Painting converts to information, into design. Into sign systems. We no longer paint landscapes we paint the superhighway of adverts. This makes sense. We look at more iPads than we do trees. The iPad is more meaningful than a tree. We relate to the world as icons, fonts, swipes - this the grammar of our meaning. "We understand them implicitly, terrifyingly." And these prose poem.
informative painting: Math Bass
The part, piece, glint is inherently evocative. It projects its missing part liked a dotted shadow, which we fill in. Everything here ready for something else. You stop the artwork from completing meaning so that it forever self renew, remain ungraspable, await its performance again.
Past: Florian Pumhösl
"... which is then treated to a Kubrickian austerity, totemized as the monoliths, allowing the surrounding emptiness of space to lend all the pressure that the gallery symbolically can"
Full: Florian Pumhösl at Galerie Buchholz, Florian Pumhösl at Meyer Kainer
Past: Alexandra Noel
"... a psychic mess, more pollution than collage, tinged with repression. The shadow of a plane is the specter haunting here, but throughout is an "offness" that is more motion sickness than fear. ... Noel's light too, toxic, the haze as permanent fixture, everything feeling smogged, poisoned. Pollution as repression, spectacular sunsets, and black oil beneath feet. The 9/11 in everyone's bedroom."
Full: Alexandra Noel at Freedman Fitzpatrick, Atlantis, Alexandra Noel at Antenna Space
It would be more interesting to talk about many of these objects than it would most paintings in galleries today. Some of these objects are miraculous, a lot of the world is; who needs a painting, or worse, art.
It was true. And Bader was suicide bomb to the categorical dam of art, release the world into the gallery. Art had no defense.
[because] if we're going to take seriously the idea of [Carl Andre's] dead fire bricks arranged gravenly on floors, or [Michael Craig-Martin's] water become tree, then too so we must accept its ideological twin: shrimp tossed in a foosball table or muffins arranged. To argue one way or the other the importance of bricks/floor vs shrimp/game is to already enter into Bader's standoff, and lose to the man brilliantly willing to lose everything to win.
Like lucky quarters undifferentiated, Bader was willing to risk losing art into pile of ordinary objects it could barely be distinguished from - were it not the crowning halo of art accreditation, usually the oxymoron, certificate of authenticity. The merger of art and life was protected by legal documents. An unspoken sore point that Bader salted. Life was more interesting than art, and we defended art from it with notarized paper and a retrograde return to painting's definitive art-ness.
Thornton OTOH seems to understand Bader's take - life's objects are more interesting than art's. But without wanting to suicide the category of art - and most importantly keeping art alive without necessarily a rebooting past genres. Everything here is neither sculpture nor readymade nor painting. It's like the world but also not the world at all.
See too: Darren Bader, SoiL Thornton
This is our most nostalgic era. Our "great again" era, a rehash era. Our reboots. Remakes. The artworld nostalgia that pervades like Marvel universes. The broad brushstrokes are already all there, the script merely updated. Or not. All things must pass. Unless you just endlessly perpetuate them.
Past: Lucy McKenzie, Atelier E.B
...the modern question of whether we should believe in the sign or not, the surface or not, like clue boards we're not sure to trust, as the PR states: presenting legal grey areas in culture’s appetite for the genuine.
How many artists/art projects have started, or started as, a fashion brand? It's almost a genre at this point, the "art" fashion brand. ... Fashion is a perhaps more honest about its object, which is really the brand, the effort to construct the aura ... And honesty about what backs the work allows for a more complete control over the gesamtkunstwerk, the ads, the displays, the showroom itself. The walls don't even need to be white, the production line of aura.
Atelier E.B at Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Lucy McKenzie at Daniel Buchholz, Lucy McKenzie at Museum Brandhorst
"... Like, while Kosuth was concerned for all the mysteries of "Chair," Wex and Mary Kelly were like yes, but we also get pregnant. The "cerebral" of men's white concerns was treated as the higher plane and, for all its agnostic posturing, the "conceptual" allied itself with a reverence akin the religious divinity it ostensibly exiled. Men, oblivious to their own bodies that had never been in question by culture, had the privilege to etherealize themselves above everyone's heads to some assumed universal while women's were increasingly entrenched in politic ground war. ..."
"the feigned resistance of the artists"
Admittance: I cried in the Rothko Chapel, left for fear of making scene. In an intellectual sense it was sham, big dumb paintings, built with a church! At the same time what unbelievable lengths to go for an artist to say, "no." Building such an elaborate stage only to wilt and retreat at its presence. I know the feeling. If Reinhardt rhetorically proclaimed the last paintings, then Rothko had accidentally found them, a trap, and so, retreated, eternally. It felt accidental, unintended, which was the pathos. Like, oops, all abyss. But now, "Reinhardt’s dictum of his as the last paintings taken as a challenge rather than rhetoric, certain artists since race to end painting in an escalating torture-porn of it." But now, now you can just turn off the lights. And since we believe, god or art, someone, somewhere, will turn them back on, we live forever. So long as the generator runs.
"The bedroom as terrarium, the girl as experiment""...The Model becomes predominate as the world's point of scale becomes unmoored, and reality floats between the virtual and material conditions abstracted by floating points of enumeration etc. etc. "Housing" replaces "houses," which replaces "house" distinct from "home," which is bombed out. The model encapsulates this world governed by virtual features, the planning, projected statistical everything, abstraction of everyday..."
Full sketch for the The Model
"Plainly, Bantone is refusing the identification of your subjects and thereby refusing their exploitation."
Perhaps similar to Pope.L tensioning a joke without the relief valve of a punchline, instead airs uncomfort - Bantone's horror is actually mere refusal to assimilate with a more gentle color. It's obvious but armor against normalization always is, always needs to be?
see too: Pope.L; “Beyond the Black Atlantic” at Kunstverein Hannover (Sandra Mujinga),
People bent to composition. A stress positions of beauty. Art's been holding bodies to uncomfortable tasks for forever. Models etoliated on diet coke and fashionable ambitions. Hieronymus Bosch. The garden of hell is scary not because we believe it exists, but because someone imagined it. And really this is painting that demands it, which is just us. Picasso beats his models to a pulp and Jordan Wolfson Real Violence. A trumpet out the ass, regaling. Wine or boiling oil, what difference. Think the Matrix-line virtual plane of painting's imaginative space, where anything can be conjured, and somehow Hellraiser exists, is a franchise.
See too:Tala Madani, Violence Against Faces
Past: Maryam Hoseini at Deborah Schamoni
"We like destroying people. Ambiguity in flesh. Bend their limbs like pipes for decoration, from Bacon to Matisse, Bellmer, Picasso, axe blades to the human doll. Gore from the 80s. To form a pleasure."
Full: Maryam Hoseini at Deborah Schamoni
Orozco used to make sculpture. Now Orozco sells tourist art, but as the tourist. Souvenirs not of your travels but his, buying his peripatetic romance. We purchase romance. - this is what artists sell, on Japanese paper. That they are almost literally inkblots is perfect. Because this romance is all you can project into it, interpret it. A diary of plants, us once again reading tea leaves left of porcelain walls, shit.
The whole premise of "process-based abstraction"'s creating souvenirs of experience is premised on some vestigial trait of conceptual that may never have existed. Like, does On Kawara's "January 22nd 1988" on canvas actually mean anything outside a finger pointing toward it. Does an artist in the forest placing native plants on a canvas actually contain its sound? What information is stored?
While this was the central conundrum to conceptual art since its inception, the rupture and distance between sign and object (always at risk that its sign didn't actually contain its object) it has since been taken as granted, as a granting agency for value added. .... Jason Rhoades built a career of mocking this value-added system, performing it under absurdly comical conditions, to create his referentially seminal signature: PeaRoeFoam, a mess of so much reference and history and jest that it self imploded.
souvenirs of experience: Sam Falls at 303 Gallery, their valorization: James Hoff at VI, VII
Tea leaves from the bowels: Yuji Agematsu at Lulu
and of course, inkblots.
