Adam Pendleton at MUMOK

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Pendleton's work is supposed to look like photocopied art history, a zine of bricolage referent, and in this repetition we are told is some new space that "renews the instability of discourse and identity" or "refashions history into something that opens out into the new." But this new space that art continuously opens always seem to be more trophy abstraction.

 

You know what the market has shown every collector wants walled? Abstraction, and so art has become a giant machine mining sources of abstraction. And the endless ironizing of abstract legacies with its remaking in different modes (fire extinguisher, silvering, abjection, food photography) ostensibly acts as critique. Pollock was just spurting cum, symbolically accredited decoration, abjection whatever; the critique fails to, despite 40 years of it, functionally do anything. It's like battling a ghost with a longsword. Abstraction is the inkblot that acts like silver, that acts like mirrors, to place whatever you want to see in it. And we keep digging mirrors.

 

see too: Lisa Holzer at Kunstverein München

Past: Michael Krebber

Krebber's "preferring not to" the herald of his artistic progeny, fantasizing that maybe they wouldn't have to either. And so artistry's lack became a claim of radical "protest," artist's claiming "strike" on the walls of the institutions that would have them, taking sumptuous bites of the hand that had become feed. Promising the academic artist a taste of social cool.

In 2013 Krebberesque was actually academically defined in the 8th edition of Quinton and Rohling's Aesthetic Jargon falling between between Kowtow kraut and Kremlin Stoogism.

The famous “digging into the mirror” photo's context reveal much less conceptually prescient images of Krebber for instance with a boot dangling from his ass.

See full: Michael Krebber at Morena di Luna, Michael Krebber at Kunsthalle Bern, Michael Krebber at Greene Naftali, R.H. Quayt­man and Michael Kreb­ber at Museum Ludwig, Group Show at Greene Naftali

Yaerim Ryu at Peres Projects

(link)

Advertising so robbed the corpus of idealization from the hands of artists that now artistic representation is doomed to forever paint us as lumbering buffoons. As canon fodder, to painting's demands. "A state of painting that has sunk so far into endless permutable bent-figuration - that someone actually tending to the body feels like free healthcare." A desire for the tender of wounds. 

See too: Karen Fan, Caroline Zhang at Gern en Regalia, Erwin Wurm at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, “Automatic Door” at Park View / Paul Soto

Past: Reynaldo Rivera

The ruins of a once beautiful citizenry. We now vampire. Not only its pain, but its life too, brought to cold hands of art's Wunderkammer. "Dominant culture lays the concrete of its social conditions, proclaims 'look a dandelion has grown,' hangs its photo in our halls as testament to humanity. But it can seem like a testament to the concrete." 

All: Reynaldo Rivera

Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff at Reena Spaulings Fine Art

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A conceptual beartrap, the inkblot asks that you spill forth the contents of your head with its innuendo as lure. What is the contents of your head.

Inkblot, inkblot, inkblot

All: Calla Henkel & Max Pitegoff

Rirkrit Tiravanija at MoMA P.S.1

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A dinner enshrined, behind closed doors, enshrined in an image. Posted on this day of our own relational aesthetics, Christmas Eve. So when you pass your uncomfortable uncle the taters imagine the utopian world foods you could be enjoying. Think of art as your moral compass, the curry you could be sharing. 

We need someone to unpack what happened here. And this is it; this is the case study. From utopian salespitch to museum display.  The salespitch is enshrined as meaning. This is the machine of art. It's not quite history, not quite record. It's a series of things that point elsewhere, are elsewhere. But we're here. Asked to be elsewhere. A long explanatory text explaining the process of this. How art in its current regime promotes this, basically corrals all art into this, endless meaning elsewhere.

Past: Amy Yao at Various Small Fires

" ... Surrealist juxtaposition in an age bio-medical cybernetics, aerosolized industrial waste and food packaging with endocrine disruptors distributed between ever more complex global conglomerates makes war and diamonds seem quaint as juxtaposition is dispersed into further and further micro-artificialities, plastics outweighing plankton in certain parts of the ocean. The sculpture here is called Doppelgängers..."


Click here Amy Yao at Various Small Fires

Thomas Sauter at Bernheim Gallery

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The PR's commitment to nailing these to the board of expressionism is something. These are paintings. With color and form and feeling.  "an inner feeling gives way to exploration, guided by what happens when a red meets a yellow..." About "the touch of the brush on the canvas..." and genius. "Such feelings can only be transmitted from an object through a deeply focused and committed approach to work. We may find ourselves asking, can’t I too produce this? No. Not like this." It's heroic. And looking into the distance between heroism and magenta/viridian/yellow is a pathos almost too much. 

Mimi Lauter at Mendes Wood DM

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In the race to excess, these currently run 1st. Not just color but adrenalized Bonnard, Redon - the positive effects of doping "oil pastel thick as frosting." Important that color, texture, perfumes, not be burdened with anything other than raw id, naiveté. Not images of the garden, these are the garden. Just arrange the bulbs, let them grow color. This is a positive review. 

Jennifer Packer at Corvi-Mora

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These seem transparent about intentions, to get color at scale. Bouquets of it. The linework, the drawing, an excuse to hang wanton libidinal paint. Watermelon theory. Conceptually we prize art for what it means, for its "politics," but then occasionally we remember that the beach exists. That candy tastes sweet, and chefs, chemists, need reinvent it. 

Reinhard Mucha at Francis Irv

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Probably one of those artists in deserving the retrospective. So we can all collectivize our memory of him. Put him on speaking terms, a common language. Is that what retrospectives do? Not interested in the past but about the fact that looks like today, no?

Jannis Marwitz at Lucas Hirsch

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It's easy to talk about symbols, reference, history, they practically unfurl their themselves - but it is hard to talk about images. A painting stippled with rattails or tentacles don't lend well to consulting the familiar cultural texts - and there's no PR to relieve its burden. Ostensibly that's the critics role. Which, delight in the refusal. Just let the worms perforate the surface, your head. An interest in not having the Tarot Cards read. The worms, the painting, does the consumption, digestion. 

Jannis Marwitz at Lucas Hirsch

Noah Barker at Lodos

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I think we're supposed to find something spooky connecting the guy at the RAND corporation (and later developing intercontinental ballistic missiles) also having invented windsurfing. Same guy who designed Tomahawk Missiles and the X-15 rocket plane. But don't care about any of that. This whole thing is better as not art. As just a boat.. An object whose design criteria doesn't care about art. As just a story of a man who loved developing really fast ways to harm people. An engineer who wanted to completely eliminate boredom. That's the art. 

Anna Uddenberg at The Perimeter

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The Greeks revolutionized ancient sculpture with contrapposto serving cunty, but now we've appropriated whole new asanas. Update figuration with fashion, this makes new. And new fabrics, new frills. You no longer paint the model, you tell the model how to dress. A thrill to play with dolls - they'll wear whatever, bend however. Matisse proved bending women till they're blue everyone found fun. Compositionalizing women for culture. It works! This is cynical but it is maybe naturalism.

Art loves women in culturally approved bondage gear: Cindy Sherman at Metro Pictures, Amalia Ulman at The Gallery at El Centro

 Past: Anna Uddenberg

"The reason we've gotten into upholstery, into couches, chairs is that...  every chair is a bodily innuendo. And the pervert knows what the decorous don't."

"The detailing designates the meaning. Meaning emerges like gender identity.Think of the distinction between "tactical" t-shirt, "sport" t-shirt, "yoga" t-shirt."

"Uddenberg works with the obvious message that's unspoken ...  there's a sexuality to the leather curves of car interiors.  ...  And everyone now tearing at couches to reveal our innuendo's innards, digging for the implication from the things that caress us."

"Uddenberg's recent sculpture are weirder than Jones' because they seem to emerge from the surrealism of culture itself..."

Full: Anna Uddenberg at Meredith Rosen Gallery, Anna Uddenberg at Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Anna Uddenberg and Nicolas Ceccaldi at MEGA Foundation, 

Past: Liz Deschenes

"A career spent negating the photographic window, viewer left at surface, like looking out a window and seeing only glass...

...The photograms now are the result of a photograph without a lens, no focus but collecting all the light it touches into its photo-sensitive halides fixed as silver, photographs that feel like the information paradox of black holes: does the light that falls into the traps retain any of its information? Could you put back the time or place? ... it doesn't matter, the point is to accumulate the gleaming of pressed diamonds."

"... a question on life support, unanswerable and asked for affect of evoking it. "

Full: Liz Deschenes at Miguel Abreu, Liz Deschenes at Fraenkel Gallery

Max Hooper Schneider at Maureen Paley

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There is little difference between the vitrine and the television, a box for growing an amoeba-like sentience - be the longterm point MHS has been making. And its parallel to painting. The petri dishes of a culture medium. Culturing culture. These grow lights. It's fun to open up a TV and see a brain, cut open a painting and see anything but art, splice into fantasyland, the casino shrunken, it's a small world afterall. 

Read all: Max Hooper Schneider

Theresa Chromati at Tureen

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Like a Miro pulled through the navel of Murakami - it's an orgy of "design." Like dragging your finger through still-wet modernism, and sprinkling some sprinkles. And apparently testicle flowers. But tugging content through a bellybutton an interesting idea. 

Mandla Reuter at Croy Nielsen

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When you start to look at exhibitions as a crimescene and art as its evidence - you can't unsee it. The art is the mystery. Which makes clues of everything. Clues lend aura. Aura is mistakable as art. The documentation plays up the murder mystery. The artwork placed in forensic baggies. This is a continuous vibe of art today - with its disparate elements array on floors.

Simon Dybbroe Møller at palace enterprise

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You can take a picture without a lens, make an image of the world. These displays are apparatus that are camera, they make an image of the dust. The photograph they create is the distance from that object dust. This is not a metaphor. They make an image, a distance, they are a camera.

 
"Photograph" has become synonymous with "image." This is top 10 historical blunders. Through this historical snafu, we have chosen a specific technology as defining image. Photography is actually a niche form of image. Photography is a subsidiary of printmaking. It should not have come to represent an entirety of "image." 100 years before photography, the “picturesque” was a term invented for painting. Or Mt. Vesuvius explodes, exposing its human to its ash albumen, and awaiting the development by plaster handling archaeologists. This is an image without photography.

Anna Glantz at The Approach

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Glantz's surrealism has become more subtle, repressed into the paint itself, making you the fool explaining the surface of a face, painting. 

Past: Magnus Andersen 

"It's impossible to measure earnestness. Time de-ironizes and jest is made serious by attention. ..Andersen knows that to survive is to triumph. ... Thus straps a bomb to his chest walks into the vault of images, which we his visual hostages, on a long enough timeline, learn to love, and pied man leading children to their deaths."

"An exhibition titled 'Stockholm Syndrome' ... a decades long acclimatization to certain types of aesthetic abuse, where an artworld begins to actually like the Jeff Koons, or Josh Smith.   To deny it would simply place you outside it. ... and as always with hideous painting, 'half the fun is learning to love it.'"

Read full:Magnus Andersen at Neue Alte Brücke(2), Magnus Andersen at Neue Alte Brücke & Dorothy Iannone at Air de Paris

Group show at Astrup Fearnley Museet

(link)

You could say it's an "everything but the kitchen sink" exhibition except there's actually multiple kitchen sinks. Which the PR is exemplar of the mythic language crowning art in which art can hold a seemingly endless paradoxical traits, until art can seemingly do anything, represent anything, timely timeless, individual, universal, and back again. A magical property of being in the eye of the beholder, an inkblot. And so one would like for a straightforward list of what exactly art cannot do, that is the art exhibition we need. 

Ryan Gander at Disneyland Paris

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Maybe i'ts more art's interpretability as its highest duty. The crime scene and art are both given this role. The movie detective, the painting, allow mystery's imagination of answers, thus light the candle that there is an answer. While we speak intelligibly of there being "no truth" - we rely on these mythic scenes, art and crime, to provide possibility in the belief of interpretation, giving it a truth potential without having to actualize answers. Interpretation, made as interminable as possible, already provides the same comfort as answers.

 Past: Ryan Gander

"There is a parallel between conceptual art and murder scenes. Not in the interpretation of clues, but of detective and conceptual artist turning a messy world into object, language, into document. Turn a world's blood and guts into evidence, into levers for the legal, testaments and a shared concern for documentation.."

Read all: Ryan Gander

Michael Ho at High Art

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The painter's goosebumps, the matte scumbled frission - Oliver Osborne, Nolan Simon, Caleb Considine, Jennifer J. Lee - rough textures through gentle painting - is easy to symptomatize: we desire a materiality to show though vulnerable image, to watermark them with that rarity, the real.

See too: (Matte Representation)

Past: Eliza Douglas

"The setting as the halo, the performance as the backer to the souvenir. Literally. Swirl the cultural object. The symbolic processes of art become literal, literalification."

 "These aren't paintings of the t-shirts, these are the t-shirts."

Read all: Eliza Douglas

Gelatin at Galerie Meyer Kainer

(link)

Gelatin's would seem a populist stupidity balanced with the high abjection of a butthole. But it's all butthole in populism, and Gelatin's greatest skill is getting a blue haired public to smile on camera with said butthole, to join in happily to dig the worthless hole. It doesn't take much. Everyone is happy to laugh because irony excuses everything. Like a nun taking photos with the Naked Cowboy - this is common. Dunking on the Mona Lisa is playing basketball against a team paid to lose. The dunks better be Globetrotter - otherwise what is the point of the effigy. Comedy falls flat when it commends an audience's ability to distance themselves.

Hanna Hur at Kristina Kite Gallery

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Spirituality was always psychedelia wearing a different coat. The vibes were differently ordered. Sacred Geometry, Minimalism. And this is the Venn center of all of them. Geometric psychedelia. Sacred hallucinatory. Amsler grids for God. Sense a higher plane, order, any order, just order, through the meat of your eyes.

see too: Hanna Hur at Feuilleton

Hypothesis: if art was given to a simple taxonomic system it would reveal that there are relatively few strategies that are continuously reshuffled underneath a facade of ever updating cultural signifiers on its surface. The stems that underpin flowers aren't all that different. That while perhaps the canvas isn't a given, and the visages refresh, there is little independence to art's conceptual underpinnings. That this taxonomy of simple mechanics is never done is not because taxonomizing art would be dogmatic or repressive - but because we need the myth, that we all must actively prevent the destruction of art by the most basic levels of assessing, categorizing, and worst naming. 

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Oier Iruretagoiena at WIELS

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The press release will explain the diagram, or it won't, but it doesn't matter - the diagram makes interest on a fabric of communication. Legibility, unimportant. The diagram appliques interest. Lends interpretability. The highest prize of art. Because it insinuates meaning, gold at colorful banner's end. 

Berenice Olmedo at Fitzpatrick Gallery

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"Every era gets the art it deserves." So then, artists were the indicator species, or canary to coal mine. Like a fever to an ailing body, art was a symptom "deserved." And so we looked to artists like idiot-savant diagnosticians. We gave them our signs, our medical equipment, pictures of our sickness so they would perform the rituals to make meaning in the churches. We didn't believe they could heal us, but we believed in a hidden knowledge in the nonsense.

Hélène Fauquet at Kunsthaus Glarus

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Détuorns a frame we're used to. Reframes a frame we expect, "know" how to read. The trick is effective. These are our portals of the familial. This photo? Great cousin Greg when he was still a protoplasm, a primordial ooze. Your uncle Geoff, he's always been a cuttlefish, a real blue tailed skink. Fauqent penchant for the glass we know too well, and the glass we look through. 

See too: Hélène Fauquet at Edouard Montassut 

Contemporary Art Writing Daily’s 9.5 Year Anniversary!

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Kyle Thurman at Sophie Tappeiner

(link)

The suit is a vessel we project into, a blank everyman we can identify ourselves in. A male power fantasy, the mech suit or the business suit. The suit is painting. It's not even a metaphor. It is simply how art operates, as a receptacle, a fantasy projection screen, a sandbox dictatorship for the tiny artist dreams.

Autumn Ramsey at Crèvecoeur

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You can't write an ode to a rose, you can't praise a flower already so decorative. The rose was manufactured, it's image doesn't exist in nature - it was cultivated by science, gardeners, botanists, whose Icarus-like purpose was to strike at god, the consumer, with something more red, more voluptuous, more synthetically emblematic of verbose Beauty. The rose is a sick and twisted beast, tattoo'd into a vacuous cliche. And it is this excess artificiality that Ramsey's paintings do well, acknowledging their plastic grandeur - it is synthetic, a drug, a worldview hybridized from research chems, paint and brush. The decorative layered on the cliche. This is your grandma commenting on how much she loves your teenage wall's prismatic dancing bear. Then later it's the reverse, finding yourself staring up at your grandma's wood paneled wall, finding yourself liking her painting of a duck, its okay to like a painting of a duck, it just doesn't feel right.

Past: Autumn Ramsey

"... the 4th cat butthole - this one with lips of thighs to attend a sort of mollusk rear. ... the butt is the nexus where the world goes abstract, the fur whorls, the thing, like a Klein bottle, turns in on itself, disappears. Self empties. Self decorates its hole hallucination. Like all the roses. 

"decorative embellishments adorning the subject like Christmas tree, a structure for the hanging of means, that while Moreau's wreaths of ornamental doodadery shimmer with objects and riches... an object that has more or less lost its meaning to act the tradition itself, history painting glitz."

"lovely and sensuous cat butt"

".. the decorative itself becomes an object. It's not the shimmer to a space, but the sculpted out affect. You're not looking at a lion, you're looking at a hallucination..."

Read full: Autumn Ramsey at Crèvecoeur, Autumn Ramsey at Park View, Autumn Ramsey at Night Club

 Past: Pamela Rosenkranz

[Rosenkranz's] substances are often fictional, and Anemine appears an artistic bruhaha in a long line of "doctors" with liminal connections to good medicine ...  So long as promotion outspeeds due diligence the product will remain valid. And they are fun to say: NeuroSafe, Anthroplex, Brain Safe, Myco-ZX, TB12, Super Male Vitality, medical leeches, ... 

"gives consumers a sensation of security: the less they understand the terms used to describe the product, the more reliable it seems, because it's at the cutting edge of technology." ... everything there for a real good narrative.

As ostensible critique of pharmaceutical, technological and advertorial strategies, Rosenkranz instead deploys them to great affect in art, using their strategies in consolidating attention and maintaining lure over the viewer.

Pamela Rosenkranz at Karma International(2), Pamela Rosenkranz at Karma International(1)

Omari Douglin, Lukas Quietzsch at Ramiken

(link)

Position the abstractions with cartoons, to prove they have content. That the cartoon contents has an abstract value. Painting is a patchwork quilts. A color you sew to its vessel. A sponge absorbs what's near, a painting is its circumstance. How it is positioned, hung, curated. "the canvas becomes a better receptacle." It just takes it. Abstraction are cartoons, our cartoons are abstractions. etc. 

 Past: SoiL Thornton

"Thornton seemed to have the insight that there are more interesting things than "painting," and that these things are (or can be assimilated with) painting, that painting is not the historical given. There is no "natural" painting but merely an inherited set of tropes... Rules to a game you didn't even realize existed. ... where almonds or pennies might be an equal painting axiom as Greenbergian "flatness".  Inflate a mattress, call it painting, it's not revolutionary except for the fact that no one else is on the same gameboard. 

A "befuddlement of the terms and conditions of paintings... obtuse, tangential starts digressing from those painting histories generally acceptable as beginnings.

a balletic comedy of evasion.."

"It's like the world but also not the world at all. "

Full: SoiL Thornton at Kunstverein Bielefeld, SoiL Thornton at Moran Bondaroff, SoiL Thornton at Essex Street

Caitlin Keogh at Overduin & Co.

(link)

What can a tornado mean? How does it speak, catapulting whole neighborhoods into the air. A house blown up, again. How many times can you explode the house, the archive, mailbox, fenceposts, Greg, displayed, waving though the air, help. They continue beyond the frame! What can a Tornado mean by this? This is the fallout of Rachel Harrison semiotic explosion. The settling dust of nonsense. This is meaning aloft, in midair, the detritus of whatever art recently smart bombed. The airline wreckage cataloging its hangar. The little stick and poke tattoos glistening on your body. This face of Post Malone. A pox, outward flush of signs. He's got a case of the semiotics. He's got a pox of the interpretability. The illustration is clear.. but the meaning, whoa, wait till you get a load of the meaning. It's everywhere. The point is to make it look like a Clue board, to make the game is meaning. The loser is the first person to say "pipe."

Past: Kaspar Müller

"Not knowing is unacceptable, but outright rejection would prove viewer's impotence, thus created an environment where artists are able to produce further and further extremes of blankness, vacuums filled by refusals to not-know, whose sensory deprivation creates phantasms..."

"You cannot kill content if you tried because art is baggage..."


See full: Kaspar Müller at Société. Kaspar Müller at Société, Kaspar Müller at Federico Vavassori, Kaspar Müller at Museum im Bellpark,

Gina Folly at Centre d'édition contemporaine

(link)

The box's abundant metaphor, the gift, vessel, the transfer, a waste, a stuf, that nests a possibility. The box is capital's egg. Delivery, birth, of sexually selected commodity. The humble cardboard box makes our Amazonian wishes possible, you can conjure Christmas from a phone, it arrives in box. What is painting but a box? Its material is useless in comparison its higher order of content, to the gift of painting. A body that dies, but whose spirit remains. (See too: Sarah Rapson at Modern Art) An excess of cardboard population, no recycling center can handle. A dystopic grin printed on every one. Which becomes here's sentiments printed like a seance to the ghost, the ether, the big thing undelivered. 

Alex Katz at Sant'Andrea de Scaphis

(link)

It is so nice to be effortless. To be a breeze. To be warm winds. God could you imagine trying hard. No one wants to watch someone pedal a bicycle. They want motorcycles leaping chasms. Speed. And not wearing a helmet, or seatbelt, for danger allows you to fuck up the face. Look cool with a broken nose. Do not stop. Guns like brushes blazing. Saying, This / broken nose / makes me look cooler / than the guy / in a helmet of perfection / right? God can you imagine slowing down, to correct a mistake, pedestrian.

Terminal velocity, production itself becomes the product: Brätsch, KAYA, Genzken, Craven, Guyton, Smith, the zombies, the current, etc.

Bernd and Hiller Becher, or Borges, the attempts an archive expand to questions of what use? What use is a photo of every wasserturm. Every image of the world. There is too much water in ivory towers. Eventually their flood replaces the land, light houses occluding everything else, the territory replaced with its map scaled to consequence, beamed directly to your hand, interest. There is darkness elsewhere, dragons. We're not even sure there's art anymore, only documentation covering the land, creating the land. Where do you stand in it? Where we're going we don't need roads, or the 90s. There's a Before CAD and an After Daily. We used to like art until it became its image. But it's a necessary project, a good one possibly. 

I walked into Micheal E. Smith's show at Clifton Benevento, ten years ago exactly, where Mr. Clifton himself greeted me and gave me a tour. It ended with him grabbing the car console and spinning out the whole world around us. Him still smiling. 

Past: Michael E. Smith

"A google search says no one has used to word 'tumor' in any online writing about Smith. Which seems odd; his objects seem awfully affected by a lot of lumps, red dots, growths... Teratomas: the classic hair and teeth of your twin in your tummy. You can google pictures of these, they actually look a lot like Smith's more "bodily" objects. ... find a potato in our eye, the 'categorically promiscuous.' Things sliding into new subjects like bare knees across asphalt..."

"It's a cliche at this point to say that Smith makes the mundane object estranged. And in a sea of so many surrealists currently operating, less than helpful. Estrangement is today's go-to strategy. Smith's is individuated, each object set off so that we can no longer 'know' the sculpture, eroding a complete vision, and opening a distrust. A psychological sliver. We cannot know the object, its relation to other objects is broken, either categorically (there is no category to place the object within, surrealist) or psychologically (the unknown threat). The rocking chair I project from the two elegant bones still in contact with the substrate of the real is not the same as the one in your head. This unknown destabilizing of our ability to conceptualize the objects in equitable terms to exchange with another -both objects and other people - (eroding the material semio-substrate with which our exchange is based) breaching a distrust, is its sinister quality."

"Threat of bodily violence is implicit to art that treats materials as categorically promiscuous (surreal - a body to become goo as any other), e.g. if you can put puffer fish under the table's summer sky, inflate them like footballs with whale ears, aren't you as wiling to place skulls at your knees. The disregard for the categorical order is like gore, crushing bodies."

"You can never be certain you've seen all the butterflies, their artwork is everywhere."


Click for full: Michael E. Smith at Atlantis, Michael E. Smith at 500 Capp Street Foundation, Michael E. Smith at Sculpture Center, Michael E. Smith at Michael Benevento, Michael E. Smith at Zero, Michael E. Smith at Lulu, Michael E. Smith at Susanne Hilberry,

Nora Turato at Sprüth Magers

(link)

What Nauman did for neon, Turato does for motivational posters, bus adverts. The contemporary illuminate manuscript to nonsensical ... sadness? - that empty pang after finding yourself having read the billboard before even knowing you were reading the billboard. Your brain wants to "make sense" of its surroundings, and you read it for clues, end up reading the billboard that has commandeered your evolutionary wiring to sell you a half naked woman in socks. It's not your fault you read it, not your fault it barely makes sense. You were not intended for spaces like these. Nothing is rational in art or advertising, for both there is only that same distending space that creates a void, a meaning that must be filled, consumerist or otherwise. 

Perhaps this is part of our Modern Gothic.


See too: Matt Keegan, Kay Rosen at Grazer Kunstverein, Hanne Lippard & Nora Turato at Metro Pictures, Gene Beery at Shoot the Lobster, Karl Holmqvist at Sant’Andrea de Scaphis, John Giorno at Almine Rech, Nora Turato at LA MAISON DE RENDEZ-VOUS, Nora Turato at Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein

Masato Kobayashi at ShugoArts

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Paintings that barely stand on their own. That's .. a position. "What I can say about freedom is, perhaps, how I go about making my frames." - the artist. The PR: " ...no fixed forms, but are free and flexible. His style of painting while stretching the canvas is unprecedented." Artforum: "It’s hard to like Masato Kobayashi’s exhibition." You can't say "bad," you say, "an apparent act of apostasy against 'taste.'" This is About Freedom. Reminded of a meme: 

A chad says to a monkey in a zoo, "You are not free."
The monkey responds, "No, it is you who are not free."
"But you are in a cage" replies chad.
The monkey then begins to publicly masturbate.

This is about freedom.

Past: Lin May Saeed

"Making art that expresses care for animals by carving it in material that - if left uncared for - would quickly degrade and release poisons harmful to animals is sort like selling live grenades in a puppy shelter. Why not take a grenade home, why not take back some of this asbestos to protect the earth if not your home, these animals need you. ... the suicide games pretty much everyone believes we're playing now in the anthropocene's foot-to-the-pedal towards brick walls type of time period."

"Its forthrightness would seem naive if it wasn't so endearing, handing it right to you to care for its fragility."


Full: Lin May Saeed at Jacky Strenz, Lin May Saeed at Studio Voltaire, Lin May Saeed at Lulu

Past: Ulala Imai

"... Paintings that feel sort of worn in, faded, like your life. The things ready to date themselves, the air exposed fruit, the bordering passé culture - it's all so ready to expire. Which makes them skulls."

"..already going out of style, like a 70s spread left to the light, going blue with that ultimate death, cliche." 

Full: Ulala Imai at Nonaka-Hill, Ulala Imai at KARMA, Group Show at High Art, 

Chadwick Rantanen at Michael Benevento Gallery & Aria Dean at Progetto

(Benevento, Progetto)

Silent instruments, silence musicians. Artists castrate sound. What is the resonance of mute instrument? What is the sound of one hand clapping? Between the form and the lost notes is the gap, the fissure allowing the viewer fill meaning in that distance. Blue ball you until you mean it. 

Monika Stricker at P420

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It's become a trope the generic lumpy thing stands as question, a guessable what, an interminable fount ... of interpretation. Stricker's previous scrota attached a specificity to this decipherable gum. They were tea leaves but they were testicle tea leaves, thorny full frontal fun. A too-specific amorphousness to your nightmare. Maybe the problem is "Bigfoot is blurry.. It's not the photographer's fault. Bigfoot is blurry, and that's extra scary to me. There's a large, out-of-focus monster roaming the countryside." Because not being able to discern is our Halloween. 

Past: Puppies Puppies (Jade Kuriki Olivo)

"...Like oral traditions whose stories allowed modification to fit the moment’s ethos, PP’s public domaining of intellectual properties proposes the, e.g., Chiquita banana as open source material. [...]  pre-established content for its storytelling, inhabiting the corporate/commercial sign systems that have come to determine our world. Harry Potter is the new Iliad for better or worse...."

"That we can rearrange the world for us to fit into, remake it to our desires, have every right be as legitimate a Spongebob as Nickelodeon, and write our own as canon. Be the Carpenter you want to see in the world."

Read full: Puppies Puppies (Jade Kuriki Olivo) at Balice Hertling, Puppies Puppies at What Pipeline, Puppies Puppies at BFA Boatos

Rachel Fäth at Francis Irv

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A kind of formalism we find endearing, one that follows its own form into esoterics. Questions of "what's it for" alienation, what use could it be? Because art has no use, though we require it. This leaves an open question where meaning forms. All the little points and greebles to precipitate it.

Think Richard Rezac's alien question, meets Oscar Tuazon's protestant ethic, and Matt Paweski's erotic service of the machine, or K.r.m Mooney's "Jeweler's dilemma."

See too: Richard Rezac, Oscar Tuazon at Le Consortium & Paradise Garage, Matt Paweski, K.r.m Mooney

Berta Fischer at Galerie Karin Günther

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The entrails of industrial material sciences. Look at this plastic intestine, this capitalist buffalo, this "sculpture as a joyful errancy."A new type of mud, like the invention of paint tubes allowed the painter to enter the plain's air, and now allows these balloons of empire, the bright stuf of production. Like a lead white that makes you blind, a reminder of plastics in your blood, coffee, eyes. The glitzy fun, plastic fun. Capital and a plasticity to the world.

Past: Charline von Heyl

These instead just sorta flip-out, covering and masquerading a can-can, like a painting in slow state of clonic seizure, and gesticulation as cerebral-visual paradox, optical illusion, disguise. What Kelsey called Big Joy could also be a state of mania, or anxious outburst, like seeing your friend on amphetamines and wondering what about his personality you liked in the first place. Abstraction is the friend in this metaphor. Because these paintings are brutal. I keep coming back to their somehow relation to the FEED, to the anxious state of transitionary image, of scrolling. "painterly recognition that is particular, depleting, and manic." People love these and I could stop talking about them if someone would write that their praise, that what we are all enjoying, is the delirious feeling of being struck in the face..."

"trading the devotional for the more transactional address of advertorial cymbal crashing, of images striking... like being struck, designed with the force of icons and logos, instantaneous recognition, the paintings connect with a speed prophetic of the contemporary ... understandable that her rise delayed would coincide with that of digital networks: von Heyl's paintings turn composition into a kind of semio-transaction of consumption"

"painterly recognition that is particular, depleting, and manic"


Click for full: Charline von Heyl at Petzel & Deichtorhallen, Charline von Heyl at Gisela Capitain, Charline von Heyl at Capitain Petzel

Georgie Nettell at Project Native Informant

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>>>Modern Gothic

This is an example of the Modern Gothic.

The strategy: employ, display, the depressing methods of our late-stage-nightmare. A celebration you nor anyone will enjoy - it's in the title. The high five of office pizza parties, the coal black drudgery of corporatized fun. What does it mean to give out what you know no one wants. The Modern Gothic can't be mistaken as art, won't provide that relief. The Modern Gothic only redoubles the banality. The John Knight quote: "It’s the primary lexicon for substantiating neoliberalism. It’s the off-the-shelf language of hegemony." We all know we hate this, why does it exist, why can't we stop it, this balloon party to capitalism.

This "repackaged and repurposed disobedience" with "a raw print speed of more than 12,000 square feet per hour." MASS MARKET HOPE. MASS MARKET CRITIQUE. Like the iconic Fairey poster quickly depleting its utopic optimism, now appearing ironic gravestone. A ballon party to the corruption of desire for political agency. Replacing it with the politically negligent. The strategy of corrupting critique, corrupting our political language, ruins our ability to form political response. If you fuck up language, the rational, enough it destroys the ability to speak, to think. Enough of this causes the "learned helplessness in rats."

Klara Lidén at Galerie Neu

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Ways to look like like abstraction. Ways to look like minimalism. Ways to look like the good ol' days. refresh the old frames with a patina of the moment. Abstraction distressed like denim. Why do we need to the forms to resemble old forms? This is nostalgia, slightly smelly.

The mud gets on the painting. The mud of Guatemala. These painting have seen a volcano. Vivid parrots. Touched grass. Was Birnbaum purposefully echoing Pollock's "I am nature" when he wrote "Are Suter’s works ecological? Yes, but they are not about ecology. They are ecology." The mud is value added: "I liked seeing them but must conclude that they alone would not have made the show worthwhile. The mudslides added another dimension." Paint is just fancy mud, but mudslides are the meaning. The production is product. The machine you create to create. This replaces meaning. The machine is meaning. No one knows why Pollock dripped anymore, that knowledge is lost. What is important is that he created a machine that dripped.

The machine of creativity. The production line of thought. A whole lot of painting. Even looks like recent Guyton exhibitions. Printer of painting. Surely isn't what Suter intended, but it is what in our current moment those higher powers command. The cultural unconscious wants, gets shown. It's hard to separate art from the machine of art, from the machinations of providing more mud with new value.

The inkblot has a shape - there is interpretation to be had - we recognize patterns in cultural noise. We are tasked with naming the forms. Naming the forms is its own type of sculpture, a chisel in viewer's hand, what do you see in the marbling. The artist awaiting his sculpture of your making. Tell him what it means. 

Using the Renaissance technologies of realism available, the church could control the heavens. Conjuring images was power, they controlled the media, the very image of god. (The way we control the image of airstrikes now.) And as art's timeline moves forward backwards, the church returns, the paintings put to heaven. We want the temple back. Want to look up to something. Regression towards trad-cath values feels avant-garde in a realm where new style is tradition. The paradox doesn't matter because this temple is comfort. A time when painting was looked up to. 

Scientists studied whether human's could identify with abstract shapes, to assign a triangle thoughts, feelings. They of course could. This triangle was angry. This one was scared. Devoid of stimuli the brain seeks recognition, applies logic to nothing to make sure the world retains solvency, coherence as defense against the face of meaningless abyss. This is how god exists. This is how Peter Halley's paintings exist. It's called Prisoner's Cinema.

In a world / where inventing new styles was tradition / I have colored in the parts that are interesting. The appearance of newness, self refreshes. In art. Triviality allowed an innumerable new. Where inventing new styles was a candied tradition. A new shade. It is synthesized from rare long chain polymers. Everything the painter touched with it, was brilliant. This bisexual coloring gothic structures, gray pasts. Rearranging the past was tradition. Electric new color. We had invented a new light, or something that looked like it. 

This is an infographic for how to dismantle your head. An airline saftey card for emergency, surgery. In a stressful situation the cartoon remains calm. In an overheated toilet, trying to make it go away. It returns. White walls not remaining white. Stained by art. Our thought attempts to clean. It can't. It is like wiping a marker. These artists are a marker on good faith walls. The turd begging to be cleaned is a paradox. Saying, "clean me! clean me," he risks vaporization, he is really only asking to be polished. 

How much of art history is a joke between painters. When Brueghel painted the two plump guinea pigs beneath two Rubens' lovers, was that parody? Is the motif of hands with velvet between fingers a signal between painters through the centuries? Surely most of Manet's was taking the piss. He knows that we know that he knows. He knows. And Monika Baer's somehow accesses this whole history of in-jokes with a single red clown nose. 

No more reality. No more home. The audience / gets up to leave. There is no more art. Something has evaporated. There is no art, there is only the sound of a feedback loop of a career's one hand clapping.

You can do anything to anything. You can make crabs metallic. In a NASA like centrifuge. The wheels at base sediment its go anywhere do anything cynicism. This display of highly irreverent material ballyhoo is functional! Wheel it around the yard. It is meant for display. The meaning is the affect of treating everything as a high powered display of itself. 

Drawings are better than art because they're only schematics. A painting gets away with a lot by virtue of being a real thing in the world - it doesn't have to prove its existence. But a drawing is borderline immaterial. Burn a blueprint and the architecture's skeleton still exists in your head. 

 A conservative politician walks out on stage to Rage Against the Machine. He is said to "not to get it." "You are the machine" someone dunks. X erupts. Bruce Springsteen is sought for comment.The cat is hit in head with a large mallet. This repeats every election cycle - it is our annual scientific experiment in the field of aesthetics. The loudspeakers pump meaning to a large sample size. Last year we selected "Born in the USA." The conservative politician wins. This is how art means. 

I have left the three emojis. There in the cradle beneath your image. These three emojis are the legal representation of the cornucopia of my care. Three hearts, the tithe and taxation of my attention. This one has an arrow through it. Curator, do you see these three plums of my engagement? They are my soul, my tender. Three diamonds, three magi bearing at your manger. This is not a panopticon, I promise I love. These three lightning bolts I have carved for you represent your Zeus like stature. That is why I carved them for you. You are not balding. Your lipstick trustworthy. You should consider wielding, a trident. I meant to say you posts are redolent and insightful, but instead I have left the three emojis from the icebox we share.

We have grown tired of critique. Grown past it. Grown into something more agreeable, more contrite, more pleasing to the eye. Just pleasant to be around. To be liked. Not so much respected. No one respects the wind, but a cool breeze is necessary. To be the wind at our backs making steps easier. To make our positioning amiable. That's what we're here for today. A more colorful world. The crunch that sells the candy. What is there left but instagram posts of artist portraits celebrating birthdays, smiling and excellent whites. We're all so friendly, all friends, this is friendly smiling. I am not imagining blood. I am not trying to kill you with my mind. I am not speaking through gritted teeth a preferable opinion. I am not lamenting the ass kiss that you are. I have never once at the bar said unkind things about your artists, never spoken ill of his collecting. Never seen the nepotism. Never held tongue of another to make it speak something I wanted to hear. This bowl of cherries is cadmium and doesn't require press release. I have instagrammed it to show I believe in beauty despite my gallery roster. The following things are bad:

Michaela Eichwald at Neue Galerie Gladbeck

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Has Eichwald gone pleasant? Surely there could be some critically interesting reason for the turn.. but what is it? A flower has grown from the mud? All that previous gasping intestinals, mud men, and tube brown were only mulch, to grow this? When Oehlen made his turn from swamp butt to the smeared super Crest contemporary there was something something kept, the stupidity of smearing paint. But these are pure handsome, brushed hair and all. 

See all: Michaela Eichwald