Tam Ochiai at Tomio Koyama

(link)

Names, dates, places, things we scour like On Kawara paintings hoping to reassemble and collate some sense from. But the signified, the thing, continuously withdraws. We'll never actually regain or conquer or even know. Names, dates, things are hidden behind the curtain of their signifier and us all looking at blank paintings trying to grasp the thing they have purposely lost behind words for us.


See too: Tam Ochiai at Team Gallery, Inc.

Fiona Connor at Fine Arts, Sydney

(link)

"Of course the painter feels a private respect for the signboard, it performs what the artist cannot." a sort of elemental usefulness making art jealous. A directness art fails at, expedience sunk to the mires of its "issues." The signboard tells what it wants: services, sales, solar panel parts. The desires of humans, hope and dreams pinned. Connor's fossilizing of these moments in archival silkscreens ostensibly preserves it for future generation's anthropology. But it's also a sentimentalizing Precious Moments vibe for its preserve, the formaldehyde injection that makes it art, transactable.


See too: Mark Grotjhan at Karma, Fiona Connor at Modern Art

Past: Fiona Connor at Modern Art

"...There is lives, jobs, wants, wishes, desires attached to a board, fossils of a building, accumulating the tacks of people's frontiers, the edges of their presence in the world [...] The Information display systems we find increasingly endearing."

Click full: Fiona Connor at Modern Art

Sophie von Hellermann at Greene Naftali

(link)

Throughout the cotton-candy scuzz our attempts to make out images ambiguous leaves what?  We look through the paint at some cloudy apparitions like a Renoir got wet, left in the rain. For all their candy von Hellerman's aren't all that appetizing; Suzanne Hudson called their characters etiolated, plants grown leggy in darkness, a feeling of being deprived of crucial nutrients, teeth-shakingly saccharine, you can almost feel how sticky.


link: Joanne Greenbaum at Crone,

Manfred Pernice at Anton Kern

(link)

That weird little painting-thing makes a comeback in an exhibition as "recap". Funny because like all Pernice's assembled objects seem on their way to being sculptures, this restating of the past seems on its way to being an exhibition.  (Even a greatest hits doesn't really count as an album, even if the cream and the not mere b-sides or storage remains.) The point being, Pernice seems once again to not quite "performing," failure to fully erect anything. It's been six years. But sometimes the depressive gets attached to a blanket feeling like comfort.


Manfred Pernice at The Modern Institute, Manfred Pernice at Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, Manfred Pernice at Galerie Neu

Caroline Mesquita at Kunsthalle Lissabon

(link)

have oft nightmares of the things that run underneath the earth. Wasn't that a major plot point of  Ghostbusters? Nightmares manifested as physical slime, the collective bad vibes of a city?  gives image to what we all feel as the undercurrents of sociality, culture, we say the city was "electric" but when the mood goes sour feels like beneath the faces of everyone pumps black bile. 20th century surrealism seemed too preoccupied with the mythos of artistic genius, and everyone's paintings explored personal psyche which led to Hollywood giving more spectacular manifestations of cultural rather personal psyche. Isn't there a movie where Tom Hanks is almost drown in his suburban basement by a pipe pumping it full of shit? Or is this another nightmare. Artists have a whole history digging holes - outdoors, in studio, in gallery, in life - but one would like for a genealogy of pipes. Nightmare pipes, a genre.


see too: Caroline Mesquita at T293, Nicolas Deshayes at Modern Art, “May the Bridges I Burn Light the Way” at STANDARD (OSLO)

Life Sport at Point Chaud

(link)

Art is a capitalistic hustle despite whatever clung to beliefs of any spiritual separation from economic domination. Spiritual practices of artists not working in a factory. And a lot of artists work in factories of other artists. (Interesting turn of events if workers seized the means of production from their CEO artists. How many art practices have devolved into studio assistant performing a rendition of Weekend at Bernie’s with their long dead-inside artists?) But so until all workers are about rise up, it would seem under the current conditions, not only capital but situations in which “money for the arts” appears to go to those willing to reproduce the previous generation in younger blood, that some forms of collectivization - or pure entrepreneurial endeavors - would spring up. It would hopefully raise questions of “who is allowed to speak” and the artworld would actually register this. But it won’t. You either survive or you don’t. If you produce some magic in that, we might respect you.

Zoe Nelson at JDJ

(link)

With gallery decentralization away from artcenters in an age of ever more omnipresent digital panopticons - foot traffic obsolescence, warehousing in cheaper real estate, and by appointments only - the white cube and its Matrix-like virtual space will perhaps become redundant to this physical de-locale, a fear of vertigo of a white space sent into hyperspace the gallery-space will need to self-locate, architecture will appear as a watermark to keep one foot on the ground avoiding the spins tumbling through non-space.

Amanda Ross-Ho at Mary Mary

(link)

What a good cruel show. There’s more photos on Mary Mary’s website. Click and drag virtual to our emotional scales, our pain. 10. Until the walls are howling. Size is a cruelty, we don’t want our more fragile moments blown up on walls. Child burn units developed these, for children pre language, to describe their pain as burned children, white rooms of red. Is there anything more unimaginable than this?  As a means of exchange we turn emotion into a signifier, turn it into plastic information, capable of all sorts of manipulation. “A universal metric to measure human suffering” Your pain is universal, equivocal, exchangeable for the pain of others. This is the best we could come up with to communicate with red children. The world is still primitive, its virtualization even more so. We all fear technology but not its precursors. (like)

Amanda Ross-Ho at The Pit, Amanda Ross-Ho at The Approach

Past: Amanda Ross-Ho

Past: Amanda Ross-Ho

"By sheer determination of size it virtualizes space, collapsing distance between you and it"
"no longer calibrated to bodily comfort but instead a fun-house manicism, of the world made slapstick, the clowning gotten carried away to mocking humanism and expressing willful laughter, forcing themselves upon you, bludgeoning distance with the brute force of size. [...] The shifts in scale reassert their indifference towards your own. [...] a cold aggressive plasticity of its information."
"Like the masks central to this exhibition, human emotion is traded for its systematic expression"
"Mental buggery of signification replacing the consensualness of sight."


Amanda Ross-Ho at The Pit, Amanda Ross-Ho at The Approach

Lui Shtini at Kate Werble

(link)

The apparition we all throw guesses like darts towards. Knowledge that's predicated on the firming up of agreement, history a handshake between historians. And in this way the amorphous is not an agreeable substance to a culture that would like to make everything fungible, easily transactable. Instead here see things that reveal only us, an elephant we're all hiding in our own personal rooms under big sheets. Ambiguousness is hot right now, the abstractionists with their gluttonous anthropomorphics, the kids with their balloon swollen cartoons, the sculptors with their lumpy things. The ambiguity exemplar of our world's distrust. Who knows who is actually the man behind the curtain.


See too: Ron Nagle at Modern Art, Michael E. Smith at Sculpture Center, Nina Beier at Metro Pictures, Nairy Baghramian at Museo Tamayo, Nairy Baghramian at Marian Goodman, Alice Tippit at Night Club

Past: Lui Shtini at Kate Werble

" ...abstraction's referential amorphousness: a resemblance that, like inkblots, adapt to the viewer they appear to. Apparition as innuendo. Do you see the sunglassed DJ's hi-top fade? do you see a booty shaking, a wailing baby, or a pig outdoors at night through a molar keyhole..."

Read full: Lui Shtini at Kate Werble

Julian Irlinger at Thomas Schulte

(link)

Butterflies pinned will always be beautiful.  Taxonomy's segmenting provides the world under glass, alien from itself. Taxidermy the world. It'll embalm itself eventually won't it. So it'd be nice if we could organize it before then. Our anthropology always only reflects the norms of the diggers.

Sue Tompkins at The Modern Institute

(link)

The painting's ineptness could almost be salved with reminders of Tompkin's enjoyably askew performances, the hollow echoes of paintings like. Today everyone verbs the noun. "Performs Painting" "Investigates Painting." And Painting saved by performance has become a trope. At least these have Polaroids as appendages to make them kind of do a jig.


See too:  Sue Tompkins at Lisa Cooley

Chloe Seibert at Mickey

(link)

Like Dubuffet run through Joyce Pensato, the scabrous is given countenance in style, a meaty thing to be toyed with, drawn on. Artists have such a strange relation to the face, to our lumpen forms. A middle fingers raised rebellion to it. No matter what gratuitous things they do it, whatever fingers clawed through it, we recognize it. Perhaps reason to hate it, through the violence it remains, you can get a smile.


See too: Chelsea Culprit at Yautepec, The violence against faces. Geumhyung Jeong at KLEMM’S

Lena Henke at Bortolami

(link)

The pig got transformed into a literal low polygon mesh, a chainmail frozen ghost, as a print that misrecalls its form, like a misremembering of its german history (that the PR attempts reanimation of). Ambiguousness as the sort of vague myths that float through history, echoing as subliminal ghosts. Attach words to the things the PR says: "tray-sized vulvic rose petals"
Ambiguousness as a means for the simultaneity of surrealism. A tree sort of looks like a horse so we can put them together; a cloud can look like anything, much like a turd, some will see interest.


See too: Nina Beier at Metro Pictures, Ron Nagle at Modern Art,

Polly Apfelbaum at Belvedere 21

(link)

Apfelbaum seems on the verge of a resurgence as everyone stolen threads from her leave full carpets and tapestries all around the galleries. Eventually a whole subsection of the artworld is woven in her image. It hadn't seemed so serious then, but now it's everywhere, "craft"'s infiltration of our more erect intentions.

Bob van der Wal at Neue Alte Brücke

(link)

Someday something will feast off the roughage of our crotches. And all the walls covered in notes behind it like a set for a conspiracy film, the mad attempts at extracting some actionable knowledge from it. As it's said, Conspiracists, like fetishists, like theists, find comfort in the underlying belief that someone is in control, at least someone is pulling the strings that manipulates the world that would otherwise feel so painfully arbitrary. We attempt to make sense, our Hominid brains are excellent at seeing patterns. We extract meaning from nothing. We become paranoid of a silent informed minority. Attempt to read the subtext in everything. Like art.

Ingrid Luche at Ghebaly Gallery

(link)

"Ghost Dresses" seem to be based-off Amerindian ritual Ghost Dances and Ghost shirts, which sounds a bit like cultural appropriation since - according to wikipedia - Ghost Dance rituals were intended to make the white colonialists leave. Which white spaces they find themselves now refashioned in. Maybe the French aren't so sensitive to such matters. Maybe this is a bonafide attempt to make the colonialists leave. Seems like the PR would have touched on that. Either way it seems like the point is that eventually everything will be able to be overlaid into everything else, you buy a cultural anything with everything, anything, on it, you have can have anything with a t-shirt on it. You can order it online. Everything will be put into everything else.

Chim↑Pom at ANOMALY

(link)

We have invented forms of wreckage we find enjoyable.

Amelie Von Wulffen at Gio Marconi

(link)

"She utilizes the brown hued bluntness of the German palette – a favorite of 18th century genre painters through to Anselm Kiefer – as if it were a genre all its own."

That's pretty good. And one would wish for a listing of von Wulffen's does with color and painting that feel so egregiously like painting trauma, its history of abuses, like that bic pen blue that smears out of the clouds, the eruptions of full ROYGBIV rainbows of colors unnecessary. Painting is filled with horror, the calls coming from inside the house.

Past: Gijs Milius at Gaudel de Stampa

"We try to make the body reappear and it appears as a cartoon, which we're mad about. Our cartoon bodies extrapolated from the growing prevalence of data and numbers domineering discussions of humans. The "broad picture" we use for governance. People as populations. Everything feels like a cartoon in this virtuality because you can do great violence to it. A million jobs lost, a million jobs gained. Tom whacks at Jerry with a mallet like an axe. Jerry distends."


Click: Gijs Milius at Gaudel de Stampa

Darren Bader at Blum & Poe

(link)

The buggery performed, inhabiting another's space with full cavity examination. Or more blurb friendly, Bader becomes Hannibal Lecter, less appropriation than a forcible taking of skins, wearing them like a costume to be paraded. A mere container for Bader's acting. Wool, Catala, Spaulings, Gonzalez-Torres, Ruscha, Albenda, Andre, and probably etc.

Possibly the reason a lot of artists hate Bader, besides the general impishness, is the refusal to perform any sort of critical consolidation of his practice, that moral underpinning of art, "criticality," (that ethic reproduced in art school).  Instead, at the cost of any "critical" structure, a near incessant expansion. His ability to take. Any of Bader's "good ideas" are buried in an avalanche of "any idea." Bader is exhausting.  A lot of artists - despite whatever art's claims to freedom, and ostensible rejection of cultural values - wouldn't let themselves behave half this stupidly. The criticism is perhaps that acting stupidly isn't really freeing, but really neither is what most artists do anyway. Mirrors are best when they are stupid.


see too:
Darren Bader at Andrew Kreps 2, Darren Bader at Sadie Coles, Darren Bader at Radio Athènes. Darren Bader at Kölnischer Kunstverein, Darren Bader at Andrew Kreps 1

Jill Mulleady at Galerie Neu

René Magritte, Le galet, 1948; Evelyne Axell L'égocentrique 2 1968"; Theo Wenner, Miley Cyrus Rolling Stone Cover, 2013; Jill Mulleady, The Discovery, 2018

(link)

Things burble up, ghosts drift like flotsam up through the flow of images, us all treading water not wanting to drown in this subconsciousness the PR threatens. Drowning in soup haunted, like a purgatory. Paintings become disfigured, gargoyles misremembered, using your memory of history's painting against you. These paintings feel like being gaslit: isn't that what's his name in new colors? No, these are entirely new paintings. History flows through the bejeweled eye of the beholder's digestive endpoint, already chewed and expelled for us.

Leidy Churchman at Reena Spaulings

(link)

"the 'manure of experience.'"
"an 'extraordinary junkyard' of symbols,"
"a disconcerting heterogeneity at first glance,"
"individually rich but collectively inscrutable."

Past: Leidy Churchman at Koelnischer Kunstverein

"'Heterogeneity' in painting, the lack of identifiable style, of painterly identity, that has become increasingly common, shifting subjects, means and themes, we find still neurotic - still being mentioned in PR. It's conversant spectacle, finger to the viewer, who is asked to sort it out. This avoidance of identity, could be argued as an abdication of responsibility, but like the fish before left well enough alone, the distance asks for understanding that we aren't required to, and can't, know."

Leidy Churchman at Koelnischer Kunstverein

Leidy Churchman at Rodeo