Shelagh Cluett at greengrassi

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Things modernism might cough up in the night, a visceral utterance, hacked. Sort of becoming-modernism, an abject type. Resembling - as opposed to mimetic or autonomous forms - this in-betweeness - which wasn't so acceptable then, not a pure ideation, but happy with amorphousness. Occasionally resembling Lynda Benglis's objects of around the same time, they seem a caricature of the dominant masculine modes, and too bad Cluett missed the whole unmonumental resurgence. (We weren't really resurging artists in the same way then were we.) But there's something very now about these now, and its too bad that things have to be ordered like that.

Miltos Manetas at Éric Hussenot

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Which normally, or recently, nostalgia in painting is pureed and spilled onto canvas as artist's childhood's uncanny. But this is straight nostalgia. And unsure what place nostalgia has in painting, a medium whose relation to time is already paradoxical. Painting seems preloaded to become nostalgia, so sprinkling it with it seems redundant. Tuymans got away with by painting threat of destruction within it, nostalgia as sickness. Katz got away with it by the opposite, threatening to turn it into monument-commodity, all those faces threatening subject-loss turned to stone iconicity.  These, even without the 64 and RCA, even when people, are Luc Tuymans meet Alex Katz, placing nostalgia into nostalgia. Redundant. What happens when no one remembers RCA cables and these become nostalgia over something that to begin with barely existed. Which presumes some type of permanence to the painting. Which we can't.

Richard Aldrich at Misako & Rosen

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No matter how much you make fun of these paintings, they just sort of take it, like dummies, bouncing right back up. Painting as a sponge for blows. Perhaps the best painting is capable of all the lashing in the world. Call these paintings stupid. And they are... but they take it exceedingly well, seem even noble in it. Some paintings whither because they fear stupidity.

Sophie Reinhold at Sundogs

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Utter softness, risking disappearance into cotton, or as others have put it, a bath. Lost to liquid. And all manner of reference to drains, total submerging the paintings tease. Unsure how fun it is to watch someone melt into a bubble bath.

Genoveva Filipovic at Federico Vavassori

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The scatlogical undertones of most painting goes unremarked, its primordial stuff, energized by libido, as dirt suspended in goo, as some form of infantile creation, of selling dirty diapers.
"It would be an interesting history correlated, the desublimation of painting, its id-ification, from the surrealist's subconscious to Pollock's becoming "nature" to finally the triumph of neanderthalism (of say Joe Bradley) the history of men's important doodle and the mythology of the infantilized artist. We must care for him, them, genius whose diapers we exchange."
Filipovic's "toy with the white cube’s capacity to render a pile of [brown stuff] expensive." according a Frieze review of her Vilma Gold show. Not even Shimizu's were this shitty even when expressly painting it, and people eating it. But provisional crappiness here seems the point, the reverse digestion of painting's normal sublimation turned to shit.

Yuji Agematsu at Lulu

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Expelled from cultural bowels onto streets and corners, and hook it to the intellect, placing the ass into the head, its virtual cubes, its broadcast mechanism, its hermetic boxes, proffering it, holding it in hands up, saying look at this shit. The new ecologies of waste. In old Germania the toilets were backwards and you would poop onto a shelf so you could face your fear. Look at what you had done. The ropes of your making on stark white planes. It had some medical diagnostic purpose, to know what you had expelled, reading tea leaves in shallow pools, to determine how our cultural digestion was going.


See too: Ser Serpas at LUMA Westbau, Dylan Spaysky at Good Weather, Dylan Spaysky at Clifton Benevento, Melvin Edwards at Daniel Buchholz, Henrik Olesen at Schinkel Pavilion,  Henrik Olesen at Cabinet, Henrik Olesen at Reena Spaulings, Nancy Lupo at Kristina Kite & Yuji Agematsu at Miguel Abreu, Martin Soto Climent at Michael Benevento & Yuji Agematsu at The Power Station, Yuji Agematsu at Real Fine Arts, Yuji Agematsu at Artspeak, “May the Bridges I Burn Light the Way” at STANDARD (OSLO)

Tomorrow, April 23rd, 2016, at 1344 Lambert Cir in Lafayette, Colorado in the USA, there is an Estate Sale. A pause before a life, its objects, is scrubbed. Green Rayon pantsuits laid out on floral polyester bedspread. Ornately bezeled mirrors. Rusting jewelry. A deflated donut cushion. Faint Naphthalene smells. Black velcro shoes. Frames with contents removed. Objects with sentiments evaporating along with the dead who left them to become voids of that sentiment. It's called staging. A purgatory, between vintage reincarnation and garbage. Threshold worlds in the trivial difference between a trash box and moving box. This last transitional moment art extends indefinitely, embalmed to pay respects, injected with formaldehyde to plasticize body without warmth.

Nostalgia suspends in formaldehyde's rose tinted veil our memories. Memories like fetal pigs. New research shows that nostalgia is the brain's way of combating negative feelings and nihilism, the brain self-administering drugs, the form of a memory, recalling a time when one did feel comfortable, safe, happy, jumpstart its human to face current adversity, depression. Nostalgia's "bittersweet" highlighting a continuum of time and thus progress made.

“If you can recruit a memory to maintain physiological comfort, at least subjectively, that could be an amazing and complex adaptation,” he says. “It could contribute to survival by making you look for food and shelter that much longer.” -Dr. Wildschut, nytimes

medical grade injections of nostalgia, Like leftover cake, nostalgia is an artificially sugary concoction we can bring with us, a souvenir that, like Gober's donuts, we desire forever. Nostalgia is how we laminate our heads to appear like there's more precious substances inside. We coat chairs in plastic to think they're worth preserving. This will all be gone soon.

And Art is symptom of death's fear, and men erecting their "monuments," tumescence, to outlast them, the fear. Thus most art is cast iron, unwilling impermanence or loss. But so much humanity isn't iron, instead it is kept in acidic cardboard, gnawed at by the affection rifling through it. Knowledge is kept on rapidly acidifying papers, stored in databanks we anodize against oxidation in deep storage basements to feign permanence, our security. But the world slowly deteriorates, look into the issue of archiving, it's complex nuanced and impossible, it's baby blankets spilled on, barfed on, a biological archive cum box. Bankers boxes purchased by the gross. Your touch leaves a mark, sews a patch, you reproduce yourself in the objects you attend. Statues eroded by touch, by people’s affinity for them. The more loved photographs in your collection slowly destroyed by your desire. Preciousness in warm cardboard, wearing touch, eroding to someone's love.

The word careworn.

Art as a form that sediments time, a ward against death, ostensibly. A prayer formed to object set to river. "Your second (final) death when someone recalls your name for the last time." Etc. This is the background noise latent art. Ships move apart in the night. Art's "eternality" like a consolation prize, life's souvenir. How one marks their time, marks life, against it ticked away. Feeling sentimental. Blame it on the press release. You, on average, get around 26,0967 days.

An accounting for galleries who had their first show of paintings of black people in 2019,18, Art History majors alight, hopefully. I wonder if there was a catalyst we could point to? The Obama portrait, the skyrocketing prices of the all too great Kerry James Marshall or Njideka Akunyili Crosby, or the all too late Barkley Hendricks Artforum cover, or just people finally awoking to a refreshing air if it didn't come perfumed with so much nervous pumping to a fill a vacuum so obvious. "Young Black Artists Are More in Demand Than Ever—But the Art World Is Burning Them Out" read headlines, like, no shit. "Williams is not alone in feeling conflicted about the type of imagery collectors in particular are gobbling up. 'White collectors want to buy representations of a black body,' artist Kayode Ojo says, 'and there was a time when you could just buy a black person. It’s like, maybe they’re doing the same thing now.'" That paranoia in not just pain but success too. 

Steffani Jemison at Kai Matsumiya

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Some have suggested the notes are meaningless, the random scribblings of a man who by all accounts was functionally illiterate and demonstrated a low IQ. Olson is quick to argue otherwise. He is convinced the codes could contain leads about where McCormick was or with whom he met in the last hours before his corpse was abandoned to rot along with his secrets.
Ricky McCormick always stood out as different from his peers. His mother, Frankie Sparks, describes him as "retarded." His cousin Charles McCormick, who shared a brotherly relationship with Ricky for most of his life, says Ricky would often talk "like he was in another world" and suspects Ricky might have suffered from schizophrenia or bipolar disorder.
"The only thing he could write was his name," Sparks says. "He didn't write in no code." Charles McCormick recalls Ricky "couldn't spell anything, just scribble."
Don Olson stands by his assessment, however.
"I have every confidence that Ricky wrote the notes," Olson says. -riverfronttimes

Art's theft of pretty much everything, dredging culture for its composition, find its emblem here, a social signifier of all of art's making hieroglyphs of itself, items totally meaningless and full. 

Past: Fernanda Gomes at Museo Jumex

"intention which becomes a perfume dispersing to all corners of the space. Our noses grow tired of perfume, of rooms, but this has a refresh rate: further and further compositionalizing the room into smaller and smaller sections, fractals, shrinking like that incredible man who finally tiny dissolves into the fabric of the space, everything becomes part of it, the space is "activated," and we are greeted to a total feng shui, everything has been touched. "


 full: Fernanda Gomes at Museo Jumex

Rasmus Myrup at Jack Barrett

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Of all the fetish endlessly sprinkled about art today we hadn't yet seen such light bondage of fragile nature. Men spilling seed for sale in the background.

Group Show at Cooper Cole

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Could you grow grass with the light of a projector? Could you grow flowers? (Doubtful this hasn't been attempted.) wonder at the total global carbon footprint of currently looping projectors. of anything. Doesn't projecting images of water on dry earth feel apt our world? Our thirst quenched with effect. Endless incantation against, our prayer set to loop.

Raque Ford at 321 Gallery

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need to manifest text as an aesthetic physicality. At its worst generally involves fabrication budgets for neon, like how little distance we've come since Nauman.
3. We don't trust text alone in space - god forbid we come across as pedagogical, or worse boooring, or, worst, wrong - so we aestheticize it, ironize it, make it sparkle, cut it to a koan, so the lash of language is tempered with comfort, which are aesthetics. There seems no art text not couched in some.
(4. While wall text is, oddly, left to its own institutional devices.)

Despite, when Ford's are their most direct, cut and left dry, they retain all the enjoyment of flipping through artist notebooks. The aestheticization is more the provisionality, but it's a natural form.

Gene Beery at Fri Art

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"Of course the painter feels a private respect for the signboard, it performs what the artist cannot. The handcrafted simplicity creating a directness of intention that art is forbidden. Artists' private esteem for the simple, functional object. These objects against which art feels inconsequential, inadequate against an elemental usefulness."

Beery toys with this functionality, a slight haywire version sparking in the walls, threatening to burn the whole thing, meaning, down. The trueness of statements, their ability to make sense, becomes if not beside the point, a thing to torture. Not the treachery of images, but the treachery of saying anything at all. 

Past: LaKela Brown at Lars Friedrich

"Commodity displays look a lot like our information displays, the Google images that look a lot like old toy catalogs, inventories of our blossoming desires anointed with the heavenly light of product photography pornography, offering a selection menu that is overexposed, bleaching like coral reefs whose left white skeletons trace a once thriving culture. The ecosystem remains a ghost of taxonomic fossils remaining, held for the assessment of all the dreams of a life embedded."


LaKela Brown at Lars Friedrich

Josh Smith at David Zwirner

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Maybe what Smith actually provides is relief. Against paintings overdetermined to like the nth degrees by whatever surrealist imago kool-aid the artworld currently swimming, Smith's is an interminable vacation to fields of ever stupid flowers. None of these painting individually matter. Functional. Require zero attention. Just exist like idiotic specimens of a genus Smith. Perhaps this is what Eliza Douglas was responding to, an idea executed, eventually you live long enough with it to learn to love your captor.

Eliza Douglas at Overduin & Co.

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Not so interesting perhaps from a PierreMenard/Sturtevantian vantage (the whole tongue louse, deterritorial author theft well trod), but maybe as a continuation of Douglas' clever ideas for coating painting in a candy shell, creating frames that exist as excuses for painting. Like before's hands which cast spells for some sloppy "painterly moment." They feel sorta cheap (it would not be the first time the artist has ordered paintings from China) and that seems too, the point, like Smith's lame name, a mere means to fill an exhibition.

In late 2014, hearing that many schools in Europe were free, she called a friend who had gone to the Städelschule in Frankfurt—one of the top art schools in the world, with a reputation for fostering experimental work. She set up a Skype date with a professor, painter Willem de Rooij. Then, with two weeks to go before the meeting, she got to work. 

Douglas began painting abstract forms on random objects around her house—aluminum foil, found images, a set of Batman bed sheets—and photographed the results. She reproduced the images on small canvases using the kind of print-on-demand machines you find at CVS and Walmart, then painted over them again. 

“I thought it was a good way to get a lot of decent-looking stuff made really quickly,” Douglas says now. “I was thinking about how I might be able to get him to think that I was doing something more elaborate than what I really was.” -Taylor Dafoe, artnet

Polly Apfelbaum, Isa Melsheimer at Galerie nächst St. Stephan Rosemarie Schwarzwälder

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Everything in the artworld is in an inflated state today, the material is in excess, the color is set to full, surrealist cartoons everywhere, the world is slapstick. Our Fragonard moment, new rococo, a constant pummeling with rosy perfume.

Trisha Baga at Marta Cervera

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A genuine gesture to provide the 2D version just to really prove you're not seeing the 3D version, evidence of your distance. But providing the crappy version at least tries. Maybe you've got your own 3D glasses at home. 

Leda Bourgogne at Jiri Svestka

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The PR, which turns todays art buttons into a machine gun hail of bullet cover, is perhaps more interesting. All of art's terms somehow loaded into its clip, the first paragraph: "complex installation," "allusions of historical painting," "meticulously built,"  "assemblage," "power relations" "contingency of identity constructions", "objects as suffering non-normative bodies," "thematizes," "objecthood of the image," "fetishistically,""the subconscious" "pointing out power relations" "multiple levels of affective" "between"x4 "constant shifting of focus."

The second paragraph begins with our guy THE DANDY. This should be horrible but somehow it's not, it's too much fun.

See too: Leda Bourgogne, Ida Ekblad at Kunstverein Braunschweig

Cady Noland at MMK

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The means through which we connect. Noland's inventing then what has become widespread today, an archaeology of modern society in art poetics, using objects to denote the human. These things were made for us, they are evidence of us. Turns out the poetry of the modern world isn't pretty, but instead a lot of connections through galvanized steel.

Ulrike Ottinger at Kirchgasse

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If Matthew Barney somehow didn't know of Ulrike Ottinger's oeuvre then a medal is in order. Others have made the connection in terms of gender, surrealism, mythos, which is accurate if vague horoscope retro-prediction. But the more distinct fingerprint lay in Ottinger's use of the promotional still image as a mode itself, able to connote and transact meaning equivalent to the film, a received token with through which to speak, a common communal currency. Barney had to have known of this when he turned the promotional image into a metastasized hypertrophic version involving stylists, lighting and image consciousness to an extreme, into basically Levi's ad campaign of artistic hubris. Cremaster succeeded, regardless any filmic merit, on its ability to manifest excitement and intrigue as a promotional vehicle, a cultural mythos that mirrored the mythos within. At the time you could almost talk about Cremaster without having seen any of it, the image was so omnipresent. Seeing was of less import than having being able to have an opinion and know of it. Having gained traction ever since, this form of promotional vehicle cannot be understated in importance post CAD/insta etc. when pipes and what they can funnel is tantamount.

Erin Jane Nelson at Atlanta Contemporary

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As the cultural detritus of artist's childhoods coagulates as surrealist irruptions, we become evermore surveyors of trash, the unconscious waste of time. That which sinks to bottom, the marine snow of populist energy discarded. Stuf. Culture is automatism, and artists become the process of its barnicalization.

Angela Bulloch at Simon Lee

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As movements and their banners fade the artistic remainders, no longer surrounded by their fanfare, makes apparent all the mannerism. What conceptual premise even was there against a blinding stylization? Why were we into the ephemera of design projects? The the final 2008 trumpeting of its moment now reads as literal explanation, theanyspacewhatever. And all the critiques reacting and filling the vacuum, Bishop's antagonism or Scanlan or whatever. The work has aged horrifically. And as much as the now any space - devoid of its party - showcases all its vacant stylings for said party, it is also perhaps that our current moment, dominated by the circulated image (and its ability to be read immediately) as tantamount makes these images appear vacant, that 2008 was perhaps the last gasps of when theory, academia, Artforumal banter, or any sort of thought outside surrealist imaginings had some sort of sway in art, filled the air with chatter, a lack of which now make the past appear vacant because we lack chatter.

Luís Lázaro Matos at Project Space 1646

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It would seem that no amount of thinking about alien life could release us from any sort of anthropocentric prison. Thinking about aliens, we design childhood bedrooms by accident.