Lutz Bacher at Galerie Buchholz and Sarah Rapson at Essex Street

(Clockwise from top left, Lutz Bacher, Susan Cianciolo, Sarah Rapson, Park Mcarthur)

Yellowing archive.

While early Conceptual Art was interested in the document (the instructional as a virtual, a program, cerebral) its second generation is a bit more lossy, interested in the fossil, more precisely the fossilization, that slow decomposition into eternality, history. Recoups its own acidification, hazing, foxing, all the condition reports it will accumulate. This "second generation" invests in the degradation of generations of bootleg tape. Fossils existing as strange evidence of a world. a pathos in the materials we find to mediate our touch to the world. ... The objects here, designed for ourselves, infer something about the bodies which they govern.

It would not take a freudian to posit why particularly women appear to be more sensitive to material conditions of the world. Like, while Kosuth was concerned for all the mysteries of "Chair," Wex and Mary Kelly were like yes, but we also get pregnant. The "cerebral" of men's white concerns was treated as the higher plane and, for all its agnostic posturing, the "conceptual" allied itself with a reverence akin the religious divinity it ostensibly exiled. Men, oblivious to their own bodies that had never been in question by culture, had the privilege to etherealize themselves above everyone's heads to some assumed universal while women's were increasingly entrenched in politic ground war.

Minimalism's infatuation for the industrial process, of say Judd et al, was, in part, premised on these industrial processes deletion of the body and its "expression" (if not a promise of subjectivity lifted entirely) in looking "pure," like objectivity, removing the human. ... Of course this was the lie of any commodity: that the clean aluminum sheets comprising boxes or laptops weren't simply wiped of their indentured sweat. Minimalism hid the body in the closet. Edward's balls coagulated these castoff bodies minimalism so desperately wanted to forget.

the body is expressed not through "figuration" but its intermediary.. Think of Cady Noland's institutional objects, learning something about the specifics of flesh under society. Of elder's walkers and handcuffs. We make objects for ourselves and so of course they express us. And eventually they exist for so long beside us, silently shape alongside us, that they begin to take on facets and express things that were latent, learning by proxy.

And today we are so acclimated to objects and commodities adapted to us that any object blurrying suggestion for the function they provide (to us) produces an uncanny effect. We say they look otherworldly, alien, simply because we don't know what good they are to us...

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 Banker's boxes purchased by the gross. Your touch leaves a mark, sews a patch, you reproduce yourself in the objects you attend. Preciousness in warm cardboard, wearing touch, eroding to someone

which Bacher recurringly recall, cosmos xeroxed into the noise of their granular flooring, stellar scales spilled across expanses like baseballs or sprawls of sand. Mountains dissolve in grains that resemble liquids in geologic time. This recurring theme. The biblical "for dust you are and to dust you will return" is, as far as we know of entropy, scientifically accurate.



see too: Susan Cianciolo at Modern Art, Marianne Wex at Tanya Leighton, Ser Serpas at LUMA Westbau, Ghislaine Leung at Chisenhale & Essex Street, Laurie Parsons at Museum Abteiberg, Park McArthur at Chisenhale, Park McArthur at SFMOMA, Richard Rezac at Isabella Bortolozzi, Henrik Olesen at Schinkel Pavilion, Henrik Olesen at Cabinet, Henrik Olesen at Reena Spaulings, Pati Hill at Essex Street, Klara Lidén & Alicia Frankovich at Kurator, Melvin Edwards at Daniel Buchholz

Contemporary Art Quarterly: Richard Aldrich

(link)

"...At the artist’s request, this archive differs in format from the others we’ve published—it includes only installation views."
What is the gallery but the wreath, the coronation, lighting bestowing your anointment like a halo. No gold frames required because white real estate provides the gilt. Installation views that attempt to distance “painting” from the hegemony of its image - to ostensibly preserve it from the porn trading cards they’ve become - seems naive at best. Privatizing it simply finalizes the gallery as the accreditor, art a fiat currency.

see too: Richard Aldrich at Adrian Rosenfeld, Richard Aldrich at Gladstone Gallery, Richard Aldrich at Misako & Rosen, Brian Calvin at Le Consortium, Sophie Nys at Crac Alsace

Lucy Bull at High Art

(link)

Psychedelia; Google deep dreams of Kahlo's flowers. Vulvas like volcanos, magma, geologic surveys. Abstraction was once "what you see is what you see" until what you saw became convoluted, full of hallucination and sexual. The press release says as much, and is good to admit as much, our complete return to surrealism. With better psychoactives. Surrealism works for today as art must be a fount eternal, and so the point today is to overlay as much as information as possible, until it blurs, slips, make inkblots with lsd.

"The boringness of Google's "Deep Dream" project was in making explicit the pareidolia latent, [what was] hidden in carpets and noise and threatened distrust in seeing, those momentary misrecognitions and ghosts in corners. Humans are apophenic machines - made to "see things." The inkblot innuendo was an essential of abstraction that was far too impure for post-war painting to deal with: it would have limited abstraction to the mere human, like Cecily Brown's meaty innuendos, very untranscendent in an era when people were throwing around the possibility of universals. Op-art was a cheap imitation of the purer form's sanctity; Op-art rested on physiologic parlor tricks of biological mechanics rather than the more strict and thus universal forms of abstraction that could communicate with dolphins and gods."

see too: Larry Poons at Michael Jon & Alan

Fabian Marti at Peter Kilchmann

(link)

Your exhibition against the wheel of time is asking for exhaustion, defeat, which this is. Kawara stated himself alive though, pointedly, not necessarily well. As if consciousness was enough. Distance of 10,000 years recedes everything to pinpoints anyway, reduced to binary, alive dead on off. The system denotes what is on/off. Capitalism it is selling/not selling. Art, show/noshow. So just whatever, put yourself out there, as if enough.

Sergei Tcherepnin at Company

(link)

Blinky lightbulb art.
We like paintings that "do things," we conflate a critical function with any function, and so when paintings sing or beam its a short cut or short-circuting this need for "function." Tcherepnin's were always sort of tasteful reserved forms of this "functioning painting" positing a perhaps real interest in their sounding that just happened to be packaged as paintings. The move into Brätsch INSTITÜT for mass-production lines of "content" - built off the Genzkenian insight that production is art, is always content, producible at any speed - seems to renege on Tcherepnin's more sound interests, into full blow collage-electronics school of the last 5 years that apparently has not completely burned its lightbulbs out. Somewhere a joke about how long these bright ideas, bulbs, last.

"Every 10 years assemblage reinvigorates itself as the dumpsters picked through are modernized to the current castoffs and appear new, the waste that evolves along culture until finally an artist is able to rummage up enough LEDs, acrylic panels and Arte Povera catalogs to accumulate the update to our Rauschenberg cardboard clogging the pipes of our forward progress."


See too:
“Lemurenheim” at Meyer Kainer, Ei Arakawa at Kunstverein Dusseldorf, Kerstin Brätsch at Gio Marconi, DAS INSTITÜT at Serpentine Gallery, KAYA at Deborah Schamoni, Kerstin Brätsch at Gavin Brown, Amy Lien and Enzo Camacho at CCS Bard, Amy Lien and Enzo Camacho at 47 Canal (2), Amy Lien, Enzo Camacho at various locations, Amy Lien & Enzo Camacho at 47 Canal (1), Ei Arakawa at Taka Ishii & Peter Halley at Modern Art

Kinke Kooi at Lucas Hirsch

(link)

What one could consider eccentric art and its rarity. Despite an entire contingent of culture ostensibly pursuing it, something outside bounds of normalizing walls. Instead just hordes of art. These touch eccentricity, but appear not lost to it. It having to do with the current state of cultural affairs.

Group Show at Center for Contemporary Art Tel Aviv

(link)

Tech industries move faster than art, are more powerful widespread and dominant than art. Our tinkerings with it, which begin to feel like compositionalizing its looks, are like cargo cults to an industrial god. They are all powerful and we build primitive totems in our churches to give an impression we understand. Theists believing religion make rain.

Marguerite Humeau at Clearing

(link)

An excess of reference. B I O M O R P H I C. Biologic inkblots. 2010's Surrealism has metastasized into camp, into theatrics. Once clocks melted, now whales do, stretched, ballooned, dragged in the virtual and dropped in the physical, cast in medical looking material (which is its own trend). Ten years ago we all thought Matthew Barney was too much, now look at us. We've literally reinvented him over and over.


See too: “Being Thing” at Centre International d’Arte et du Paysage & Treignac Projet,

“Ungestalt” at Kunsthalle Basel

Kelly Akashi, Cayetano Ferrer at PP

(link)

More exhibitionist materiality. Open the wardrobe to expose the wood. We so desperate for some woodgrain to counteract the glass we see everything through. We crave touch, sensibility, sense, something to counteract this numbness from everything electric, world rendered. This materialist becomes conflated with the authentic, the rustic. Stripped. But, no matter how much you want it, do not touch the art. Leaving everyone with a case of erotic sexual denial.


See too: Olga Balema at High Art (2) Olga Balema at High Art (1) Olga Balema at Bridget Donahue, Daniel Lefcourt at Blum & Poe, ektor garcia at Cooper Cole, N. Dash at Casey Kaplan

N. Dash at Casey Kaplan

(link)

These are bit more compositionalized, more arty, but at base they are still the butterflies, material, pinned behind glass, catalogs of physical sensations you see but cannot touch. Materiality porn. "...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 [build] a materiality so strong it visually empaths itself, that we could actually feel something through glass.""[these,] images, unable to be tactile, to make sensuality palpable irrupts strange fetishes: pornography must materialize its sensitivities by finding visual equivalents for touch. " "Bodies that photograph well." "Our touch, now more than ever, comes from sight, comes from packages of it in the high definition of images and advertising, we feel through sight"


Olga Balema at High Art (2) Olga Balema at High Art (1) Olga Balema at Bridget Donahue, Daniel Lefcourt at Blum & Poe, ektor garcia at Cooper Cole, N. Dash at Casey Kaplan

Hilary Pecis at Halsey McKay

(link)

Gingham filters for our paintings. Nostalgia you can adjust on a slider. The equivalent of jeans that come pre-torn, factory fresh history. Surely our craving for this nostalgia's cake, a symptom of insecure times. The obvious reference to Wood's would fail to account for this theme'd overlay, and closer thematics perhaps in Davey's search in means of prewashing our tech with its past.


See too: Moyra Davey at Institute of Contemporary Art, Jonas Wood at David Kordansky, Steve Bishop at Kunstverein Braunschweig, Wolfgang Tillmans at Galerie Buchholz

Alan Charlton at Galerie Tschudi

(link)

"He didn’t want to build a myth around himself, strive for a socially respected position or create paintings that would reveal hidden truths or promise transcendence. Charlton therefore became an artist who – with modesty, but also with unwavering commitment – does everything himself: from the stretcher frame to mounting the canvas to the careful application of colour, from packing up the paintings, tidying and cleaning the studio to organizing shipment. ""Throughout, the paintings are grounded, unpretentious, honest, and straightforwardly present."
But then: This [Charlton's] unshakable concentration, the perfectly skilled handling, the authenticity and care lavished on each individual step..."

The quaker or protestant ethic, with its reverence, particularly without those ethics end result of a function, becomes its form of myth, building church without furniture.


See too: “Seven Reeds” at Overduin & Co. Daniel Buren at Bortolami, Heimo Zobernig, Dena Yago at Sandy Brown, 

Ivy Haldeman at Capsule Shanghai

(link)

To summate, the casing is the suits, which is the comic line, which is the erotic sheen, which is the women.


see too: Ivy Haldeman at Downs & Ross

“Fried Patterns” at Brussels Gallery Weekend

(link)

Sure it looks like your usual undergraduate thesis show, but that's not what matters in situations like these. Attention is not valorized in the visible, in situations like these.

Past: Ivy Haldeman at Downs & Ross

"Oldenburg innuendo slicked to the surface, in the stroke of the brush we could call lascivious. The same strokes that delineated super hero breasts comicly. In latex suits forming questions other comic artists posed as, "Is Amazon Girl's super power the ability to squeeze that figure into that suit?" Squeeze that meat into that casing. Is the [casing] the product, or a surface of sex that sells?"


Ivy Haldeman at Downs & Ross

Miriam Cahn at Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía

(link)

They look like drawings made by children to be diagnosed by therapists. And wearing their analysis on their sleeve. There's no confusion as to what these relate. And this should make them mawkish, sentimental, but the hammy naiveté only underscores. So much "bad painting" comes with an ironic wink made, generally, by grown men who affect their idiot savant, pretend Picassoing. These instead are too much, their saccharineness becomes its own abjection. Real stupidity, not feigned.


See too:Miriam Cahn at Meyer Riegger, Miriam Cahn at Jocelyn Wolff, Miriam Cahn at Meyer Riegger, Calvin Marcus at Clearing

Darren Bader at Franco Nero

Dora Budor at Kunsthalle Basel

(link)

A Pierre Hughye for the post-apocalypse, Budor's maybe a bit more invested in theatrics, the movies, and less in magic, instead in its dumbness, which is what we love those big sci-fi budgets for, the vast quantity of ash.

“Digital Gothic” at Centre d’Art Contemporain La Synagogue Delme

(link)

Why has the gothic returned? It has metastasized, a gothic grown on gothic. A more byperbolic version. Sometimes it's easier to embrace pain, ruin, than it is to desire change, which would leave possibility for disappointment. Instead welcoming the car crash to feel some control over its. We peek through doors at madness, horror, peel back scalps to see skull's white, as a comfort to state, surely the end-times will not be as bad as this.
The gothic's dissolution from historical marker to stylistic genre, like steampunk or retrofuturism, holds onto an anachronism, an implicit nostalgia for the past's future, rather than our own. What the Victorians had imagined as horror, pools of blood and pendulum cuts, is far more genteel than what is our current madness. This is the pleasure-saftey of genre, it has rules.


See too: Morag Keil at Project Native Informant, Morag Keil at Jenny’s, Morag Keil at Real Fine Arts, Nicolas Ceccaldi at Le Consortium

Bea Schlingelhoff at Museum des Landes Glarus Freulerpalast

(link)

A good thorough dry PR. Removing the glass from the Museum. When art finally comes back around to things like conceptual practices, or institutional critique, one wonders what role CAWD will have in a more patient thorough artworld. If we get back there ever.

Naomi Rincón Gallardo at Parallel Oaxaca

(link)

A PhD in art. Thoughts on doctoral necessitude arts once alit the artworld. Now here we are. Pursuing it. Can calls for anti-colonialist practices come from inside the house?

“Automatic Door” at Park View / Paul Soto

(link)

The asinine quantity of pictures of bodies today, instagram influencers, lotion advertising, pornography. The vast amount of flesh smeared on everything, our stores full of them, our faces spread at 10 meter heights. Everywhere; a hall of mirrors. As if Bernd and Hilla Becher had foretold of a, this, complete surveillance, catalog, cars with more eyes than spiders to take everything and render it. And our bodies become so extracted, mined, and repackaged, that we start to feel like we don't have bodies at all. Just things, mocked as meat space, something stupid or without sense, or heat, or passion, or sensitivity, but whitened teeth smiles mined. And but then here a photo of a body still surprising, that can endear us to it, these weird incongruous things not yet fully extracted.


See too:  AA Bronson and Keith Boadwee at Deborah Schamoni, Geumhyung Jeong at KLEMM’S, Roger Hiorns at Faena Arts Center, Erwin Wurm at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg,

Ann Craven at Center for Maine Contemporary Art

(link)

A disposability, amassment, like pages in diary, sketches in a notebook, kleenexes to breeze, dust to the wind. Cheapness enhances their temporality; it tarnishes quickly to any glare that won't care for it. They come pre-wounded as chintz.

Andrea Büttner at Galerie Tschudi

(link)

We've become so addicted to the candied surrealism that dominates. Not sure other forms are even entirely legible anymore. Your gut biome begins to mirror the flora of what you feed it. Eventually you crave what you've been fed.

“Body Check” at Lenbachhaus

(link)

As a visual pairing, a sort of symmetry, sense. And also a physical feat collecting "about one hundred selected works on loan from international collections that are rarely on public display." But we get about 16 images here. And as a conceptual pairing, a goose chase, "dramatizing the female and male bodies" pretty much end the similarities. A coincidence if not a mistake.