Past: Richard Aldrich

"Aldrich's befuddlement of the terms and conditions of paintings makes for obtuse, tangential starts digressing from those painting histories generally acceptable as beginnings. If the paintings seem facetious or frivolous it is because Aldrich doesn't necessarily venerate the histories that are painting cannon, and so which attaching almonds to a painting is not only a thing to do but becomes naturalized as a term of painting - possibly - as all the talk of flatness once was...

"Because surely there is actually a fool doing this full time."

Read Full: Richard Aldrich at Adrian Rosenfeld, Richard Aldrich at Gladstone Gallery, Contemporary Art Quarterly: Richard Aldrich

2020's Figurative Painting Bingo

Martin Puryear at Matthew Marks

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A sculpture that misleads. Hard to take in. Creates two rooms. A hidden internal structure and in another world, the one we occupy, the anode gathering air. Going to somehow turn us inside out. 

 Past: Martin Puryear

"...what had been its throwback vintages, traditionalism, seems now prescient of trends of biomorphic sculpture and its use of vague forms, distributed or unplaceable referents, the sort of innuendo formation of meaning, whats in your head may not lay in mine, contemporary even." 

"in which any Stadelschulite handed these objects, packaged à la mode instead of as craft, would look “fresh;" fresh as septuagenarian's handiwork."

Full: Martin Puryear at Parasol unit, Martin Puryear at Matthew Marks

Martine Bedin at Crèvecoeur

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Art is a ludicrous object, a Rube Goldberg device for some strange cultural malignancy. But art's basic forms mask the inanity. Painting is a format that seems to tautologically explain itself, it's a painting, it's meant for walls. In this way artwork falsely naturalizes. Bedin's objects evolve structures that prevent naturalization, like peacock tails they are partly too stupid for this world, but somehow biologically necessary. Design which refuses to be necessary, importantly. 

 Past: Lewis Hammond at Casa Masaccio

"Dark in amber, scenes held in brown glass. A "wine dark sea," a Homerian world devoid of azure. ... scenes reflected in another substance, using a mirror to inspect the bathroom, ... An aberration in the glass or in you."

 Past: Lewis Hammond at Casa Masaccio

Merlin James at Chris Sharp Gallery

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James makes paintings that are difficult without resort to "bad painting." A distinction interesting since, for all "bad painting"'s ostensible antagonism to rational orders and anti-appeal, has become immensely commodified - the idiot savant nappies now become blue chip trading cards. Somehow the adults love trading diapers. Bad painting not so bad. The point: James's rejection is more obtuse, slow to reach the demands of consumable painting. Like Hans Hoffman, an intellect doomed to make terrible paintings. Or Joseph Albers always being terrible at color. James forever caroms off anything digestible. Elderstatesman to the Richard Aldriches working tangentially to canon's rutted path, instead an outer mud searched through, never really wiped clean. 

See too: Richard Aldrich

Past: Merlin James

... James shows how weird painting can actually be. So far outside current tastes that not even sure we like them, ugly as hell ... These are like painting trying to turn itself into a car. Even the dumbly painted ones, paintings trying to pretend they're a cat...

Read Full: Merlin James at Kerlin Gallery

Bernhard Schobinger at Martina Simeti

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At a time when so many artists are working to backfill their materials with "content" the press release elucidates as ingredient lists, it's become an unironic Pearoefoam so prevalent. So it's a point to note Preciousness is arbitrary. Diamonds, the internet will tell you, are artificially rare, demand conjured by corporations excellent marketing. Which, is all preciousness artificial? Conjured through the technique of aura production? Everything is Pearoefoam? Are artists the industrialization of aura? Anyway its a point made clear here, jewels made from the mine of arbitrary standards, as good as any other here, better even, these jewels were invented. 

Gretchen Bender at Sprüth Magers

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The simple Brechtian device, knot tied around finger, reminder distance. In comparison, how overwrought today's hi-budget televisual orgies. An interesting observation from the PR even, "Layering text over moving image is as familiar now in memes, tweets and social media posts," - that these are memes, constantly updating, live, cycling between nonsense and prescient. An analog HUD. "Items that are overdetermined to point of banality, yet the obviousness of the operation does not lessen it." Now you get to watch TV with some ostensible criticality, two TVs at once, what could be better. 

See too: Julia Scher, Gretchen Bender at Wilkinson

 Past: Gretchen Bender

"... the almost imperceptibly slight shift required to bend our cultural images as though Empire's propaganda... Bender did, famously, design the credits for America's Most Wanted, the most explicitly authoritarian expression of US entertainment, in which the ostensible good skip judge and jury for the exciting mercenary chase of the manhunt from the comfort of your home, call 1-800-CRIMETV, themselves the long arm of the law.."

Read full: Gretchen Bender at Wilkinson

Genpei Akasegawa at SCAI PIRAMIDE

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Like freebasing Wolfgang Tillmans - the raw particles of a life, its detritus of attention, this is the good stuff, artless, hidden in drawers, in nana's closet. Pay attention to someone else's attention. We of the upturned noses, hoovering up another's stash, vacuums all the way down, or human centipedes of another's output. 

Past: Kerstin Brätsch, KAYA

"The point is, the production is product. The machine you create to create. No one knows why Pollock dripped anymore, that knowledge is lost. What is important is that he created a machine that dripped. This replaces meaning. The machine does. "

"Genzken [is] the most influential living artist not because everything looks like it, but because [she] predicated a conglomerate speed absorbing any last vestiges of particular attention to individuated objects. And whereas others used this to produce "series," Genzken extrapolated, used this as a means of acceleration in which speed and production was the communication, amassing product and centering production as the point. That the production of itself became the product."

Adam Kleinman in TZK: "as many artists have learned to feed this desire with work made quickly, but with enough conceptual acrobatics to make them acceptable as part of a canon of their own oeuvre—or that of a supposed canon on the critique of modernity. And here, the artist has found a way not only to maximize the circulation of his/her work, but also to reduce the budget in terms of both time and materials—the original shady business of “skimming”, although one that is justifiable considering the low rate of artist fee’s. Within this particular loop, a potential critique of excess is ensnared as another symptom of that very excess. And it is with this dual farce of today’s production and related branding activities, namely the desire for the curator to collect and justify an artistic industry of prefab and ready-at-hand esoterics, that one should enjoy DAS INSTITUT’s irreverent something for everybody with a little for everyone approach."

"WHO says by 2020 depression will be the second most prevalent medical condition in the world. Rats pleasure themselves to death. ...use of beauty as a deployable assaultive thing, prolific- likely what critics refers to as the artist's "advertising strategies" - exhausting..."


Click here Kerstin Brätsch at Gio Marconi, DAS INSTITÜT at Serpentine Gallery, KAYA at Deborah Schamoni,  Kerstin Brätsch at Gavin Brown, Kerstin Brätsch at Gladstone 64

Tunji Adeniyi-Jones at Morán Morán

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There is no narrative anymore. There is only soup, a Matisse boiled alive, a figured consumed, a PR acting as an ingredient label: "arts and crafts" "Yoruban" "Mexican Mural" flavoring. A more refined soup compared to the squalor punk of, say, Max Brand's squat house gruel. Soups are everywhere today. "Soup is easy to mass produce: a base prepared in advance can be used to a support a wide and readily available ingredients on its surface." The point being soups are brought to taste, you might even like yours.

See too: Max Brand

Georgia Sagri at Ulrik, New York

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You must sediment your practice. Into tangibles. Painting becomes the catch all. How Trisha Brown also bottled dance by touching painting. Painting just takes it. Plays nice, supports its role as artworld coin. Placing everything on painting reinforces the myth, having the magical property of containing it.

Group Show at Galerie Clages

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A sort of encapsulation of current art. Cargo cult totems that we perform our art rituals upon. It might as well be magic what today's press releases claim. Incant. And wryly Werner's contraptions are the Rube Goldberg machines of art function, like Rachel Harrison and Jason Rhodes finally shaking hands - the factory, meaning disassembles and reassembles, semantically fractured, as content/aura. Art's ostensible value. The sign is material, the art is the machine for compositionizing them, meaning's byzantine Mouse Trap. 

See too: Antligature Rooms p.43, Cargo Cult

Bispo do Rosario at Americas Society

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At one point we force fed things like Krebber, all the hot white stars of the western hegemony, spammed in feeds, again and again. For we were the Colognies. For years. This was the digital process of artworld reproduction, spread across seas, maps spread like all the dark slide rooms of schools, of catalogs, of the cannon reproducing itself in wet eyed young forced to look up to it. Which we're taking account for now, decolognizing your bookshelf, contemporary art library et al. An artworld ostensibly returning care to those previously left at the fringes. One wonders how many of these will return? How many will be cared for? Each day we receive a new banner heralding the new forgotten. As a matter of inclusivity. Rightly so. How many will be taken down from the banner and be given hospitality. How many will return? Will we see Bispo again? Can the ark of culture bring more than two in this deluge, all existing artists on Earth. Questions everyone kept asking.

Gina Proenza at Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen

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European Kunsthalles have budgets with press releases bearing the weight of the world. In NYC gallery will have no press release and be a show of dirty dishes. A Kunsthalle serves a slightly different purpose, but the trope extends throughout. 

Na Mira at Park View/Paul Soto

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Mirrors which allow color to spill, bleed. Into the political dimension - a place artworld can see but can't access. Just hope our artwork somehow runs into it. 

Past: Darren Bader

"that if we're going to take seriously the idea of dead fire bricks arranged gravenly on floors .. then too so we must accept with it its ideological twin, shrimp tossed in a foosball table or muffins arranged. To argue 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."

"the reason a lot of artists hate Bader, besides the general impishness, is the refusal to perform any sort of critical consolidation of his practice, that moral underpinning of art, "criticality." Instead, a near incessant expansion at the cost of any "critical" structure.  Any of Bader's "good ideas" are buried in an avalanche of "any idea." ... A lot of artists - despite whatever art's claims to freedom - wouldn't let themselves behave half this stupidly. ..."

"...on the internet you would see mugs printed with inane images auto-designed by algorithms. It dredged everything available to place it onto a mug. Everything onto everything. A tornado of reference and attachment, and the audience in the whirl attempting to see anything to relieve the anxiety of so much garbage, vertigo in feeling one's toes sense the full ocean of production."



Read Full:
All posts tagged Darren Bader
Darren Bader at Franco Nero
Darren Bader at Blum & Poe
Darren Bader at Andrew Kreps
Darren Bader at Sadie Coles
Darren Bader at Radio Athènes,
Darren Bader at Kölnischer Kunstverein
Darren Bader at Andrew Kreps

Darren Bader at Real Pain

 Past: Dominik Sittig 

"forcing the child to smoke the whole carton, painting. A 'too much' to taste, painting. Sittig's had been so entrenched in their miasma (paintings that approached, but never quite landed on, hyperbolized mud) that no love for paint would save it, they were paintings dying in their own tar pits, unrescuable."

"keepers of the sewer."

Dominik Sittig at Nagel Draxler Kabinett, John Miller, Dominik Sittig at Nagel Draxler

Fabrice Gygi at Wilde, Genève & Holly Coulis at Cooper Cole

(Wilde, Cooper Cole)

Today we should all be paying a lot less attention to Gerhard Richter and a lot more attention to Bernard Frize. Because everyone today is nervous what to do with a corpse, Frize already provided the answer. 

Both of these artists used to be harder, and that's a selling point. 

Nikos Velmos at Radio Athènes

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A drawing does what so much art must artificially prevent - its exhaustion. A drawing is only an idea, a scratch pad for the realized candy. The drawing is instructions for a creation inside your head. What kunsthalle budgets and SFX can concretize will never match the monster hiding in the closet of your mind. This is why inkblot abstraction has taken over the artworld - it secedes responsibility to the viewer for its meaning - making it an interminable interpretable fount. But we already had one in good ole stupid drawing. This is what we must protect from the landlords. 

 Past: Robert Kulisek at VI, VII

In the sky, written overhead by plane: "Leave the youth alone. Stop extracting their joy to be sold like a vampire pleasure for vaults. Youth is not some fount to be bottled. Youth is not wasted on the young, attempts to preserve it the cold hands of those knowing is. A canned and brined youth. Advertorial youth. Youth to sell perfume. Youth to be enjoyed as youth is not youth. Put your plastic bottling devices down. There is no fount here, only cold hands."

 Past: Robert Kulisek at VI, VII

Group Show at Wattis

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More interested in the Exhibition Guide. Huberman has always made the relating of art itself an artform - a deeply earnest and plain one. And today we should be thinking about the plain guide. And this one teeters over audiential petting, but it's a risk feeling fresh, telling how far we've sunk into verbose ass. 

Dear museums, let me write a guide, a pamphlet, picks, to your collection.

Alain Guiraudie at Crèvecoeur & Timothy Kelly at Can

(Can, Crèvecoeur)

A joke about photography being the Hoover of the world, indiscriminately sucking.

Past: Caroline Bachmann

The waypoint between today's digital surrealism and the pre-renaissance's religious devotion ... the way spirituality has been rendered over the centuries has a direct influence on our computer interfaces. Organization of symbols to access higher planes.

See too: Caroline Bachmann at Kunsthaus Glarus, Interface Astrology

Mungo Thomson at KARMA

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This is just the Bechers with a jazz soundtrack. 

Like Marclay's Clock, interest is subsumed to a logic, an accounting fulfilling the parameters. Quality is mere quantity, organized. Collector porn or just something to do with those stacks of old magazines. It would seem to have some relation to conceptual art, with the aesthetics of administration. But what Bernd and Hilla Becher made into an ontological question, Mungo Thompson turns into a funhouse, conceptual art with the numbing affects of cinema. There are no questions here, only bad answers. Questions depleted to games. Thompson trades the aesthetic experience for the trick of "getting it." Getting it becomes the relief. Because people hate "not getting it" and Mungo is there to apply balm that the world makes sense, that there is rationality in the system.

Past: Mungo Thomson at Contemporary Art Gallery Vancouver

"...Thompson's replaces romantics with cleverness, inserting pop-culture into the permutations of conceptual art. It's all almost funny. e.g. John Cage's 4:44 rendered beautifully as symphonic chirping of crickets. [...] The list goes on and critics groan and the uninitiated feel some sort of awe at getting it, art, we get it, the easily explainable trick Mungo's greatest trick of all."

Click: Mungo Thomson at Contemporary Art Gallery Vancouver

Past: Vincent Fecteau

"Like a google algorithm trying to invent a car part, like a human recalling some vague sexual attachment to a physical object.."

"like ears or industrial labia.... the 'complicated pockets'. "They resemble, brandish resemblance... morph ..twist in like an ouroboric muscle car. Like cutting open your abdomen to reveal a cathedral. These turns are important, they mirror our body's soft points, the vulnerable pink cusps." 

"Notice your body shifting from exterior to interior, your lips, eyes, anus, ears, urethral opening, these twilight moments rolling into."

"The muscle car was - if by name alone - intended to resemble a body. Exuded the 'muscle' it contained, sleek and rippling with. The image seeped into culture and the fast cars took on different appearances, insectoid, technical. But those muscled images remain latent and Fecteau seems to pluck and rearrange some subconscious forms of these chopped and reassembled [...] 

Past: Vincent Fecteau at greengrassi, “Magic Ben Big Boy” at Matthew Marks, Vincent Fecteau at Misako & Rosen, Read all posts tagged Vincent Fecteau