Stuf becomes subject. Curdles a skin, a flake to slough. Contaminates, spreads. "Disposable." "Flushable." Problems in city pipes, amassing with congealed human grease to create clogs from hell. "Behold The Fatberg: London's 130-Ton, 'Rock-Solid' Sewer Blockage" A world unable to contain our disposability. Reamasses elsewhere, waiting in the night, leaking nightmare. Find toothpicks in veins. Lupo's associative juicing. The process of paper making and the accumulation of sewer blockage aren't that different. A more human pulp. A calendar of waste.
See too: Nancy Lupo at Kristina Kite, Nancy Lupo at Swiss Institute, Nancy Lupo at 1857, Nancy Lupo at Antenna Space
Safety products not only abating hazard but highlight its possibility. A potentialized air of drama that we'd love to accumulate on art's stage: at any moment calamity, at any moment circumstance. There is said to be "a situation." Sort of like an "experience." Even this weak force in the real Painting wishes it could hold such potential. Some previously invisible thing be felt. The "layers of infrastructure that determine experience."
Past: Marte Eknæs, Sean Raspet at Room East
"Safety products not only abating hazard but highlight its possibility. A potentialized air of drama that we'd love to accumulate on art's stage: at any moment calamity, at any moment circumstance. There is said to be "a situation." Sort of like an "experience." Even this weak force in the real Painting wishes it could hold such potential. Some previously invisible thing be felt. The "layers of infrastructure that determine experience."
"And Fight Club turned the 'Calculation of Negligence' into nihilistic mantra for millions of angst ridden boys, finding solace for their jade in a new schizo-sado-masculinity, solace in a brutality ending in terrorist fantasies of high-rises burning. It felt like relief. The main character's lavish condo exploding from a gas leak was ostensibly the best thing that ever happened to him. The non-accident we later learn is a symptom stemming from the very repressive bourgeois lifestyle it destroys. That the terrorist act was itself an expression of late-capitalist detachment, the same thing that Baudrillard would later claim in his "The Spirit of Terrorism" that capitalism expressed a sort of auto-terrorism, boredom itself bringing the towers down. The Pop success of both at least clarifies the latent cultural desire we have for the fantasy of watching the world burn so long as they are sublimated (make us able to believe we would never actually desire to see them enacted) through the filters of acceptable and neutering forms, pop-film or philosophy, and here art."
Read full: Marte Eknæs, Sean Raspet at Room East
Showers as prisons, cages. Dark historical undertones. Even if these are "Edwardian" "wellness" and "welcoming"(wut) there's something about "mechanistic" and "shower" that will always dredge some historical subconscious. These are the afterimages of such. (Rid of flowers, we are the ghosts asked to inhabit.) If Foucault were alive we'd already know the spa is a prison. But he's dead and these linger with some notion of. I keep thinking of that Carolyn Lazard quote, the "uncompensated labor necessary to reproduce oneself day after day." To keep oneself "clean." To keep oneself viable. And painting to touch such nerves.
Past: Lewis Stein
"... an obvious precursor to interest in cultural artifactification and art's white light used as anthropological study ... The world is alive and humming with the energies that conceived an object as well the current emptiness inferring the ghosts that will inhabit it... A door handle infers a maker and user, and art is the Fried-ian stage that plays it.
Read Full: Lewis Stein at Essex Street
like Jawelnsky's heads, which whose anatomy is just the excuse to hang paint. Gives it a reason, the face arranges the paint, like furniture.
See too: Heather Guertin at Brennan & Griffin
"Is there a distinction between furniture and works of art? Where do you fall on the spectrum?"
"Sometimes I make sculptures, but for the most part right now I’m making functional works. It’s a little bit less rigorous. Sometimes I feel pressured to load work with meaning—or, when the work doesn’t have a real function, you’re sort of trying to create a perceived function. As if it serves a purpose. Worth having an existence. That can be nerve-racking sometimes. I think it should happen very naturally, very organically. With furniture, the function is its purpose, so it’s still art in that way. You can still give it that same respect, but you can justify its existence immediately because you can use it, you know?" (interview in ssense)
"But Kanu muddles the usual divisions, highlighting the way black vernacular making—slab culture, African textiles—is excluded from rigid notions of what art is and by whom it is made." (Review by Tiana Reid in AiA)
Kanu is right about the functional object. And one of the joys of a vernacular functionalism is the endlessly alternative, the elsewise arrival at a similar solution. Think Birney Imes documenting the solutions of an impoverished south. Kanu's project might be a similar mining of alternatives to an already existing solution, selling the artworld what it wants.
See too: Jessi Reaves at Bridget Donahue, Melvin Edwards at Daniel Buchholz, Mark Grotjhan at Karma, Robert Grosvenor at Karma
Past: L (the artist formerly known as Lazaros?)
"art's a witchcraft, disproved by the sciences, elucidated by sociology and psychology, in which a practice's material insistence affects a viewer magically: think tarot, images drawn and illuminated to bounce around in your head to alight some new substance inside, like any painting. The further you believe in the drawing the more deeply it affects. A potion for wealth eventually brings it through stubborn physical existence on your kitchen counter to remind you that's what you value, seek. Any object's aboutness, its meaning, it tautologically enacts like a string tied around your finger: the string doesn't necessarily intrinsically symbolize "pick up eggs;" its meaning is conjured by the reminded who tied it. Objects are imbued with meaning, even snakes humans are not primed to fear but primed to develop some emotional response to, blank slates all. Like art the trick is getting anyone to believe it enough to keep it in their home, tie it to their being."
There was nothing really "new" in Wade Guyton's rocket launch career. The "new" was a false-promise of a new technology for realizing old dreams, a printer for our unconscious. New tech, means, provides a look of promise, of advancement. And Fallahpisheh's more like Tala Madani's, better for its ancient and dumb themes in drawing dark projection screens. This is what drawing is. Old.
See too: Tala Madani at 303 Gallery, Wade Guyton at Academie Conti & Le Consortium, Tala Madani at David Kordansky
Past: Matte Representation (Jennifer J. Lee)
"Paint like suede. Leather, rubbed, treated. The point is the [soft opaque] surface, a shallow pool ... A plane to project on. Have you touched a movie screen, they're like this, bumpy and silver... A surface that warbles in little blots scumbled. ... a new type of formalism where content is created then made an aside, rejected, cancelled by the imbroglio of meaning."
"Call the exhibition Clue. The puzzles of today's painting in which their individuated flat symbols present a real mystery of a subject. Looking like de Chirico designed a board game. Soviet Realism for the icon age, new devotional painting. Colonel Rublev in the museum with a candlestick."
Past: Ian Kiaer
The romance of battle against architecture, as some have written it. In which the overt drama of rooms is rivaled by dumpy objects attended to. Kaier is seductive. The gesture of the artist's deliberation, hand, heightened to anxiety, makes unresponsive objects gain weight.
"objects gain authority through compositional attention, (think Fried's theater and minimalism's staging), remnants totemized by a self-aware anticipation of the viewer, and arranged for them - is probably the best argument against speculatory theories. The arrangements anticipate the viewer, appear as though inhabited, sentient by the specificity of a logic which cannot be seen but inferred, winking, and attributed to the Wizard of Oz, an intelligent design from some immanent spectre, but really just a smokeless mirror and us believing again in ghosts.
Read full: Ian Kiaer at Lulu, Ian Kiaer at the Neubauer Collegium
