Cudelice Brazelton IV at Murmurs, Los Angeles

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Maybe its nostalgia for late aught's unmonumentality, for Donnelly mystery, for E. Smith estrangement, for that single image of Hammons' little radio on top a brick or whatever, or maybe this is finally just art that's hard to parse again. Not even knowing what you're looking at type enjoyment. In the last ten years art has become appallingly clear. Instead this more like "The rocking chair I project from the two elegant bones still in contact with the real is not the same as the one in your head." Searing your brand into the wall, an amorphous inkblot, but an amorphous that's more, already gone. For Donnelly, E. Smith, for that little radio it is less about the object more about altering the air. Book title: Arts of Suspicion. 

see too: Michael E. Smith at Sculpture Center

Julia Scher at Kunsthalle Gießen

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As art has begun to look ever more sci-fi without acknowledging sci-fi, it's nice here to have overt admittance. Appreciate Scher for finding metaphor in the obvious, explicit. The security camera, the space port. Items that are overdetermined to point of banality, yet the obviousness of the operation does not lessen it. This cardboard spaceport is no more inane than regular airports. The TSA is mostly cardboard. And CGI flights to Corsucant have become as regular as Indiana. Gary Indiana is probably weirder than Corscucant. I've been on a Greyhound bus and it was far more interstellar than any Star Wars movie. 

see too: Julia Scher

Alighiero e Boetti at Sant'Andrea de Scaphis

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1993 was a very strange year for figurative sculpture. You've got the above (which "must have come as a surprise.") But then, same year, you have Paul McCarthy's Spaghetti Man (guess where the spaghetti is), Charles Ray's Family Romance, Janine Antoni's Lick and Lather as well as Mike Kelley's seminal survey exhibition (alongside the Boetti at Sonsbeek) The Uncanny. Kelley's "experiment took its cue from the rise of 'mannequin art,' a term he coined to describe artists like Charles Ray, Kiki Smith, and Jonathan Borofsky, whose life-size sculptures—not, in fact, all mannequins—evoked anxieties about the role of the human body in a time wrought by the AIDS epidemic, the growth of plastic surgery procedures, and advances in biotechnology. In addition to artworks, however, Kelley gathered religious statues, inflatable sex dolls, ventriloquist dummies, wax figures, and medical anatomical models into crowded clusters to eerie effect." 1993 being today. 

Emilia Wang at A MAIOR

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Horoscopes broadcast amongst commerce, hosted as art. Astrology is particularly well situated to fit between both. (see: Art's Astrology: Sung Tieu at Emalin, Ei Arakawa at Kunstverein Dusseldorf, "[art,] 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.") The stars down to Earth. It makes sense, feels comfortable, reminiscent of artist-made commercials in the 60s. Wresting open a space for its message, for your interpretation. 

Past: Roger Hiorns

"You, a machine, a corruption of the sublime, in repetition awe becomes bullying mocking the human for its meat. ... We are but flesh objects, barely cognizant stupid creatures, morons in search of hope, and nailing us to crosses of our trash seems a brave act but it is impish, pornographic, unneeded."

"The Jewel-crusted success of Hiorns' sulfate almost eclipsed the less fabulous concoctions-as-representations for the surfaced body. ...the goo and strata of flesh and bone, and the machinic body ejaculating foam at the mouth, Hiorns wild material divergence always expressed in dualities, steel and perfume, machine and foam, boy and fire, boy and gratuitously hulking aircraft engine, the bodily soft always set against its cold hard master, rigid and pliance, occasionally providing a mild erosion of that order, a strange and insistent fetish that we all seem to enjoy."

Full: Roger Hiorns at ELI Beamlines Center, Roger Hiorns at Annet Gelink

Past: Lu Yang at M Woods

"... whether this is a critique of culture or fantasy doesn't matter anymore, trying to out-absurd culture is impossible but look how far it's gotten us, Genzken too"

Past: Lu Yang at M Woods

Stefan Tcherepnin at Meredith Rosen Gallery

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Is this the tasteful turn, Sesame street puberty blossoming an arabesque adulthood's cash in? This flying spaghettis bear resemblance to the monsters both: the muppet eyeball becomes painterly logo, brand to the artist, because stitching alligators to cotton improves la cost. And the noodle monster to prove there is no god. 

Past: Stefan Tcherepnin

Eliza Douglas at VI, VII

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Culture/commodities valorize their objects with simple bludgeons: the celebrity holds the product, the commercial assigns attitude. Our knowledge of its arithmetic does not cancel it. The code still functions. Brand is the level we fight on. The Whitney Biennial weathered months of protest until the attacks came at their identity, a rebranding "The Teargas Biennial," and suddenly softened their militancy. (CAWD wrote an essay about this here.) Museum brand in turn forms its signet in the installation view, architecture watermarks the photographs, walls as the celebrity hands cradling the art. Why else would Christopher Williams be shipping walls across continents? More celebrity hands. These celebrity hands have been chopped off, stolen, dead hands made to hold. Like as teen you photoshopped yourself kissing Johnny Depp. It would be interesting if a lawsuit developed. Like when the Guggenheim sued Paul McCarthy and Mike Bouchet (again the attack was at brand level.) But Douglas's theft is probably flattering, who doesn't want people stanning for them, building at home reliquaries to them, Johnny Depp, The Whitney, they live off our reverence to them.  

Valerie Keane at High Art

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We haven't had a Valerie Keane solo since 2016 when formal adventure seemed fun and the garbage was reassembling as totem, content, rococco. (see too: Chadwick Rantanen at STANDARD (OSLO)) In the years since our formalism as gotten less cyber-baroque and more goopy materialist, the photogenic mud wresting which makes Keane's seem chaste. Thing looks different against different backgrounds. And against the ever shifting micro-genres of the last ten years not changing appears new.

Chadwick Rantanen at STANDARD (OSLO)

Jorian Charlton at Cooper Cole

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Photography's harvest of youth, an ongoing thread:  Robert Kulisek at VI VII, Justine Kurland at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, Sean Patrick Watters at Galerie Praz-Delavallade, Paul Mpagi Sepuya at Document, Michael Smith at Richard Telles, Wolfgang Tillmans at Galerie Buchholz

That said, a good press release gives pause. A firmness invokes disagreement, opening. What is a photography agreeable between model and maker. Between society and art. Orchid become wasp. Is this possible? Not photography only as extraction for others. A model may contort themselves to the desire of camera, but ostensibly photographer bends too. A handshake between them in the form of a photograph. 

 Past: Valerie Keane at High Art

"capitalist equivalent of objects coughed up in the night, the night terrors of Haegue Yang shopping spree, they assemble the technologies of display... Sharpening the garbage of post-ford CNC driven custom-ordered world, the grosser parts of the capitalistic buffalo, amassing the plastic neurosis..." 

Read full: Valerie Keane at High Art

Rachel Rose Enclosure Pilar Corrias, London

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Weather you can turn on and off, affect detached from reality, a sunset in vial. The preservation of feeling. The embalm of sentiment. Painterly effects, a sun you unplug. Art, like the dandelion, becomes a tool for the storage and display of moonlight, sensation.

see too: Steve Bishop at Kunstverein Braunschweig, Pamela Rosenkranz at Karma International

Past: Rachel Rose

"surface effects of our emotive connection, they play like enchantments into us ecstatically, eroding any affective links with what is seen, hyper numbing, leaving the viewer estranged, cold as the real is endlessly manipulated like weather you can turn on and off."

Past: Rachel Rose at High Art

 Past: Raoul De Keyser

"reminding us why we liked all those modernist paintings to begin with."

Raoul De Keyser at Inverleith House

Yalda Afsah at BAR & Kunstverein München

(BAR, KM)

"examines the blurred boundaries between affection and identification with animals on the one hand, as well as submission and human domination on the other."

Arnold Joseph Kemp at M. LeBlanc & The Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society

(M. LeBanc, Neubauer)

A peculiar fact that humans have empathy, emotional connection, identification with their others. With a sack with some holes in it. These are "masks" but only in the most reduced sense. The face as it childhood parts. The emoji as signifier. You face is barely distinct a bowling ball, in a semiotic sense. What's wrong with us. 

See: Jon Pylypchuk at Petzel, Sarah Lucas at CFA Berlin

Tomory Dodge at Philip Martin Gallery

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Damn, maybe Vitamin P Painting returns as the patchwork quilt of itself. Or maybe its just our memory of that time... Jules de Balincourt meeting Amy Sillman, a painting assemblage of painting. Shaking the box that contains it, your horoscope appears abstract in its depths.

see too: Tyler Vlahovich at Lulu and Marc Selwyn

Bradley Kronz, Jessi Reaves at High Art

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Nice to see these things in a crust of a space. Not the ethereal nowhere of white walls but within the detritus of life, your cluttered lived in home. Objects which remind you of your animal-strapped body in your already bodied halls, your keys in dish and a nasty lamp to echo it. Your life isn't perfect and your artwork won't try and disprove that. The opposite of Muji, Ikea trying to sell you an commodified idea of order, and nor the white walls to aura your disarray as totem, just crust all the way down.

"like all that stolen Ikea elegance whose eventual blown out corners reveal its making of all but compressed trash, underneath everything we desire to be is an intestinal makeup of sponge replacing its weight with rumors of dead-skin and dust-mites of a body threatening to turn fungal"

See too: Jessi Reaves at Bridget Donahue

BANK Status Quo Galerie Neu, Berlin

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BANK is CAWD's father. There's no secret around this, and no need for patricide. BANK was there in the primordial reptile brain of CAWD's stewing formation. BANK's Fax-Bak white hot brilliance. The Press Release as decree - and the returns on that decree. Speaking back to the decree. The way Will Smith deterritorialized comedy. This is not filling out a comment card at The Museum of Modern Art, but actually finding a place to speak. Wedging open a space for return.

"Well the whole inside/outside thing is kind of theatrical," suggests John Russell, "I thought we were kind of hypocrites in a way, which is a pretty interesting position - or an unavoidable one. The 'critique' was kind of fun. And we did sort of dislike quite a lot of people."

Erin Calla Watson at Larder

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Art's alchemical processes on cultural signs to conjure "meaning." Usually the process is some technological (or painting) hoo-ha that the press release incants the recipe of. /r/malelivingspace is a cultural symptom that we could perform "meaning" on for days. This meaning is useless. Meaning is the mere lure to silver surface, the experience of a coldness, a loss. Empty bed as pareidolia stimulus.

Hans Bellmer, H.R. Giger at Schinkel Pavillon

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Because our moment is so filled with tortures on the body, with stringing our puppet goo, experiments on flesh? Half of portraiture today looking like medical eviscerations (see: The violence against faces.) - our more genetically modified Picasso, not dismembering the ear/nose it but growing it there. So the lineage for these two - current figuration is medically experimental, grotesque, alien, et al - is here. But at some unconscious base is sexual violence, and the women who suffer at that. (It wasn't until Dan O'Bannon and Alien's brilliant reversal that the sexual violence threatened captains.) I like both Giger and Bellmer much, but acknowledge "the artworld [is] continuously electrified by depictions of women in societal bondage gear. Artists depicting the strictures that force women to conform to cultural mores; images of women made, if only momentarily, powerless or complicit ... that its success is simply a culture that likes seeing - culturally approved - women in bondage." 

The Giger Chair trend, Amalia Ulman at The Gallery at El Centro, Cindy Sherman too, H.R. Giger on CAWD