A title that's compelling because it's honest - materiality, brought to Market, amass enough becomes quality, an aesthetic, of the marketplace. Hoist a table, your wares into space, for sale. Like we ever needed more. Expressionism's paint on a fine tablecloth, now durags. Mike Kelley's chintz glued critique to its cloth, but that was just what we liked then.
This is a crazy repository. Documentation that goes all the way down. In CAD's spectrum choice of editorial or vault, this is firmly in the vault territory - the whole catalog - more than your morning coffee can handle. This is not an exhibition but an archive. Which is good for the world, bad for dear CAWD reader. This after all CAWD's endless whinging over exhibitions with 6 promotional stills. Now CAWD given the whole pack to smoke. Eat it and like it dweeb. Maybe this is way to get CAWD to shut up - sing its music of universal silence. Maybe this is pesticide to memetic insta-friendly aesthetics. But maybe excess might only eventually breed new editors, new mastheads to sort the mass, fear.
Grosse is the most French painter alive. Which is impressive for a German. Deftly avoiding the historical German anxiety* to instead shoot acid rainbows, prep rooms to catch clowns exploding. The French taste for acrid color. Us all happy Bernard Frize hadn't thought of it. The mess was qualified by its scale, which felt like reason. Because it's hard to package both scale and mess. And this was its critical quality, "site specific" and unconsumable as anything but painting, no support for its sale, just paint, everywhere. Painting dirt was probably the crescendo of this. But now an attempt to package the ether, like Yves Klein's sponges, a structure to sop the aerosol, give perfume both air and object, like a misread jewel.
*Though admittedly Richter too wiped the burden to freedom.
Is this the softening? Black becomes a hex #444444, white becomes #ebebeb. Anti-ligature Rooms: "It was a morphologic change stemming from and signalling the temperament changes within. Domesticated foxes developed spotting, resembled marbled dogs." Our bodies a surface display, openly communicating friendliness. Art - even 4 years ago - looked stark, the lighting for an autopsy, the art cold, and all displayed in the pristine white of online vitrines. Now, on the the anniversary of our nth reckoning, we're all trying to be better people, be nicer to each other, deburr the edges. Now galleries are turning to grey, getting the exposure levels correct: 15orient.com, a softening of the pornographic presentation with finer underlying bedsheets, a linen photography. This is the trend. A softening. You see it shown smiling in the new friendly paintings. A morphological change.
This was always an "educational" mission. And "Library" attempts a solution to the BC/AD split - After Daily and the dawning of image, outshines the much less illuminated past. Its solution: bring everything into its light. A monopolization that is less a power grab than the creation of the ark: megalomanic if it wasn't so necessary. Monoliths at least provide a common enemy.
We stand corrected that this is not just CAD in a new skin. That over half the projects are not CAD. We got this wrong. But still standing proof of the occlusion of the past, because the growth rate is in 2000s, that the 90s didn't take place. This isn't CAD's fault, this is just the before/after split. But it is possible the Gulf War didn't happen. CAD is the network, not the warmonger, in this metaphor. A wish for a button that would make 1991 reappear, maybe close to inventing it.
Correction: As noted above in the text above, CAD issued several corrections to our original text. We incorrectly stated that nearly all the exhibitions appeared from Daily. And though we did not mean to imply otherwise, its mission has always been educational. Our attempts at a hex probably remain wrong.
Past: Jannis Marwitz at Lucas Hirsch
"Which is why Tarot cards are such powerful meaning creation devices - humans are apophenic machines - seeing sense where there may be none, they create it for themselves. Art comes to resemble it."
0465773005 is the title of this show, a glowing sign within the show, as well as an H&M "cashmere blend" sweater that is only 10% cashmere. This could be a coincidence (though the number itself sorta relays its odds) but Leung's sort of abide it, the gradual creep of its suspicion, the John Knight cold cut ominousness in staging. Why must the light be blackout? Why the floor silenced? Why does the carriage require staves? The creep builds suspicion: a house haunted under glistening sterile light. A crime scene scrubbed, we, detectives.
see too: Ghislaine Leung at Chisenhale & Essex Street, Ghislaine Leung at Künstleraus Stuttgart
Because we need to turn images into tombstones. And the press release is the meaning giving prayer. And abstraction as a verb, an artistic technology for memorial. Processed pain.
past: Noel W. Anderson at JDJ
Artists engaging in traditional crafts, marquetry and woodblock. But tradition was wiped out by the invention of capitalist plastic. Labor was reduced to work, and craft became manufacturing processes, became laser cut wood, CNC milled blocks, a thousand interns on call. Suddenly your dreams could be injection molded. Ostensibly. And these are two artists who's importance is the plasticity of style - the sort of whatever possibility of plastic goos, bent for artistic purposing. New images in old habits. So it's odd then to have a press release calling the whole thing into question, a excerpt from a 1906 book of traditional wood crafts lamenting novelty:
"If there is one quality which more than another marks the demand of the present day it is the requirement of novelty. ...the question is not, 'Is this fresh thing good? Is it well-fitted for its intended uses?' but 'Is it novel?' ... dispens[ing] with tradition, and ... set forth with childlike naïveté. Careful study of these experiments discloses the fact that .... the undigested use of natural motifs results not in nourishment but in nightmare"
This would all depend on whether we believe this art to be "undigested designs indifferently executed which have little but a fancied novelty to recommend them.” Not a "...a saner view of what constitutes originality by setting before them something of the experience of past times, when craft tradition was still living and the designer had a closer contact with the material in which his design was carried out than is usual at present." Surely this is not today. But there's something I'm not willing to throw away with the show. Somehow its uselessness seems the point, an abuse of interest.
see too: Sanya Kantarovsky at Marc Foxx, Camille Blatrix at Wattis
"Painted trash" sounds like an insult, but it's what we have here. A decorate filth. Framing the more expensive. Does this imbue them a criticality they would lack otherwise? Connecting them to issues at hand? Or a self-inflicted wound, pointing out that the jewels too are just mud with a glaze. Eventually the plastic disintegrates, washes away, and inside the lumps remain.
"the artist Frank Walter who died eight years ago. He lived in extreme poverty, was the child of a slave owner and a slave, a fragmented identity. He travelled extensively in Europe during the fifties and sixties, where he experienced extreme racism. Afterwards he lived in the Antiguan countryside, intensely interested in questions of ecology and agriculture. He was a pioneer. And he painted over 5,000 paintings! An unbelievable body of work, which has not been seen so far. He also wrote poems, worked in nearly all art disciplines. He was the Leonardo da Vinci of Antigua. " –Hans-Ulrich Obrist"
I wish we could stop picking up the bones and proclaiming vitality, picked from the wreckage, like an archaeological dig waiting on the culture to fall - waiting for hardship to patina into aura. Starts to feel like a celebration of pain. The skeletons are worth more to the natural history museum. "Dominant culture lays the concrete of its social conditions, proclaims "look a dandelion has grown," hangs its photo in our halls as testament to humanity. But it can seem like a testament to the concrete. A mythos of suffering starts to feel like instructions for it."
See too: Alvin Baltrop at Hannah Hoffman
The fragments, clouds, poems on papyrus to be reassembled. "[Fragments] are wounded, ominous, their meaning is fractured, in ways that can't be put back together. We place these objects to our foreheads and ask for their secrets, contemplate their use, rotate them in our minds. [Their use is] to be pressed to ears, interminably silent, and hear the ocean in your head." Attempts to cage a cloud, the pleasured exhalation of your last cigarette, leave one wondering at the limits of repair. You can identify a world by its fingerprints, but you can't recreate it from. Think Lutz Bacher xeroxing the cosmos to noise that they were always planning on returning to already. The palimpsest that can't be regained. Bathrooms wiped of their graffiti would be a waste two millennia later but two millennia of graffiti isn't much better. Poor Smithson. Sand through fingers, the columns of society finding themselves into finer and finer granules. For society was a fine dust, and a dust is what it will return. I say, stubbing out a cigarette.
(link)
Images-forms which are shown in a certain way, i.e. in a studied “correct” way, under “correct” guidance, embedded in a “correct” strategy, are readily accepted, as if they have existed all the time. Repetition, while creating habit, nearly at the same time leaves a taste of déjà vu. The end is an accepted boredom. Images-forms, no matter how strong they are, may appear perfectly normal, submitted, tame, having reached the saturation point. The images are experienced as something “retinal,” which is also the experience one is looking for: the significance underneath is kept at a distance. We are inclined to dispose of any images which cannot be used to finish our homework, as mere scenery for more important things that we supposedly have on our mind. To demonstrate this obvious wearing out of images, I started looking for basic forms with a very simple structure but a heavily loaded content.
If Geys' work is confusing, ever shifting, it is because it voids itself of the general markers that usually demarcate its sense/use/meaning. Geys' don't necessarily ordain a use, something "used to finish our homework" but instead images which flight in and out of an ability to read them for information. A language we are not necessarily tasked with translating but ascertaining whether meaning at all.
See too: Guy de Cointet at Museum Leuven
Dark in amber, scenes held in brown glass. A "wine dark sea," a Homerian world devoid of azure. It seems less like we are seeing scenes than seeing them reflected in another substance, using a mirror to inspect the bathroom, a reflection to infer the world around you. An aberration in the glass or in you.