Past: Andrea Bowers

"Surely the protest sign is a populace's stealing back the language of advertising for its own self [...]  the protest sign attempts to recoup a voice that has been disenfranchised by a powerful who can drone it out with the turn of a monied knob. [...] When the protest sign already has all the coronating volume of white walls and press packets and being sold in a blue chip gallery as a commodity it may no longer be protest sign."

"..."Art, despite all its PR and back patting as a common good, is a privatized endeavor.  Museums are behind paywalls, is a pony show of the elite. Art is not medicine, it is only sold as such. The monuments of art will never be as public as an actual class consciousness, as the public itself, which the phrase already was."

read full: Andrea Bowers at Capitain Petzel, Andrea Bowers at Weserburg Museum für moderne Kunst

Past: Neïl Beloufa

Are these not bondage devices for tourists? .. Art is the new form of penance. A form of entertainment as self-flagellation, "of repentance for having done wrong." The doctor's table and the movie theater converge. 

"enjoyability in the mastery of lubricating forms of cultural massage, mediums of libidinal and candied fun."

Venice 2019, Neïl Beloufa, Neïl Beloufa at Balice Hertling

Fergus Feehily, Günther Förg at June

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At first an odd duo. But time deironizes, dissolves the difference between stupid and reason to a painting leaden before you. Though Förg may be lineage in the neanderthal abstraction to Joe Bradley or Josh Smith avant-nappies, in the end Feehily's seemingly less industrial more underdog engine may be no differently dead. 

See too: Fergus Feehily at Misako & Rosen, Günther Förg at Barbel Graesslin

Past: Günther Förg at Barbel Graesslin

 "the slightly stupified version of Forg's modernism..  it didn't speak to anyone, becoming a stone in the modernist pathway, a weighing down ideals of transcendence... the work refuses to lift one beyond the limits of your earthly human presence, the usual higher pleasures instead hamstrung to leave you right where you already are."

full: Günther Förg at Barbel Graesslin

Past: Veit Laurent Kurz at Kunstverein Nürnberg

".. anachronistic period aesthetics misremembered, like retrofuturism, or steampunk. Call this look post-apocalypse primeval. Cosplay nostalgia for time that was not. 

"Steampunk clung to the Cartesian, mechanistic, [a nostalgia] comforting against the opacity of neoliberal globalism, market algorithms, and subprime CDOs that no one understood until collapse. Then it made sense that [Star Wars] and Apple commercials began setting their products in lush green forests, envisioning the technology so advanced it appeared natural, magic, indistinguishable; today: Artisanal baguettes and iPhones."


Read: Veit Laurent Kurz at Kunstverein Nürnberg

Ser Serpas at LC QUEISSER

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a particular type of flesh, between medical and Barbie, a plasticity of morgues or dough. The way students paint, ineptitude that comes out as violent smoothness. Or like dolls, we're all genderless beneath the outfit. Which is its own violence. New in the way that fresh infants resemble old corpses. 

becoming flesh: Martín Soto Climent at Proyectos Monclova

tender flesh Nicola Tyson, Miriam Cahn

 Past: Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster at Century Pictures

"Reading a book in a commercial art gallery was a torture device invented for the late Medieval Era. A sort of mental flog, a public humiliation. The point being, you're not supposed to read the books. It is a show library. ... You peruse a person's library to triangulate a subject, denote their reader, here an artist, an ostensible brandishing of an intellectual pedigree."

Full: Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster at Century Pictures

Jongsuk Yoon at Galerie nächst St. Stephan Rosemarie Schwarzwälder

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Eventually the referent points of painting get so soupy and all over that there is achieved an almost transcendental genericness, all that is common in painting, like you have reached bedrock. Without the identification marks of modernist genius, instead an everyone, everypainting, that starts to feel like those big claims to the universal again. 

Past: Philipp Timischl

" the rearranged parts of the cultural casino, cut from and placed into its altars..  The PR says as much: 'Our Clement Greenberg in TMZ sauce.' The culturally accredited mall."

"Timishcl's sculpturification of photography is on one hand full of cheeky moments of puncture - the objectification, fetish, and bejeweling of hyper-beefed men who unwittingly take part - as well as the need to sediment the more transitory elements of photo and video in an object original.  ... About the level of risk involved and who bears it in what situations. ... our carefree objectification."

full: Philipp Timischl at Neue Alte Brücke, Philipp Timischl at LAYR Coburgbastei

Kembra Pfahler at Emalin

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As art becomes identity - not that it ever wasn't - this overloaded branded version begins to make sense.

similarly: Juliana Huxtable at Reena Spaulings

Cooper Jacoby at High Art

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"the surface veneer of this illusion has cracked as it runs up against climate catastrophe, confronting humanity" - great we've cracked the symbolic hieroglyphs. What the PR doesn't answer is why this doomsday is so fucking sexy - there's even a bench to tell you how hot your ass is. But hadn't we just realized global cataclysm was actually pretty fucking banal, refrigerated semis full of corpses just another byline in the inexorable spread of stupidity. This is like the hotrod version, the hollywood version. Lesson:  There is money in making the interior of our doom fun. 

Death Drive Designer: Cooper Jacoby

Past: Cooper Jacoby

"Apocalypse fabulous. Our world's end, celebrate it with a commemorative lamp, a luxury mirroring your wealth's participation in it."

- Read full: Cooper Jacoby at Freedman Fitzpatrick

"...recasting the bee houses as foreclosed slums, a critique predicting the ends of these best intentions as in the hive of Detroit - a production colony experiencing its own collapse - the ends of manufacturing utopias, if the art weren't so sexy too. ... critique of power often comes with the fetishization and deployment of it..."

- Read Full: Cooper Jacoby at Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden

Andrei Koschmieder at Jenny’s

"But I sculpted the banality so accurately!" cries the painter of life. "A mimesis so exact it enacts the drear it represents!" They look like turds, the expellings of capitalist markets finally manifesting all those environmental externalities of the jet-set as piles of shit we imagine their tons of exhaust to be. Like the nightmare of our coming dystopia. ... know at least that we could envision our own demise. ... and all the questions as to why in moments of our dire circumstances further manifest visions of it. "Target fixation" a psychological phenomenon when the "individual becomes so focused on an observed object (be it a target or hazard) that they inadvertently increase their risk of colliding with the object" and the motorcyclist intent on avoiding the guardrail cannot look aways, sends himself flying over it. Or an airplane pilot, understandably.

full: Andrei Koschmieder at Jenny’s

Evidence at Mercer Union

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In one breath children's art is celebrated. The crayon marks as an unspoilt freedom, eden not yet subject to the cultural regulatory capture. This is the raw art, ore for artistic refinery, later on scatlogic nappies of adult canvas wipes, ART. Which this exhibition is at pains to distance itself, by bringing the raw stuff itself to market. But this is the paradox of how art means. Because the exhibition still begs the light, needs legitimation, the names of consecrated artists to perform the ritual of valorization. This is like asking artists to make flowers mean. And do flowers mean?

Brian Belott, Rhoda Kellogg at San Francisco City Hall, the genius whose diapers we exchange, An object absorbing all artistic abuse.

Past: Sergej Jensen

"...the fetishistic attachment to raw material unpainted was hard not to see in purview of that time's explosion of bars with reclaimed wood everything and newfound reinterest in brass and stone and a sort wish for a return to materiality and sensitivity... and reviewers describing Jensen's paintings like their high-thread-count bed-sheets ... "the natural" that Jensen acquired through accumulating accidents (nature) and so the "painter without paint"(!) ... stains and bleach and dust were patinas that referenced age ... but they're still stains in that they are ghostings of history's painting and still totally vintage."


Past: Sergej Jensen at dépendance

Fred Sandback at Galerie Thomas Schulte

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 "What kind of aesthetic experience can be admitted by a hardcore, uncompromising, materialist, sociologically informed “institutional critic” like myself?

"We are all here members of cultural fields. We carry, each of us, our institutions inside ourselves. There’s a museum in here, inside of me, with the Corinthian columns, the grand staircase, and the mezzanine. There’s a system of organization: the way I see things. There are objects and images, and there are texts, and there are voices explaining. There’s an archive that also contains my memories. And there’s a basement where I keep the things I don’t want to show."

Andrea Fraser - Why Does Fred Sandback's Work Make Me Cry?

One of the great essays on art, attempting to mend two halves, a contradiction, art. 

Kasper Bosmans at WIELS

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The Visitor's Guide takes the symbols at face value, making the painting hieroglyphs to which the guide is Rosetta Stone. Which implies an inner to be translated, implies a hidden meaning, which implies myth that art is pedagogical and museum as intrepid archeologist caretaking meaning for the lay. Put the bilingual dictionaries down. The idea of translation at all. 

Past: Kasper Bosmans at Gladstone Gallery

Painting in the virtual space ... Reflecting the increasing prevalence of the interface over image. Space becomes an information deployment system, and layout becomes highly organized studied and manipulated.  

 The symbols ability to store and dissipate information, hyperlink icons and broken links, and paintings with all the navigable space of ipads, littered with icons. The look of information, the pleasure of useless maps. ... cast across the gulf of meaning, the fissuring of symbol from its signified, this distance of the rift the interpretable space we call poetic.

Full: Kasper Bosmans at Gladstone Gallery

Zelmira Rizo-Patrón at CENTRAL FINE

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The aura becomes overpowered, illumination at 600hp. Everything begins to blow out, dissolve, etherealize, until paint becomes markings in virtuality. The mechanized halo becomes the ground to reality, its connection to power.

Rebecca Horn at Galerie Thomas Schulte

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We should all be paying better attention to Rebecca Horn.

"If you believe art to be some abstracted form of sexual plumage it would make sense that all art is a form of "love," shimmering objects like peacock's tail. It is perhaps why Chuck Close could assault by mistaking an interest in his object as an interest in him, the conflation of art with its sexual extension. We don't speak of art as love - Gonzalez-Torres had to all but force the issue - because we fear this sublimated form of desire bubbling back up its primordial grease. Art is an extension of us, our selves, our home, sometimes as an innuendo at the end of a rod."

Hiromi Nakatsugawa at Franz Kaka

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The roiling surface of Solaris. "We don't need other worlds. We need mirrors." This is the function of the inkblot planet, returning in your reflection something in the seaweed beneath surface, it is only you. This is why painting is incredibly popular. 

Past: Lonnie Holley

"Our continual desire for assemblage.. Why we desire our ruins? answers proffered by psychoanalysts as well as Nazis. Why aesthetic pleasure in our death, the flotsam of our cultural wreckage netted, the gore of culture. The inherent violence in this, to which Holley seems attuned.

"the psychotic level of things touching in culture, diamond ads next to Syrian bodies, perhaps reason for our assemblage catharsis"

Read full: Lonnie Holley at James Fuentes, Lonnie Holley at Atlanta Contemporary

Phillip Allen at The Approach

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Like a food scientist at the forefront of taste, on the eve of the Dorito, artists' approach to consumability is a less direct rod to dopamine receptors yet no less disinterested in creating Fruit Loops.

Rinella Alfonso at Project Native Informant

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You can't tell the difference anymore between young and old art. Is this an artist of the 20th century reemerging, or is this someone who doesn't remember Francesco Clemente  or 9/11? Today's paintings emerge from any age. Previously, you had been able to tell, you would say this is the forefront, made by a 20 something in Berlin, but today painting emerges antiquated. Today we like the old things, it gives the appearance of being longlasting. 

Paleototemism: stonehengification

Jessie Homer at Various Small Fires

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The self-proclaimed “regional narrative painter” who honeymooned at Elizabeth Taylor's estate and lived at "an idyllic 2½-acre estate in Beverly Hills." Grandma Moses or Clementine Hunter style depiction of rural cemeteries inflects differently painted from the window of wealthy LA county. "Self-taught" but in a Beverly Hills estate sense. None of this would matter if folk traditions weren't generally class traditions. 

Kinke Kooi at Lulu

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The coastline paradox: any increase in measurement's accuracy produces a commensurate increase in length: better measuring only moves a coastline's mileage towards infinity. Similar a hyperbolic geometry like green leaf lettuce and frill and Kooi's superfluity - increases in a descriptive power only release further metaphor, an excess of reference, description becomes the watering can, flowering a loaded lettuce content, a power for suggestion, leaving you, pervert, with pesticides spread against tumescence. 

committing language: Kinke Kooi at Lucas Hirsch, Ron Nagle at Modern Art

Liz Deschenes at Fraenkel Gallery

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 Like a more bejeweled question of On Kawara: does the index/signifier retain anything of its original? The question is repeated ad nauseam throughout contemporary art. Like all worst aberrations of art, it's a question on life support, unanswerable and asked for affect of evoking it. 

conceptual art as one hand clapping: Yuji Agematsu, On Kawara at LA MAISON DE RENDEZ-VOUS, On Kawara at the Guggenheim, Kirsten Pieroth at Mathew, Sam Falls at 303 Gallery, James Hoff at VI, VII

Stephanie H. Shih at Harkawik

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Like Silly Putty spread across the City, the katamari of art picks up its displays, content. Gathers the city, reroutes it back into the Museum as a cultural enrichment program.  

An appreciation for the sign painter, whose vernacular does what Painting cannot: communicate without pretense, anxiety. The sign painter functions, the artist does not. "They start to scratch at what we crave: not looking like art. Because art is mannered, stillborn, cliche." The long history of artists wanting to be anything but. 

They become totemic or omen-like, mystified, connote but do not mean, become hieroglyphs of a culture lost.

 

Sign painters: Mark Grotjhan at Karma, Lauren Halsey at David Kordansky Gallery 

David-Jeremiah at Meliksetian | Briggs

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The inkblotification of art meeting its stonhengification. Luckily they ironize each other. Turning trope to monument. Turning the trope theatrical. An overwrought materiality one can appreciate. Like Pope.L, a joke that dissipates instead into the punchline of expectation, blackness for your projection.

see too: stonehengification, Inkblot, Pope.L

Deshaun Price at Neue Alte Brücke

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Glass holds the juice, painting, the signifier of art. Held aloft in white air. Floats in glass, canvas, gallery, as the invisible structure for what we really want, the markers of art liquidity. "...Drawing ripples in surface to activate [painting], tap the vast depths of painting's cultural wealth"

The juice theory: Anna Zacharoff at Neue Alte Brücke

COBRA at LambdaLambdaLambda

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There's a joke in here somewhere about a caged bird as a metaphor for art, not singing but fried as painting. All creativity must be caged, painted. Or maybe it's just a couch painting for your song bird, happy he isn't a worker forced to factory production for eggs. Why the caged bird...

Evelyn Taocheng Wang at KAYOKOYUKI

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"fragile candy, soft and hard shell, capturing its affect in an art lozenge. Swallowable. .... affect is captured, the feeling, packaged."

It's a personal bias - associating sumi with chintzy prettiness, a touristic souvenir art. "takeaway objects of little import but hold significance. ...tchotchkes are transactional objects made for the transference of the buyer's desire. The souvenir acts as a placeholder for tourist's urge.. likely some vestigial expression of our sexual selection's wiring, which is why so many of them are cute. "

Alexa Hawksworth at Theta

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Giger is hot again so maybe YA book covers - Animorphs via Francis Bacon - seem proper art fodder. A biomorphic carnival. One would wish we could treat illustration as a proper art form - experiments in the commodity aesthetic. Experiments in looking cool as hell. A less disinterested form of connoisseur. "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."

Illustratively sick: Kennedy Morgan at Delaplane and Cushion Works, Kye Christensen-Knowles at LOMEX