Amalia Ulman at Jenny's

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"The theater that came next placed their social capital literally on view, staged, showcasing the finer patrons on a pedestal and brightly lit to be gawked upon. It would be called a Blue Ocean Strategy... Whatever institutional critique it held was mostly in the fact that it could do it better, insinuate itself better, prove the sporting of it, point dull yellow lights at the gameroom of it."

This is how you get corrupted. Eventually you get intertwined, which is the same as ensnared, because you know these people. Your opinion is no longer neutral, you bite your tongue, you become a compromised asset. There's nothing New Yorkers love more than self-congratulations. They and movie industry making self-congratulations an unironic artform. This is Empire and its state of mind. Do I fear other's toes? - that's what no one was asking. It's fun to be part of something. The toast and the roast are the same to the professional. It's barely caricature at this point. Robbin's Talent was funny because it wasn't a joke. It dryly announced its commercial moment, no art to it at all. Artists as their headshot. Artist as professional. This was before "Top 10 Under 30"s. It was saying the quiet part loud. Here the caricature is alms paid to deny the horse of it all. Barely caricature at all. 

"A culture, say a magazine or a museum, that can purchase an absolution to the images it wants through an art that gesticulates critique."

See too: Calla Henkel & Max Pitegoff at Cabinet, Amalia Ulman at The Gallery at El Centro

Karen Fan, Caroline Zhang at Gern en Regalia

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A state of painting that has sunk so far into endless permutable decor-figuration - that someone actually tending to the body feels like free healthcare. Nursing wounds.

Past: Andrea Zittel

"... " Zittel is local science-fiction - ideas as propositions, viewing them you get to feel the utopian impulse - imagine a world where we haven't already welcomed the new insect overlord, fantasy rebellion against Empire. - a fantasy of a world cognizant."

Read Full: Andrea Zittel

Pae White at greengrassi

"... Grandma's quilts compressed into jewels, like Babylonian cylinder seals you can roll out their patterns to any length, threatening a mass production of precious moments.

Pae White at greengrassi

 Past: Diane Severin Nguyen

"... Filth is only gross when we fear its spread, contamination. And we have become lovers of filth. [The list below proves it] ... It could be that rise of CAD and crystalline documentation - the even-white fluorescence provided the clinic - could hold filth at a distance, anti-sceptic photography for petri-dish transmission. Everything looks good in the white light of pornography, even that filth. Like we finally had the clean rooms to handle it, not just white boxes, but had invented technological gloves to package all of it..."

Read full: Brandon Ndife, Diane Severin Nguyen at Bureau

Gowoon Lee at Meredith Rosen Gallery

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An enhanced interrogation on our own childhood's wet eyed tube intake. Art History's torture of Disney rodents: Oldenburg, Foulkes, Pensato, McCarthy, Beeple, et al.  Attaching artistic electrodes to the commodified rabbits and amplifying pain. Our moment today: "the body reappears and it appears as a cartoon, which we're mad about." Why? Abstraction: "Our bodies extrapolated from the growing prevalence of data and numbers domineering discussions of humans. The "broad picture" we use for governance. People as populations. Everything feels like a cartoon in this virtuality because you can do great violence to it. A million jobs lost, a million jobs gained. Tom whacks at Jerry with a mallet like an axe. Jerry distends."

"...comedy premised on slapstick’s violence upon the real, stretching the real into a comic absurdity, teasing a threat to break it, which rationalizing this discrepancy forced laughter in children...What may be interesting about this show is that we have defined the moment, the kids grown on cartoons have arrived and their childhoods have coincidentally, absurdly, become the accurate depictions of the way the world has begun to feel, and will soon become generic, but at least we'll get to stop repeating ourselves."

Past: Isa Genzken

"To make one of those statements that art writers have tendency to make based upon an inflated assessment of their own opinion's import... Bruce Nauman has passed the torch of most influential living artist to Isa Genzken. It happened in field about 4 years prior as part of a much unpublicized ceremony 28 miles due south of Santa Fe. Without fanfare, neither artist even leaving their respective vehicle, handed through lowered windows, Nauman reported to have said "Best of it." The two made eye contact and somewhere off a small goose was made to fly along with several terse press releases from the agency that assess such matters. It was said that Genzken's speed finally attained escape velocity from the crushing gravitation of Nauman's iron mire."

"Genzken founded strategies rather than objects, an artistic down-shifting, a speed that could overtake. "the most influential living artist not because everything looks like it, but because it predicated a conglomerate speed absorbing any last vestiges of particular attention to individuated objects" i.e. When we see Genzken we react to the deployment or manipulation/alteration to its strategy, the means of attending the object rather than object itself. Weirdly deny the consumptive act of looking by permanently existing in a state of limbo.."

Past: All posts tagged Genzken, Isa Genzken at David Zwirner, Isa Genzken at Institute of Contemporary Art, Isa Genzken at Hauser Wirth & Schimmel + Daniel Buchholz, Isa Genzken at Galerie Buchholz

Elliott Hundley at Regen Projects

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The "just fuck my shit up" school of reasoning paint to canvas. Building armatures to spray. Rube Goldberg device, for displaying juice. Paint will always look good. This is a permanent feature of art - that these gold coins we trade are always already minted, you are just looking for reasons to fill the parameters. A backronym for the trade. 

Past: John Miller

"There's Yves Klein blue and John Miller brown, a color so untranscendent as to castrate any pretense of art's higher plane, reminding us of our earthly rope tethering bowels to earth. Miller blockades, belittles, our azure sky fantasy with the lesser order, everything we would prefer to forget immortalized over what had been our vacations, from drudgery."

"flashy twinkling across televisual space frozen as the wallpaper of painting and hideous: television zazzle becomes the bad struggle to taxidermy it. The Price is Right ... a Vegas labyrinth watching guesses at the price of garbage, but Miller's focus on the chintz is as much an attack on painting as much as any politics of mass entertainment ... Because the television game is no different from the majority of dealers and collectors also guessing the eventual price or status of the painting before you...."

Full: John Miller (all posts), Richard Hoeck and John Miller at Meliksetian | Briggs, John Miller at Barbara Weiss, John Miller at Institute of Contemporary Art Miami, John Miller & Dominik Sittig at Nagel Draxler, John Miller at Meliksetian | Briggs

Camille Soualem at Exo Exo

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George W. Bush's leaked Guccifer paintings were laughably earnest in the ex-pres's personal struggle with representation - they were self-conscious, bad, and, literally, nakedly vulnerable. The ineptitude allowed obvious metaphors that any regular publicist would shine out. A war criminal's self-portraits with all the symbolism of teenage art class. And this was the president's teenage years. Literally looking in the mirror, at toes, again, naked. Later, when Bush realized he could append thick abstraction to cover for lack of talent the paintings became middling, average, collegiate. An impasto to cover the cracks, a style to camouflage. But the bad was when it was good. Appropriate here. 

Past: Kayode Ojo at Praz-Delavallade

"...perfume advertisement sedimented as sculpture. Awaiting moistened Drake to pour and offer, not just a drink but a life. ... We like chintz, and better any excuse to play it as ironic, look down upon it. How much artworld glitz comes with heavy justification, armor against actually liking it. Excused glamor are why artists were invented. ..."

Past: Kayode Ojo at Praz-Delavallade

Past: Koak at Altman Siegel

"... The painter demands composition, extraction, humans repurposed for painting's ends, how modern. Arabesque motifs get harsher until the ballet seem inhuman doll-like, Picasso rips apart models and we find this intoxicating. Our runway models and their own body's El Grecoing..."

Read full: Past: Koak at Altman Siegel

Peter Fischli at Galerie Buchholz

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This torturing our social symbols. Why? What does a technical interrogation garner? What are we looking for?

Past: Magnus Frederik Clausen, David Ostrowski at Spazio Orr

 "The less you try the closer you are to getting something uninhibited, almost natural. You get raw wood, a brushstroke that looks free. Like it's not in a cage. Of course no one really thinks it is. But you maybe get to imagine it."

Past: Magnus Frederik Clausen, David Ostrowski at Spazio Orr

Graph paper day - Hanne Darboven at Petzel & Jennifer Bartlett at Marianne Boesky

(Petzel, Boesky)

Graph paper day at CAD. Where one's accounting system attempted visual coherence we could call organization or even "aesthetic" - the other had no problem fully opening its system to endless all encompassing meaninglessness. Of course it's not true. Both are equally meaningless. But the ones desire to cohere some graphic, pattern, or reason fulfills its function as art. The other made an ocean.

 Past: Hanne Darboven

"the staggering vastness of information, The feed we are forced to endure, the stream choked down like faucet glued lips ...  the .jpeg format is a finite set of pixels, already contains within it the entirety of images, every photo that could possibly be taken, in the noise there are nudes of you in it, of your father, nudes of Napoleon, simply shuffle the pixel deck enough, one will be accurate, the trick is finding something meaningful in the babble, in the stream knowing what meaning would even look like."

"Proposal: A series of videos of curators explaining Hanne Darboven to their dad."

Read: Hanne Darboven at Sprüth Magers, Hanne Darboven at Deichtorhallen

Past: Brook Hsu

"... like looking at a museum through Heineken bottles ... And this chromatic loss only instead heightens desire, want for the full spectral ecstasy, denied in your beer-glassed body. Maybe this is what Homer meant by a wine dark sea, ... But, this continually applied loss could be metaphorically over attended, it is too meaningful, and wants for. Its erotic denial is itself a thing..."

Full: Brook Hsu at Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Brook Hsu at Manual Arts

Elizabeth Orr at Derosia

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Painting takes on the appearance of a widget, a machine for itself. Functionality is an appearance, an affect of form. Like Matt Paweski, there's an enjoyment of the functional object's subservience, a footrest for your feet, for your eyes it displays.  

see: Matt Paweski at Park View/Paul Soto

Magali Reus at Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Deurle

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Reus is exemplar of the cartoonification of the world. Everything convertible to plastic, printable. "tradition was wiped out by the invention of capitalist plastic. Labor was reduced to work, and craft became manufacturing processes, became laser cut wood, CNC milled blocks, a thousand interns on call. Suddenly your dreams could be injection molded. Ostensibly." Now the chore becomes pressing print, of everything on everything, Paintings are already printed on totes to toilet paper so why not a wooden spool? The algorithm combines and consumer clicks value. The artist becomes the algorithm in a society that doesn't know what it wants. The great recombinator. Post Rachel Harrison blowing up the mall - it returns as souvenirs. It is not the artist's "semantic ambivalence" - it is the world's. The world is stupid and functioning, and art we are given we are said to deserve. 

See too: Darren Bader at Andrew Kreps, Sam Pulitzer at House of Gaga, Sanya Kantarovsky, Camille Blatrix at Modern Art, Rachel Harrison at Whitney Museum

Past: Magali Reus at Westfälischer Kunstverein

"the created objects treat the real as constructible, the physical as putty in cartoons, detached from their specific instance and arranged into hieroglyphs, what Javier Hontoria referred to as the artists's 'semantic ambivalence.'"


Magali Reus at Westfälischer Kunstverein

Patricia L. Boyd at Secession, Vienna

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The "certifying white light." Of food porn, pornography, and god. Also the gallery. Product photography. To reduce blemishes. Feign omniscience. Pretend to be science, all knowing, objective. If we could remove darkness, spend extra on the intricacy, we would find some kind of truth-identifying substance. We only require extra wattages, a more technical brilliance, higher levels of magnification, detail, analysis. Then it will be revealed. The exhaustion engine. 

Past:  Patricia L. Boyd at Christian Andersen & Front Desk Apparatus

"But what does this system produce? Nothing except an image of itself. The artist refers to the work as an “exhaustion engine.” It simultaneously represents and realizes the use and expenditure of her artistic resources: a commission fee and a studio at the NASA-grade production facilities" -Annie Godfrey Larmon Artforum

Someone once said that Sports were simply an advanced random number generator for creating stories. Sometimes art seems a similarly tangential means for the same.

Past:  Patricia L. Boyd at Christian Andersen & Front Desk Apparatus

 Past: Hana Miletić 

"...that labor itself returns as a literal fetishism, stitches mark this labor, look compelling, can be brought out onto white walls, as aura, as artwork. Labor itself becomes auratic, the look of it. Simulacra. Because every cheap objects is an equal tapestry. The stitches in time are smoother, hidden. Hold up your child's plastic toy and feel another at its end.

"Because knitting is so laboriously outmoded it can only be care, i.e. not capitalism, more love hours than can ever be repaid, etc. Knitting is the province of excess time, and attention, which translates to -anticapitalist- care)"

Full: Notes on Stitches, Hana Miletić at Basement Roma