Frames make the interface, UI, the UX of painting. That we interact with, are informed through. We look through frames through frames through glass, and glass. Institutional critique is merely the remarque on the passe-partout. En abyme. Like looking the wrong way through a telescope, near friends waving far way, the aperture widens, widens, making painting appear distant, embedded in so much UI, even this, these words' wreath, dear U.
so thoroughly of and beyond our moment. Information turned kaleidoscopic mirage, tortured on the rack of art. Things being their surfaces. A car commercial all at once.
the cultural detritus pressed into reverential windows. Let the light in. The highlighter attracts thought. The flypaper of civilization. Our cargo cult now building advanced architecture to prayer: please let this waste our world have meaning.
See too: “Flat Neighbors” at Rachel Uffner, “Breathing Through Skin” at Antenna Space, “A Love Letter to a Nightmare” at Petzel, David Lieske at MUMOK, Rachel Harrison at Whitney Museum
being a young lad looking at snowboard graphics and feeling something navel in the drawings sinuous metal hands. I hadn't yet seen Bellmer's liquid flesh. Or Giger's carapace sex. Ballard's cum drizzled chrome. Tactility is a strong force, bent and harnessed to express urges that only exist visually. Like Lozano's tool drawings for our more pornographically sensitive age. Through the glass of art we now conjure feeling. This is how pornography works. This is what Sontag argued against: "Pornography has a 'content' and is designed to make us connect (with disgust, desire) with content. It is a substitute for life. But art does not excite; or, if it does, the excitation is appeased, within the terms of the aesthetic experience." Current pornographic materialism indicates a shift in art; the overt identification with an object/image is useful means for accessing its viewer. Connected such that our higher faculties have no defenses against. This is not tasteful consideration at a distance but thrall of slumber, dreamed emissions, sick drawings.
see too: nagle Materialphilia, Ron Nagle at Modern Art
If you placed a Daniel Spoerri in a Kusama Infinity Room does it beco- whatever. I can't believe these things haven't exploded as the hot new lobby bait. Museums need a product to fill their atria, search for reflective, and thus inclusive, possibility. Wasn't the artist present also just a mirror? Occasionally leaking goo, guts. Golden is good at mirrors, there's no doubt about that. But maybe the thing about Golden mirrors is they never reflect us, we become vampires before the lobby of art, which is too apt a metaphor for museums.
See too: Attempts to reach out
New trend: forgetful surrealism, a sort of traumatized historical painting. Bleeding through. Your memory of painting clouded, convoluted themes. Less the vitamixed collage of say Juliano-Villani and more like Picabia with a head injury, amnesia allows the soap opera to continue again, repeat its plots in new ways.
Artists include: Amelie von Wulffen, Birgit Megerle, Jill Mulleady, Jeanette Mundt
"almost like the history ... bruising into paintings. How images transact through time... Our memory of Matisse is like seeing the past in bad dreams, crushed into the present. We have memory of how painting was, how history functioned, how impressionism was painted, but it's wrong, [historical] hangover, a painting full of malfunction, its shipment through time arrives damaged. The hematoma is fine."See too: Amelie von Wulffen, Birgit Megerle, Jill Mulleady, Jeanette Mundt
Past: Tyler Vlahovich at Lulu and Marc Selwyn
"deftly avoiding any specific painting reference - not quite any particular - but being obviously loaded with it... Kaleidoscopes of image that sift though. They accumulate reference and abandon it, as if the abstraction of reality wasn't enough... abstracting the abstraction... our current phantasmagoria"
30 years before the future was female merchandised and Beyonce haloed herself a 30 foot font Feminist it seems Mikkola had already tensioned this feminism and commodification, the bronze Fearless Girls, and the activism of posture. There was apparently success. Then she left it. Which seems foreboding. Because as the PR states, "It's time for a new toy!"
See too: Andrea Bowers at Capitain Petzel
"Suggesting an interiority. A beneath, the inside, indoors, the soft pink innards you imagine. An igloo is crunchy on the outside and chewy on the inside. "
Past: Louise Sartor at Le Consortium
"Painting is made rare and thus valuable for its support, its anchor to reality. ... So that support starts to hyperbolize, exaggerate. Placing stakes to claim existence, location tethering, against images lost on networks. Materiality claims an objecthood. Painters protecting their domain. "
Read full: Louise Sartor at Le Consortium
A movement called "thrift store unconscious" - that "every image has the right to exist beyond its aesthetic quality" - that images exist because someone somewhere, regardless of skill or self-awareness to conceptually edit their mental garbage, had the desire for garbage. Paintings like a physical wish, and these ones just happen to be kinda gross. Someone cared enough to make these. This desire "speaks" - has meaning, a subject appears, however abject, the grey slime of the human, in paint form.
"The surrealism of today's painting mirrors the fact that any of the medium, in quantities vast enough, begins plotting points of the cultural unconscious. If you amass enough hand made images you begin so see dreams emerge. Painting, a virtual box that you fill with what you desire, but the desire is, if not caged, steered around themes that can be inferred by the collection circling around them. You can't see the pier but you can see the fish circling around them: the nude, Jesus, the phallus, pink things, us. Shaw's collection is like Wade Guyton's ostensible promise of printing our dreams, the conveyer of painting collecting like flypaper a civilization's subconscious."
"These are some of the worst paintings you will ever see," Jim Shaw's thrifted paintings.
"sunsets [are] the near endless regurgitations of saccharine accident. Incidental returns on arbitrary conditions, each completely unique and endlessly the same. A triple-point of beauty, arbitrariness, meaning." Do sunsets mean?
We want to see the human through the bars of its conditions, a contest of life whose winner grants freedom, acceptance. We prisoners who make art in attempt to prove we have souls. Live forever.
Past: Stanley Whitney at Karma
"Whitney toys with arbitrariness. Caroming off the totally indiscriminate to float in some nether zone of baroque frivolousness ... Opposing Gunther Forg's true flippancy."
After the post-apocalypse of the sign, in the wasteland, we began picking up the rubble. We needed meaning, which was old, vintage, possible authentic. We started storing it in reliquaries, placing it in altars. Aura by the altarfull. The relics were asked to speak. We pressed fragments to foreheads and contemplated skulls. Which was a very old pastime.
(Campoli Presti, Francesca Pia, Nina Johnson, Bridget Donahue, Candice Madey, Hannah Hoffman )Our powers combined we form, WORLDWIDE, the power of friendship.
We forget we enjoyed modernism, led by hand, school group, through Art's hallowed atria into the heart of painting, children learning to look up to it. Socially engineered by cadmium at scale. Our love for painting so ingrained that of course artists tortured it. Rooting the modernist corpse for one more magical rabbit of identity, a painting. The magic trick of Zobernig's corpse step - but there's less modernist meaning at stake than a painter's ability to renege on signature, identity, to evade it. This is so instead of recognizing a painting, we have the painful obligation to look at it. A painting as opposed to a signature.
See too: Amy Sillman at Sikkema Jenkins, Joanne Greenbaum at Crone, Rochelle Feinstein