Gay Outlaw, Helen Mirra, ﾠﾠﾠﾠﾠﾠﾠﾠﾠ at soda, Kyoto

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The question of "what does this mean?" is replaced with, "what am I looking at?" An ostensible glitch in the visibility production machine. The above - guessed to be an - Ian Rosen project gotten more baroque, a mutation, succeededon the demands of infection, the host CAD. Which is where our previous golf metaphor breaks down. The putt was sunk. Admittedly in today's news real success is transmission. (Sanchez et al.) There's very little to 'gram. Surely the point. Whereas it had been that sinking your art into good gallery placement was key to the laurels - something the Rosen project had been surely adept at - this is no longer the ultimate conditions of art. “what had been a process of legitimation, attributable to particular institutions or critical bodies, now becomes a process of simple visibility, attributable to the media apparatus itself.” Accreditation today looks more like JoshSmith/Kardashian spamming yourself into cultural consciousness. "Fame is only predicated on sight, not value: eventually a critical mass of people know you and then you are famous." If we're unsure what we're looking at the machine can't transmit. This where we're teed up for the art writers' questionable duty, to answer for the question, the point. But we renege. We're left holding a glitch, a hole. Containing a golf ball.

See too:  Ian Rosen, Nandi Loaf at King’s Leap, Sophie Nys at Crac Alsace

Christopher Knowles at Bridget Donahue

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If Knowles had gotten famous back then we could have entirely prevented Jonas Wood. Possibly several others. An artworld revolving around paint rather than ideas. 

Motoyuki Daifu at Misako & Rosen

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An odd fact that we let dogs piss all over the world. It's, like, totally cool. "It will rain someday," thinks the dog owner, letting god take the reins on this mess. Dogs emit the color of hazard, signaling their species' - on the whole - dehydration. 

But here the artist splashed water - it's not pee - which, I don't know, I guess complicates it something. The Pollockian waypoint: dribbled abstraction and marking Guggenheim property, your territory, drunkenly, yelling "I am nature" to the policeman explaining, "you can't pee here, Pollock, dog."

Past: Susan Cianciolo

"...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.."

click here for full: Susan Cianciolo at Modern Art, Yellow Archive

Sophie Giraux at Etablissement d’en face

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Art becomes affect tunnels. This one goes warm, the next one goes cold. You standard repetition-as-desensitization chamber. Under the Leckyian bridge. Or in the next room cuteness, rubberized. That we are asked to process. Art is always asking us to process. We lift its chaos like weight, to get stronger, a more resilient muscle at its tinkering your head. 

Major theme in current art: Desensitization, corruptive affect. "the diminished emotional responsiveness to a stimulus after repeated exposure to it. It also occurs when an emotional response is repeatedly evoked in situations in which the action tendency that is associated with the emotion proves irrelevant or unnecessary."

see too: Zak Kitnick at Clearing, Morag Keil at Real Fine Arts, Desensitization

Astrology

 "Astrology like tarot cards finds alliance with art since the artwork has mutated to be less an object of beauty than a fount for interpretation. Art having gone from object to oracle. The point of art begins to be setting the spheres to rotate so they may occasionally align, a machine for semio-recombination we could call meaning. Artists become not merely the recombinators of signs, but the producers of machines to do this, to be turned to on, set to run. Endless interpretability becomes their function. This is art, possibly. "

"your level of trust in the celestially telling matters less than the overall strategy: turning an artwork to an interpretable state and blinking, tea leaf divination in sporty Vegas-odds inkblots. We're primed to see meaning in information, in art, particularly when so bright and shiny, and thus here's lots to be said about these works, interpretation to be done, they'll pour forth all you are willing to extract from them. Perfect analysands. Like the wacky inflatable arm man drawing eyes to dealerships, Arakawa understands the qualifiers for "art," performing them with wacky panache, theatricalizing the artwork as a caricature of attention, art played to show its now quite standardized set of rules."

Astrology: Ei Arakawa at Kunstverein Dusseldorf, “Hecate” at Various Small Fires

Tarot too: Juliette Blightman & Dorothy Iannone at Arcadia Missa, Caitlin Keogh at Bortolami 

Saturn at Vigo

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Burst Pants? Posted on Christmas Eve? 👀

Rachel Harrison at Galerie Meyer Kainer

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An information processing app asked to process our world. The premise reasonable. The results are deeply midcareer. Literal. Instead of a Terminator HUD, we get a generalized mess, abstraction. Harrison has a struggle, recompressing the diamonds after the explosion of her star, the mall, our world. But every group show looks like you blew up a mall today. Harrison's influence is prevalent. CAWD has written more about her mostly through other artists. Her work explains a lot of other artists. Our exploded semio-wasteland. We're all just garbage pickers now in Harrison's ruin, even Harrison. A trash become good god. 

Past: Rachel Harrison

"The hipster too was a semio-naut; whose careful balance of fashion’s signs were an additive and appropriative construction of appearance and identity, a careful facade of references, and so the concurrent rise of Rachel Harrison [with the hipster] makes symptomatic sense for its ability to thematize semio-collapse and short-circuits in a way that was jokey, pranksterish and light relief against undeconstructable-tuber confusion of “the real” having really ascended into code that both Harrison and Hipsters were obviously responding.

Condensing the mall into the diamonds of its peak 2006-08 moment we have to admit it was a pretty neat trick, the things just felt like collapse within singular objects.

The fallout of [this] semiotic manicism/collapse/supernova, of the 00’s assemblage (Harrison, Genzken, Pernice et al) and the exploding of Unmonumental’s detritus, left the next generation picking cultural rubble. Artists became post-apocalyptic cargo-cult, artists, still wanting to believe, began to reassemble totems of cultural meaning. Staedelschulites rehashing a form of ready-made-marxist-surrealism, societie's tchotchkies made to “speak” the tongues of the Invisible Hand, worship of gods who must be crazy. Post-Lieske - the real rabble of Neue Alte Brucke, Pro-Choice, etc. - Ceccaldi, Yngve Holen and everyone else - rearranging/collaging/juxtaposing the signs of capital as some sort of anti-altar to them - the whole "arrangements" phenomenon, tableaus of cultural artifacts, seen again and again and again on the rugs of art fairs everywhere - finally hitting bedrock in the strip-mine of Darren Bader just arranging capital’s objects on the floor."

Rachel Harrison at Whitney Museum, Rachel Harrison at Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler

Past: Amy Sillman

"...the way fetuses are ugly, there's not enough drawing to hold the shape nor body to give it viscera... that newborn quality of looking like pink pencil erasers...  A confusion of painting and drawing"

"A tragic affair collectors seek "signature" pieces, [...] requiring the artist already having a signature and thus emptied of its origination, adolescence, nubility and becoming etc, that Sillmans work, generally, seems about... "


Amy Sillman at Sikkema Jenkins, Amy Sillman at Kunsthaus Bregenz, Amy Sillman at The Arts Club of Chicago

Tomm El-Saieh at Luhring Augustine

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We keep repackaging old things. Finding new ways to get it. Nostalgia is so powerful. The Marvelverse reboots like the Artworld a canon. Even if Schjeldahl is correct that these might be best in show. As galleries onboard difference it's a sensitive fact the chosen are generally working in a language that "fits the program," looks the part, variations on the "universal language" that buyers might find familiar. Now, certainly this is the language the galleries know, ostensibly wield expertise, not necessarily trusted judging Haitian Vodou, but it should be noted that El-Saieh is curating them into view, Myrlande Constant for instance, but we're just not seeing it here. 

Past: Thomas Eggerer

"The painting’s tension exists in whether or not Eggerer cares about his subject matter. Richter may have shown care for his but then masochistically bled it, and as this cold blood trickled down, through Tuymans and Sasnal, it finally reaches the ambivalence of Eggerer’s young men as vessels."


Thomas Eggerer at Friedrich Petzel, Thomas Eggerer at Richard Telles

 Past: Bill Lynch

"...but believe that these are perfectly honest, earnest, miraculous paintings, as if untouched by human crappiness, whether or not its true and which we can’t know..."

"... brushstrokes with a tendency not to touch, distinct and fragmentary, the paintings continuously coalescing rather than any rigid stasis, like particles exploded on their mean free path to collision and the cups ready to slip from their plates."

Bill Lynch at Tanya Leighton, Bill Lynch at White Columns

Mira Dancy at Chapter NY

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The Futurists is female? Returning a style with more acceptable copy. The Futurists are cancelled right? So something needs to take its place.  "You put the referent in the shredder to make a puzzle appear. Which looks like a painting."

Art in America, Alina Cohen, 2017: "Countless styles of NASTY WOMAN T-shirts, a Secret deodorant campaign focusing on women’s work-related stress, over four thousand results when you search for “feminist buttons” on Etsy—the evidence abounds that consumerism and feminism are more deeply entwined than ever. Brooklyn-based artist Mira Dancy’s recent exhibition of paintings, neon signs, and works on paper—which spanned Chapter NY’s two Lower East Side spaces—fit squarely into this entanglement."

See too: Anna Ostoya at Bortolami

"the 19th century's joke was painting faces positioned next to flowers and 20th century's joke was painting a face like it was flowers. Now what? A face is just the putty we rearrange in hopes of arranging something like meaning. An endless mine to profit from, our faces. Something we can pump."

Leave our faces alone. Be nice to our faces. Be tender. Love them. Like a mother would. Stop expelling on them, peeling them, colorful horror on them. At one end of culture we've got advertising turning us all into real dolls, and the experimental end turning us into polychrome wreckage. I want to feel like I have something worth more than torture attached to me.  I want the painting equivalent to wearing sunscreen, to eating a banana, to staying out of the light.

 Past: Sylvie Fleury 

“Fleury suggests art can be liberated from its reliance on constant innovation and complex physical formulation and relax instead into a sort of ne plus ultra of laissez faire 'whateverism' which ups the ante on American 'Slacker' culture’s aesthetics of resignation.”
-Adrian Dannatt

read: Sylvie Fleury at Karma International, Sylvie Fleury at Karma

Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg at Gio Marconi

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Getting tired of flower art, all seeming to do the same thing, excess excused. Flowers are their dramatic overage, that's the point, they're sex on a stick. The more pornography the better, when it comes to flowers, there's fields of it, empty like porn. "an orgy of saccharine beauty." So they drip and spray and amass color and form as no other object could handle. You wouldn't do this to your mother's face. But flowers take it. An object absorbing all artistic abuse.

Flowers: “Miranda” at Anat Ebgi & “A Change of Heart” at Hannah Hoffman, Willem de Rooij at Arnolfini,  Tom Allen at Chris Sharp Gallery, Tom Allen at Air de Paris, Tom Allen at Lulu, 

Past: Max Hooper Schneider

"Well these sure make our ecological collapse seem beautiful. It surely won't be this ornamented to us. "

"the Chuck-E-Cheese Animtronics begin horribly signing a new dystopian that is lush."

Read full: Max Hooper Schneider at Jenny’s, Max Hooper Schneider at High Art

Monika Stricker at dépendance

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This is the second time we've reviewed excellent paintings of nutsacks. (Is there something about today that makes testicles right?) Whereas the last painting was an exotic gum, these paintings are soft creatures -  Stricker can turn a nutsack into a malignant growth. This would seem obvious or easy - the thing is an alien enough gum - but her nutsacks are like the baby in Eraserhead, there's an uncomfortable paternity. Occasionally even looks like a crowning child, the penis removed entirely, and the bulb swells. A monstrous sex, and painting a strange care for the creature.

see too: “De Por Vida” at Company Gallery

Nancy Rubins at Rhona Hoffman Gallery

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Nancy Lupo noted in a PR that MOCA's Nancy Rubins sculpture, located in the plaza, had become a bird hotel. The cleaning fees likely astronomical. Lupo's proposed plaza sculpture, a bench to feed the pigeons, was rejected by the museum, sadly. But all I can think of is Rubins being bird houses. Machines to amass pigeon shit. Beautiful nests for sky rats. It's hard to return from the thought. There's a long history of artists deterritorializing the previous generation, like David Hammons' pissing on Serra. Tom Burr's cruising spot Serra. Or the kids you find using Serra as hideouts to smoke pot. Punctures the artistic bloat. Return the public sculpture to the ecosystem of the urban, wasp and orchid. A sort of embrace as ruin. Alter myth.

Eliza Douglas at Neue Alte Brücke

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The setting as the halo, the performance as the backer to the souvenir. Literally. Swirl the cultural object. "appends the abstraction we want, that we associate with painting while giving the value of the photographic, the 'abstraction' performs the work of 'art'. ...the mechanistic process of reproduction doesn't ruin it." The symbolic processes of art become literal, literalification.

Is all art just twirling culture into composition? to make it mean as art? Finding the twist you like?

See too: Eliza Douglas, Calida Rawles at Various Small Fires, 

 

Pippa Garner at JOAN

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Garner's parodic invention seems dark. Invention becomes the lash of capital, the driving force - internalized as self-flagellation, forced to invent, the jester marionette. Even Garner's description of gender transition is less dysmorphia than novelty, something to try, something new. The [novelty] artists are shackled to, forced to seek, find, commit themselves.  Invention becomes survival, requires our renewal continuously, Sisyphean, invention a plea, please, allow my survival, make me interesting.

Haena Yoo at Murmurs

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Rhoades' pearoefoam was brilliant in its mockery of art mythification. The "factory of art" became actual factory, cartoonifing the symbolic conveyor belt, the transubstantiating of stupid object. The fact that it worked, that the objects became highly sought after art, was twice the fun. The above similarly mocks the potion-izing of certain essences, identities, importances. The things we put in the potion to make Aura. Press Releases or dolphin tongue, everyone has their own secret sauce. Which, like Rhoades, would be a joke if it didn't work so well. I mean you have artists today selling actual magic potions - wondering a question of what's the difference. Secret sauce is to taste.

See too: Masaya Chiba at Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery, James Lee Byars at VeneKlasen/Werner

Monika Baer Am Rhein Kunsthalle Bern

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The small shock of a joke, just enough, a surprise to the viewer befuddled. A balancing act: not too much be rejected as random, but just enough to be comedy. Painting was long ago converted to interface, an conscious interaction between painter viewer. Painter has the mic. The surprise is fun, funny, played for laughs in the deadpan space of art. 

See too: Monika Baer at Neuer Berliner Kunstverein

Past: Monika Baer

"Baer playing her own game of painting, our fun is figuring out the rules. There are many ways to play [...] Pleasures are denied and reinstated, the picture plane is mocked with cartoonified sweat but open to atmosphere, the viewer is asked to look in only to be pressed out by a little turd. I'm not sure how you win."


Read full: Monika Baer at Neuer Berliner Kunstverein

Julio Le Parc at Maison Hermes Le Forum

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This same artwork appeared on CAD exactly 10 years ago. The above is today, the below yesterday. There is probably nothing to be made from this info, from the difference, but you could. 

Ed Atkins at Sant'Andrea de Scaphis

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"...We continued to live through a distancing world held increasingly close, more finely detailed, not so much nuanced as mictorized: microscopically huge, a memory that was infinite, thoughts reappeared haunting you from underground server vaults, friends since ghosted returned with body supplements. Viral punishment: forever indoors. Forever asked to participate in the rooms where you could be viewed, thumbed, generally commented on. Like suddenly everyone is an artist inviting anonymous critics. A person we liked less you than her. Every teenager learned numbers/statistics by an emotional battery. The bodies got online, got ever more perfect and you got ever more, well, [blistery]."

CAWD wrote the exhibition texts, you can find them here, hosted by CAD.

see too: Ed Atkins

Tom Allen at Chris Sharp Gallery

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Don't tell me that brick wall isn't about to embroider a sphincter, navel, fistula between. Perfumed sexual flora otherwise soured on anus. Don't let them fool you, that's a butthole. A Google deep dream of. Pants opening reveal. Don't let them tell you otherwise, don't let them be coy, saying the asshole-like-an-opinion is in you, everyone's got one, this one is yours, abating ruined meaning, its not true, that is a butthole, next to a flora, next to an entrance, in an opening, a cleft of meaning, and I'm telling you yours is this.

Past: Tom Allen

"Flowers ...the Vegas sign advertising sex and nectar to bees, birds. What did Zizek say about tulips, 'an open invitation to "Come and screw me."'... this crass evolutionary productivity ... 'the lowest of the genres' gaming the system with hardwired desire. ...what artist has ever been above cheating? Flowers are an experimental-constant through which an artist may perform tortures on a cultural concept of beauty...

"...more Berghain than cottagecore - to paraphrase the press release. The pleasure here seems in twisting the dial to the humming point between saccharine pleasure and spoiled overripeness - between day and night - a painting your mother 'likes' with uncertainty... pleasure in this sweet spot hum."

"Tastes change however, but let these be a marker of 2020s - that this was the edge, the waver between sickness and wealth. Painting as stakes planted, this was the limit. So if you start to love these, see how far we've moved."

Tom Allen at Lulu, Tom Allen at Air de Paris

Israel Aten at What Pipeline

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Our childhood figures of action, action figures, painters, seminal spray webs from wrist, paint from sabres - blur together literally, figuratively. Arms dripping musculature of paint. Linework delineate form and forearm, masturbating, spraying Herculean abdomens, Doryphorian sixpacks, statues now with battle damage! a Kouros spiderman, carved lionman, power figures nailed wood, gods of the old style, men in the new style, a sistine God who benched heavy touched man. History's palimpsest of juggernauts Zeus to Antman, a framework to hang paint, "masculinity."