Eva Fàbregas at Kunstverein München

Today's post is an assemble your own intenstinal adventure.
Current common themes.
Images of Intestines: 

Daniel Dewar and Grégory Gicquel at Portikus, Michaela Eichwald at Silberkuppe, Michaela Eichwald at Maureen Paley,  Nicolas Deshayes at Modern Art, Jessi Reaves at Bridget Donahue, Juliana Huxtable at Shoot the Lobster, Quintessa Matranga at Freddy

Bodily Innuendo 1 
(haha funny sculpture mock human):

'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, our treatments to spas, acupunctures, health tonics, facial plumbing, giving facelifts to the homeless.'

Erwin Wurm at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Geumhyung Jeong at KLEMM’S, Sarah Lucas at CFA Berlin, Roger Hiorns at Faena Arts Center, Venice: Anne Imhof at German Pavilion, Gina Beavers at Michael Benevento,

Bodily Innuendo 2 
(uncanny lumpen)

'...biomorphic stones complicating the minimalist mantra that "what you see is what you see" because what you see is sometimes sexually confusing, leather seats looking like the lap of a taught, tan and naked man. The cigar that just might, or rocks that just might not, it is a “bodily” different from its post-minimalist reassertion: entendre produces uncertainty in polite company...'

Nairy Baghramian at Museo Tamayo, Alexandra Bircken at Le Crédac & BQ, Bergen Assembly, Jessi Reaves at Bridget Donahue, Nairy Baghramian at Marian Goodman, Sarah Lucas at CFA Berlin, “Ungestalt” at Kunsthalle Basel, Ron Nagle at Modern Art
Ed Atkins at dépendance, Miriam Cahn at Jocelyn Wolff, 

Bodily Innuendo 3 
(objects which denote us)

'...Darwin, living in the 1800s, could see a flower and draw a moth undiscovered until after his death. The objects here, designed for ourselves, in a similar way infer something about the bodies which they govern...'

Park McArthur at Chisenhale, Klara Lidén, Alicia Frankovich at Kurator, Anna Uddenberg at Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Katja Novitskova at Kunsthalle Lissabon, Alexandra Bircken at Le Crédac & BQ, Cady Noland, Eloise Hawser at Somerset House

Visual Material Fetishism (pornography and the need for materials to express itself through glass):

ours is a world we see but don't touch, like in an art museum. And like porn, we want to touch, want to experience sensuality, and so separated by this glass both art and porn must find ways to make physical sensation a visual code passable through glass. Pornography does this by covering the body in oil, wrapping it in latex, inflating its breasts to absurdity. Art does this with goo and viscera and softness and lumps. Hypernormal stimuli.

Olga Balema at High Art (1), Olga Balema at High Art (2), ektor garcia at Cooper Cole, N. Dash at Casey Kaplan, Tony Conrad's Glass, Anna Uddenberg at Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler,

Medical Device Horror (blushing)

'...if the trope of horror-films was to die after sex, it was because the carnality established the body as fragile, human, meat; sex filled the character with blood for the destruction to come...'
'The biomorphic ambiguity invokes the body better than any specific image, the ambiguous evokes feelings which we relate to corporeality rather a concrete image we would relate to as information. It's why what is unseen has such stronger potential in torture scenes, ears cropped or arms chainsawed...'

Nairy Baghramian at Marian Goodman, Michaël Borremans at Dallas Museum of Art, Ambera Wellmann at Lulu, Miriam Cahn at Meyer Riegger, Andro Wekua at Sprüth Magers

"The rotund, biomorphic. The anthropomorphic, anthropoid, and the dripping and the glistening. The meaty and the squishy, fungal. Glass etched with goo, sprayed. Wax deformed Rodins. Primordial, high definition flesh. The dirt. Psoriasic pulchritude. Your standard innuendo; vaginal negatives. The soft and photo sensitive. The band-aid awaiting its knee. Someone farts. The misshapen; hideously deformed. The institutionally nurse-like and the gore spread across asphalt. The putrescent, the rotting inside taught PVC. The colonoscopic. Our bodies inferred, touched, spread with creams oils and ointments. The sick. It was a lie to believe in machined aluminum autonomy, bodies and minds everywhere guttered. Every sculpture today inferring the body."

Wong Ping at Kunsthalle Basel

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Comedy in anxiety over the bile we all believe lurking beneath surface norms, in your neighbors closet a man watching you have sex with his wife. Finding yourself watching your wife have sex with a man, from a closet. Penis attacked by ants. A penis snaps. Abortions raised to kiss their daddy. The candy shell animation serving coprophilic chocolate just below. Ping's protagonists narrate their chocolate predicaments with a general numbness. Mama died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don't know. The Stranger is when you sit on your hand until it goes numb before masturbating. So it feels like a stranger. An indifference, world's slight remove. All the penises look like different alien creatures. Because they do. This is all believable because the world is already a cartoon.

George Rippon at Wiels

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"Now you are one of a group, invested in the belief that it has elected the company it keeps, and that by this act can set itself aside both from those whose acts of power require of them a strict adherence to a state of ignorance, and the desperate rabble always seeking whatever it can get, sapped of intention – one of those whose lives miraculously prove to reproduce the ideal of that fantasy of being apart from the crowd and its automation – popping around the globe to the tune of champagne flutes and flight announcements, while at the same time adhering to and enjoying all the conventional accouterments and assurances of self-esteem and respectability – of mobility – aspired to by that very same normalizing mass one shuns, but whose effort of desire as a multitude creates the conditions under which that ideal can project itself as the fabricated lifestyle you assume, and which consumes you." -Roger van Voorhees

Which was a press release for Rippon's last, and while absorption of critique - or simply acting as the enemy -  is one way to attempt to neuter it, it occasionally just rings.

Raimer Jochims at Jacky Strenz

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Against Jochims' more splintered or fractured here is an exhibition of sculpture looking more digested. There is analogy to be made in the sculptor as an intestinal tract: Freed from the structure and striations of skeletal muscle that once predicated historical (figurative) sculpture, the smooth muscle sculptor digests like an intestinal tube that is artist's erosion in time. Time is tube in this metaphor.  Time over the open touch of just rubbing, frottage until the rocks are tumbled to our gratification. Smooth muscle occurs mostly in the gut, uterus, walls of blood vessels, bladder, sphincter, etc.- the body's transit tubes - and these sculptures look like the things those organs produce: turds, early fetuses, blood cells, kidney stones. Things warmed in the gut of the artist.


Raimer Jochims at Jacky Strenz (1), Raimer Jochims at Jacky Strenz (2)

Diedrick Brackens at Various Small Fires

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A stitch correlates to time, it is a labor visible in increments. While brushstrokes may have been the impressionist equivalent, modernism seemed, somewhat, goal orientated toward removing the more intensive marks of labor (first for a performative "expressive," the work was not labor but expression) before culminating in Minimalism and Conceptual art, two legacies infatuated with things ostensibly springing from ether. (The instructions being the art, not the 40 museum interns drawing it.) I'm not sure what this meant for them, their desiring to be capitalists, desiring to wipe the sweat from their aluminum, but it's still a desire today, no wants want to imagine previous fingerprints on their new iPhone. So the workers hands are latexed. Work, labor, sweat is the parcel of something we denigrate to the great purity of "good design," that cerebral craft we revere, which should be clean, elegant, and without a trace of sweat.


see too: “Tierra. Sangre. Oro.” at Ballroom Marfa, Ajay Kurian at White Flag Projects, Brendan Fowler at Mathew

Michael Queenland at Maureen Paley

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Pre compress our trash into the decorative fossils it will become? Litter absorbed into the earth that on geologic scales become liquids, so our landfills are like slow smoothies. Someday someone assess our ruins as beautiful fossils.


Trash: “May the Bridges I Burn Light the Way” at STANDARD (OSLO), Nancy Lupo at Kristina Kite & Yuji Agematsu at Miguel Abreu, Dylan Spaysky at Clifton Benevento, Nancy Lupo at Antenna Space, Yuji Agematsu at Real Fine Arts

ektor garcia at Cooper Cole

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"...made, crafted, formed, manipulated, and arranged by the artist's hands. Hand shaped and glazed terra cotta, stoneware, and porcelain. Intertwined ceramic rope and chain. Hand made copper wire lace, crocheted ropes, twined threads. Hand sewn leather hides. Imprints, mark making, fingerprints, gestures: the trace of the artist's hands are everywhere. [...] the tactile memory of garcia's hands. They call out to us to be touched in return, tempting us, even daring us — to touch. But we can't touch them back. The gallery is at once a space of sensory overload, and sensory deprivation. So how can we make up for the inability to touch?"

a very modern problem, our world, mediated by screens, the totality of which becomes enshrined in gallery or touch screen glass, and art is the world's development project in all the ways to surmount it, a materiality so strong it visually empaths itself, that we could actually feel something through glass. A "supernormal stimulus," exaggerated materiality that begins to look like fetish for.


See too: Tony Conrad's Glass. Olga Balema at High Art (1), Olga Balema at High Art (2), N. Dash at Casey Kaplan

D’Ette Nogle at Bodega

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manifesting pedagogy and social reproduction in object form was never going to be exactly "fun," and the soft-authority is deployed with a humor so dry as to almost be nonexistent (its own form of comedy) and even when the stand-up exists it is deprecated to near loss, fury, all but calling the whole thing, whole project, the teacher that Nogle is as "fucking losers." (admission-of is repeatedly the point). Assessment and authority and its role in social-reproduction is as an aesthetic as much as anything and one that Nogle has for some time now enjoyed erecting in art spaces. (It seems the funnier stuff goes to storage.) And Nogle's interest in this loveably unfun thing we call bureaucracy* seems to be for its hairy, ensnaring and otherwise tangly qualities. Enjoyment seems less important than the slowly painting and then identifying one's hands, yours and hers, with a faint perfume of red, so that "you're going to regret clapping in the end." But reproducing it in you, teaching.

*conceptual art has always had some sort of quasi-love affair with bureaucracy, legalese, instructions, and always pressing "expression" through this grate of whatever schematics. Nogle, a grade school teacher and graduate of Mary Kelly's UCLA program (a program supposedly DEEP into Lacanian psychoanalysis) and who herself, Kelly, had her own malignant-bodily comedy-spoof on conceptualism. And so it's no surprise that Nogle's is obviously in the grand lineage birthing some demon form of bureaucratic "socially-adjusted" conceptual art, forcing it to speak through the lenses of current dominant forms of socially "tuned behavior." 


Pregnant bureaucracy: Marianne Wex at Tanya Leighton

Mathew Cerletty at STANDARD (OSLO)

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It's like the closer it is to reproducing its sign that maybe reality starts to panic. Not necessarily the platonic forms, but, like, maybe. Painting feeling like objects smoothing into their icons, symbols, some sort of shorthand for reality which isn't it.
Appropriation by means of really really close, technical, representation. Which, Sturtevantily, negates it.

“Post-apocalyptic Formation: 1” at Felix Gaudlitz

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Yes, this does look like the post-apocalypse, rubble on parquet floors, in bright refined rooms.

Andy Warhol at Galerie Buchholz

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Hey you know that really famous artist that everyone is pretty fatigued of but continuously sells for millions?

Well we unearthed a few more unseen scraps from under the floorboards.

Walter Swennen at Xavier Hufkens

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which despite the overall inanity of most, does occasionally yield spark, an occasional brilliance in darkness, that dies, and leaves one wondering what light there ever was in the first place, and when its dark its almost chilling levels of it, sort of begging you to hate them. "Quinn Latimer has described Swennen’s images as non sequiturs. But is there even a logical sequence from which to remove them?"

Adrian Morris at Galerie Neu

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during a time [1956 – 2004] of ostensible post-war optimism over scientific and economic explosion of the time, the space race, increasing ease of travel, the plane windows we were all finally travelling on instead seeing vast de Chiricoian wasteland, blatantly lonely. A world able to see itself for the first time from the eyes of god and yet Morris' paintings read it as abandoned, moon-like. The virtual plane of technological invention becomes synonymous with the pictorial plane of creative invention. That surrealist expanse that stood in for theaters in their skulls. Painting in that Matrix-like virtual plane - inventing what-you-wish - and yet a vast emptiness, like humanity's inability to imagine anything worth painting. It's pretty bold to say, "I have been given planes, spacecraft, worldly travel, and out my window I see only desolation, maybe some earth converted to farmland." "we are checked by the surface." a sort of comedic reversal, the virtual plane given immediately to its immanent form, paint crust, dust.


Read too: Gertrude Abercrombie at Karma, Tala Madani at David Kordansky, Tala Madani at 303 Gallery

Keith Farquhar at High Art

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Content you apply as a paint, or collect like a grime.  Kin Henrik Olesen's stuffing filth into crevasses (and hair adhesived among else) art's usual conceptual pyrotechnics are given abject gloss that prevents our usual cerebral distance, a sterility requiring less iMac than latex gloves. The humor is less punning than sexual, painting in need of laundromats, content viral, wash basins, outlets smeared with paint. The fear of the Kristevan abject is less the fear of repulsiveness than the fear of it becoming-you, nearing you-ness, we fear getting it on us because we fear its indistinguishability between us, and Farquhar's continual covering of everything with everything else spreads the fear that we could get some painting on us.


see too: Keith Farquhar at Cabinet, Henrik Olesen at Cabinet, Henrik Olesen at Reena Spaulings

Ulrike Müller at Meyer Kainer

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I like when shapes have a gender. When they are “becoming.” Abstraction congealing a being. When they move toward codifying identity, which are icons. When Shapes like embryos. Placental.

Also, what a press release.


see too: Martín Soto Climent at Proyectos Monclova

Paul Pfeiffer at Carlier Gebauer

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players in ecstasy and boxers stricken with invisible tremors, the comedy was was usurped by the elegant formality of all it, its technical feat to some strange other world that was decided loneliness and pathos, that was undercurrent bedrock of its spectacle. And this sort of "encarnating" Bieber as the object of devotion he spectacularly exists as, feels obvious. The traditional techniques Pfeiffer used artisans for this incarnation are far more interesting than its conceptual gesture. Not quite funny enough to escape itself, nor dead enough to be camp, as is often the case Pfeiffer's works rimshot high-serious and silly. Also, in the rear, the workers have sculpted the heads of their children, which... not even going to get into that one's Freudian-capitalist undertones, shackling the workers to what they work for, cruel.

Thomas Bayrle at dépendance

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Despite the feast, there's nothing particularly pleasant on looking at them, reminiscent not only of the increasing cultural maximization - wringing efficiency from every nook - but spatial nightmare as a child the monsters of unascertainable depth, distance, both near and far, like videos zooming out of fractals running only makes them reappear closer, again. Apart from all the juicing of metonymy or synecdoche, Bayrle's invoke a sort of fordist seasickness, a vertigo of the cartoon and our bodies and converted to hours, sign, symbol, stuf, window dressing. We are, simply, made into an abstraction, and a curatorial idea: a show called like Virtual/Vertigo or whatever daffy offering, about our now untethered freefloat in planes and scale lost as design replaces subject, populations standing in for people, traffic for car: Bayrle, Amanda Ross-Ho, Daniel Pflumm, Mathis Altmann,  Alberto Giacometti, all the submersive video-nauts, etc etc et al, space lost.


see too: Daniel Pflumm at 6817 Melrose, Amanda Ross-Ho at The Pit, Amanda Ross-Ho at The Approach, Mathis Altmann at Halle für Kunst Lüneburg, Mathis Altmann at Freedman Fitzpatrick, Gina Folly at Ermes-Ermes, “Sylvanian Families Biennial 2017” at XYZ collective

Past: Thomas Bayrle

Wading through repetition of criticism that bogs Bayrle produces the same repetition fatigue of the paintings, trying to extract endless allegory out a single metaphor. [...] expecting mechanization to ensure repetitive homogeneity, instead an endless individuation, the paintings do contain some abhorrence befitting the current situation, "It’s what Bayrle calls the quality of quantity, or the process of making pure quantity into a quality."



Click for full: Thomas Bayrle at dépendance, Thomas Bayrle at Institute of Contemporary Art Miami

Guan Xiao at Bonner Kunstverein

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In a world governed by the cartoon, its virtuality, all things are exchangeable and appear similar enough. You can throw them all together. (and Fair symptoms that such a world in cartoon mode, accelerating homogenization would also see an equal rise in identity politics bristle against this mayonnaising.) But so it's artist's naughty fun to accelerate cultural flatenning, run impishly through borders, tie everything together, steam roll the whole thing into one vast of cultural whateverness, throw it overboard into the soup.

"The hipster too was a semionaut; whose careful balance of fashion’s signs were an additive and appropriative construction of appearance and identity, a careful facade of references, and so the concurrent rise of Rachel Harrison makes symptomatic sense for its ability to thematize semio-collapse short-circuits in a way that was jokey, pranksterish and light relief against undeconstructable-tuber confusion of “the real” having really ascended into code that both Harrison and Hipsters were obviously responding. But artists now live it, take for granted the serial construction of references fashioning artistic identity whose appropriations need make little sense, that juxtaposition is enough capable of producing all the double-binds, oxymorons, and paradoxes that the artworld prefers in a the-more-the-merrier type campaign, creating perfect mires filled with loads of interpretive juice whose glossy surface reflected the world well."

see too: Nina Beier at Metro Pictures, Henning Bohl at What Pipeline, Henning Bohl at Karin Guenther, Max Brand at Off Vendome, Goshka Macuga at Rüdiger Schöttle

Nobuya Hitsuda at KAYOKOYUKI

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These paintings are fine. Will we ever see more of them?

Robert Heinecken at Rhona Hoffman

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Mass images are startling, powerful, ubiquitous. Artists had commanded images. Ringing a lot of echoes to those churches earlier, and their, artist's, power controlled and wielded by the already empowered to show godliness, authority, divinity, before becoming a mass program of consumption that artists would now attempt some sort of dismantling, their overlords, to prove its understanding against. Envy or upset, art as stones against its Goliath, though artists claim not to be theists.

“Magic Ben Big Boy” at Matthew Marks

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You can see what was already in the later work then, that endless turning from inside to outside, what is open and what is hidden. While ever more skeletally baroque now, the similar rotations then, into shyness then. A portal opens, a cork plugs, things are sealed, places buried. What happens inside these "Shirley Temple Rooms" is what's at stake, but the exhibition's "Ben" is a Michael Jackson song about a boy who love his rat, and the "Big Boy" is adult sized sexual assault trauma doll, and the "Magic" is some old crone with a box of roses, cats wideyed at their prey, Magic Ben the big boy, and our eyes the size of eggs, I'm sure you can put the story together.

Luchita Hurtado at Hauser & Wirth

The 98 year old painter who seemingly first heard about from Park View/Paul Soto unearthing its gold and then the Hammer's showcasing that gold looking so contemporary like every painter with an airbrush today (that cartoon brand of surrealism merging virtual and spiritual we all wish to upload to) and suddenly the rush to it unstoppable:

"Hurtado has recently experienced a rise to fame that has been thrilling to witness — albeit maddening in its lateness. Later this month, Hauser & Wirth will dedicate three floors of its gallery [...] the Serpentine Sackler Gallery in London will mount a solo exhibition [...] Hurtado’s first international [...] Museo Tamayo [...] then travel to a series of art institutions in the United States.

"Albiet maddening in its lateness." Maddening in its pretense to an artworld omniscience. As if a lot of artists haven't been left off. As if mere oversight. As if a lot of people aren't suddenly seeing a lot of dollar signs. The prospectors drooling. Ulrich Obrist already having issued grandiose statement to be quoted endlessly. and did you know she was friends with a lot of famous artists? thankfully the tastemakers, the overlords, have finally selected her for accreditation, get to join the ball. The Disney story we all believe in, the rescue we're all waiting for, recognize the good in us. Placed near expensive hardwood benches.