood and Artwork and its risk, once again in the history of art, for disappearance. Art vanishing from the retinal dissolving into concept wasn't enough. Now there's risk, fear, of the unauthenticated object. Mass produced or intentional, do and does not matter. A gleeful anxiety of teetering art over the brink of art just being stuff as any other, art into piles indiscriminate and question what separates authentic from artifice and watch the distinction melt, its just stuff that's not stuff or so.


Art into piles: Jason Dodge at Casey Kaplan, “School of Chairs” at 500 Capp Street Foundation, Joëlle Tuerlinckx at LLS Paleis, Darren Bader at Sadie Coles, Michael E. Smith at 500 Capp Street Foundation, Martin Creed at Hauser & Wirth Somerset