Because of the hegemony of image, we don't see art like this much anymore. Shimabuku requires a time that no longer exists, the lazy day, a time for wasting on clouds. Long videos without much a clear point. It's that Bas Jan Ader, Francis Alys sort of breezing conceptual art. Gentle myth making. You glean as much, or more, from the generous press text accompanying the the exhibition as you do the images, which in true poetical-conceptual fashion, don't mean much, but instead provides a lovely illustration. It's easier to recall a myth if you have an image of it. Recall a time when we had time for this.
An explosion in a Hello Kitty flannel factory. A John Wesley from hell. Organized, but not necessarily reasonable.
Past: Caitlin Keogh at Bortolami
Illustration is meant to bring clarity, to denote, delineate, resolve. So when it draws surrealism there's a tension in the elegant lines not necessarily clarifying. But we feel something is being told, illustrated. Like if John Wesley designed Tarot cards ... The Tarot illustration provides its own oracle, meaning. ... Its less the digitalization of painting than its conversion to iOS. Clarity and "recognition is a visual strategy used by the advertorial (logo) or systems (icons) that has reached saturation with touchscreens, GUIs, facebook... [Clarity and recognition become their own force, violence.] Painters begin adopting this as their history, the Magrittean version of objects as linguistic symbols."
Read full: Caitlin Keogh at Bortolami
What the artworld attempts to disavow always comes back to haunt it. (Andrea Fraser wrote about this well.) Disavowal "rejects a fact that is too uncomfortable to accept" - i.e. the artworld unable to accept some uncomfortable truth that doesn't agree with the self-image it needs to project. So for instance, Simchowitz is the artworld villain of the 2010s - I can't even remember what the villainry was - maybe saying the quiet part loud - his name basically synonymous with "evil dealer." But as new villains emerge evolving greater forms of evil, Simco seems tame, his methods all but accepted, and the artworld acclimates to the uncomfortable fact about itself. That people use it to make money. The lesson here being the ultimate adjudicators of [vitality] in art are not justice. It is the merely the ability to self-replicate - to procreate, survive, spam yourself into consciousness with press, sales, money. Power in the artworld is simply the ability to leverage ones assets into more.. well assets, which eventually becomes visibility. Until it's non-ignorable. Until they all absorb the evil, still pretend something else.
Same w/ the Cucchi/Clemente thing here - despite all the last 20-30 years warding against neo-expressionism, guess who is back.
The Spaulings shift happened around 2014. Josh Smith was painting palm trees. Klara Liden took dance lessons (instead of bashing bicycles with a pipe in an empty apartment.) Koether showed painting on canvas. Even Carpenter painted paintings. Claire Fontaine's revolution stopped being given several exhibitions a year. Seth Price decamped for Petzel. It was like everyone had kids. And then two years later, a second home, and suddenly tasteful paintings on the walls, many exhibitions of them. Had we all just become adults? This was everywhere. Even Mackinven's 2013 paintings seemed more with old Spaulings. But everyone's teenage hopes of criticality and middle fingers given over to colorful walls, given over to the mere apparatus of visibility (2014 was one year after Sanchez's question on digital transmission, is this the aftermath?) to just keeping the symbolic lights on for fluorescent symbolist moments. So that there are two kinds of nostalgia operating now.
Past: Alastair Mackinven at Reena Spaulings
"Something on our faces."
This one is mostly images, so you gotta click to see: Alastair Mackinven at Reena Spaulings
Past: Bob van der Wal at Neue Alte Brücke
"...the mad attempts at extracting some actionable knowledge from [art]. 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."
(link)
The PR's meter relates them to sun - "Sunshine made physical" - and not that dark shameful interior - the abyssal logs we pass like intestinal ropes, attaching us our immanence. The difference between what something is and what something represents. They are but sticks. Sunshine made physical. But oiled with elbow grease. Which makes them sensitive. Opens pores for interpretation. The break in between what something is and what something suggests: a function, poetic fissure. Tea leaves, turds, or sticks, when placed against porcelain, it's open. Suggestive and, more importantly, moistened.
See too: Yuji Agematsu at Lulu, Richard Rezac at Isabella Bortolozzi, Naoki Sutter-Shudo at Bodega
As "photography" becomes ever more processed by virtual machines, and "realism" so abstracted beyond anything concrete, the term "photorealism" becomes meaningless against our cartoon stuf. The new plastic real. The protagonists of Toy Story are not representations of cowboys or Space Rangers, their being is rendering: "YOU ARE A TOY," screams the sheriff of this reality. But through the power of movie magic, they are suspended between. Their image is the real, the world around them is made false, a rendering in comparison. When you buy the cartoon sponge off the shelf, you don't purchase the one in your hand, you purchase that higher order of its affective image, its grease scrubbing sorcery. This higher order that arranges us. Originals without origin. Which rubber duck is this? Where is this image located?
Past: Gerold Miller
"a genre, "Problems in painting" which we could trace through a legacy of modernism and concerns with flatness, frames, and for-art's-sake, ... endless ways to begaze your navel, painting. Weren't Stella's black paintings just navels-en-abyme. ...How many ways can Dr. Frank reassemble the corpse and we still call it painting?.."
"severity of its blankness softened by form massaged to the shape that becomes the content of its extreme legibility: graphic and squealing. Extreme legibility; insta icons semio-traverse space to possess recognition, without it, the psychoactive element of Miller: getting struck in the face with blankness."
Gerold Miller at Cassina Projects, Gerold Miller at Kunsthalle Weishaupt
It perhaps should come as no surprise that Haim Steinbach’s practice has seemed increasingly relevant during the past decade, a period in which the rituals around commercial objects have become all the more pervasive and resolved in their choreographies of desire. Indeed, the heightened attention to design in mass culture—its near-total application in commerce, from the making of products to the construction of display space, at the service of rendering life itself more a matter of lifestyle—would seem an immediately resonant context for an artist long interested in the ways in which our subjectivity is inflected by the things with which we choose to surround ourselves. One might even productively compare corporate focus groups, which seek to articulate and refine the emotional and intellectual associations consumers have with their belongings... But whereas the focus group is steeped in a kind of mercenary anthropology, Steinbach’s endeavors hold up a mirror not only to the symbolic operations attending the creation of exchange value but also to the real psychological dynamics that underpin such identification. - Tim Griffin
If desire is what Steinbach’s work produces, it arrives with blunt, unexpected force. That might be because our drive to acquire and organize things is, in part, a conduit through which we understand ourselves. Less a comment on capitalism than an investigation of the production of the self, Steinbach’s work acknowledges the fragility of subjecthood—that our funny, fragile egos are bound up in the unexpectedly rich terrain of the knickknacks and bric-a-brac we collect and covet.- Johanna Burton
Whether his manipulations of anticipation and desire produce a unique psychological space or are merely clever remains in question. -Joshua Decter
