Vedran Kopljar at LambdaLambdaLambda

(link)

Like an iPhone shouldn't have a bellybutton, a painting shouldn't have a butthole. Orifices ruin the sight of our oracles, puncture a hole in our hole in our aspirations. 

See too : Tishan Hsu at Hammer Museum

Past: Cerith Wyn Evans

"We've been staring at lights for a hundred thousand years, fire to hearth to television to phones, the light we arrange our living rooms around, surely finding comfort in our control, ability to channel and manipulate forces. We can now flaunt it, bend the tubes of capital to allow its flows to move through our neon, make it baroque to brandish it - Where once the fire was symbol of home, lights are now proof of capitalistic viability: an artist keeping the lights on. light as proof of our life, we are vital."

"...i.e.: Conceptual Art was always [already] maximally poetic; failing to deliver the object the bureaucracy its language promised - breaking the logical glass to expose perfume of its confusion. Glossing beauty atop to prove it: annoying at best. Wyn Evans engagement with this problem seems, at least partially, the point, the aestheticization of experience and awareness of it. This is the sinister pulsing of Wyn Evans, the fact that there is no need for this artificial light."


Click for Cerith Wyn Evans at Galerie Neu, Cerith Wyn Evans at Museo Tamayo

Edith Deyerling at FELIX GAUDLITZ

(link)

This press release is good. I am Jack's indentured meaning. A moral failure, a character flaw, to the viewer who can not release it. If I tell you, have I deprived you of yours? Your hero journey across deserts of well.. dessert. What could all this frosting mean?

Past: Alice Tippit

 “What do you see” becomes a loaded question. The schoolgroup is led elsewhere. Nudity we can bear, it’s natural, but this penis may be inside your head... Ambiguity becomes the new force, rupturing our ability for exchangeable shared common experience..."

"Between the anthropomorphic and the pareidolia is the seeing ghosts in images that contain a sort of liquid content, innuendo, form to the container-viewer"

See full: Alice Tippit at Night Club, Alice Tippit at Nicelle Beauchene

Past: Rochelle Goldberg

"35 of the most Hauntingly Beautiful Urban Ruins" "Urban Exploration Tourism" "Amazon.com: Beauty in Decay; A visually stunning book" showcasing the wider appeal of our desperation, of our ruin.

"our desire for a materiality comes at the hands of world we increasingly do not touch. And so art must become a hyperstimulus; art must make us, perverts of novelty, feel something through glass, by sight, because our hands have been removed to a world we touch only through electrified track pads, through eyes, through a world like advertisement."

"We now compete with actual images of dead oiled fish. Art excesses itself, crusts, proofs its real."

Full: Rebecca Brewer, Rochelle Goldberg at Oakville Galleries, Group Show at Commercial Street

Past: Ull Hohn at MD 72

"... Hohn's landscapes instead descend toward their complete loss into... the oblivion of whatever cheese substance grows cultural memory (the kitsch landscape existing in everyone's mind). From the specifics of an actual living plant to gross bloated inaccuracy of "tree" for the expediency of a television audience. This hanging threat of a signifier's total loss to this cultural oblivion, becoming a cliche of a cliche.."

Full: Ull Hohn at MD 72

Anna Uddenberg at Meredith Rosen Gallery

(link)

Cronenberg baby furniture? American BDSM Airlines x BabyBjörn? You can make distinct things look like other things because the microtization of affect becomes an all encompassing sign system. Think of the distinction between "tactical" t-shirt, "sport" t-shirt, "yoga" t-shirt. The detailing designates the meaning - both real and fake at the same time. Meaning emerges like gender identity. My baby is a tactical baby. Mine is liberal. A performance without origin. So of course the high end sex toys begins to look like baby toys - they are catering to the tastes of the same buyer - who assembles a closet of identity, no different from meaning. These affective layers are what AI is so good at spinning. Certain AI generators ban the  word "Cronenberg." His is too powerful. You start to see things that were always there. The "suggestification" of art. 

Theory of the couch.

The reason we've gotten into upholstery, into couches, chairs and gotten into sleeping bags, is that they infer us. They contain the ghost of the human they were made for. Every chair is a bodily innuendo. And the pervert knows what the decorous don't.

Aria Dean at The Renaissance Society

(link)

   Note: the PR contains the password to view the film. 

Slaughterhouse are marked by efficiency in death, a tenet of modernism. So if everything comes to resemble a slaughterhouse... that's true too. Modernism is a slaughterhouse, the utopian impulse was turned against us as efficiency to extrapolate realty capital, turn cities into glass, into "luxury" rent harvest machines. The slaughterhouse curves a Richard Serra - so the bovine experiences a merry temple grand in relaxation of its muscle before getting its captive bolt steel. We all know what happens in slaughterhouses. People say if people only knew what happened they wouldn't eat meat. But people know. People know of world's injustice. They know the the unfairness. The darkness in cobalt mines. That's not the problem. We humans are too adept at compartmentalization. We train everyday on trains full of animals to remove ourselves from the problem of identification with others. Beating hearts in the floorboards of every human on your commute.  But I think we're alone now, where there is nothing scarier than the monster in the closet of your mind, guilt.

Haim Steinbach at Dvir Gallery

(link)

The shelf guy doing what he does best, putting the rubble on the counter. This is endpoint, no? A machine to display .. garbage. Or maybe it is the milled ruins of the Acropolis. It doesn't matter at this point. All the stuff is the same today. Unique and interminable. A stone on the street is dirty, but a stone en masse is expensive - like a Coca-Cola everyone drinks - watch the ebb and flow of a commodity become unique and regeneralize, become garbage. This is industrialized negativity. (This is a positive review.)

 past: Raque Ford at 321 Gallery

"... 3. We don't trust text alone in space - god forbid we come across as pedagogical, or worse boooring, or, worst, wrong - so we aestheticize it, ironize it, make it sparkle, cut it to a koan, so the lash of language is tempered with comfort, which are aesthetics. There seems no art text not couched in some.

Despite, when Ford's are their most direct, cut and left dry, they retain all the enjoyment of flipping through artist notebooks. The aestheticization is more the provisionality, but it's a natural form."

past: Raque Ford at 321 Gallery

 Past: Michael Queenland at Maureen Paley

"Pre compress our trash into the decorative fossils it will become? Litter absorbed into the earth that on geologic scales become liquids, so our landfills are like slow smoothies. Someday someone assess our ruins as beautiful fossils."

Past: Michael Queenland at Maureen Paley

Sam Falls at moCa Cleveland

(link)

"You know what the market has shown every collector wants walled? Abstraction, and so art has become a giant machine mining sources of abstraction. ... 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. 

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

"The industrialization of aura through reference-shredded-process." "You put the referent forest in the shredder to make a puzzle appear. Which looks like a painting. Gives the PR something to talk about."

"And so they are like sunsets, both the near endless regurgitations of saccharine accident, cliche. Incidental returns of arbitrary conditions, completely unique and endlessly the same. A triple-point of beauty, arbitrariness, non-meaning. And perhaps meaning, our affection for the blushes, only appears as ward against inversion: If even one stupid sunset doesn't matter, nothing matters. Our fear."

"...any sufficiently complex sidewalk is indistinguishable from art."

"PeaRoeFoam"

A candle that smells like rain. A wine that remembers its year, can taste the vintage, the sticks, the horse shit. Not non-objective, just non-objectionable, the highest object of art today. 

Past: Sam Falls at 303 Gallery

""process-based abstraction"'s ability to create souvenirs of experience you didn't have is premised on some vestigial trait of conceptual that may never have existed. I.e. does On Kawara painting "January 22nd 1988" actually mean anything outside a finger toward it.  Does an artist in the forest placing native plants on a canvas actually contain its sound?  The signifier does not actually contain its signified, I thought we understood that. No cares seems to care where the canvas is wove, where the pigment is made; no we only care for the image which ostensibly means something, stupidly."


Read full: Sam Falls at 303 Gallery

Jesse Stecklow at Sweetwater

(link)

Stecklow takes signs and basically subjects them to any permutation that can be reasoned (though aren't necessarily reasonable.) It's generative, endless seeming. "Long associative chains." Content pulled from the air. Which was corn. Which lead to ears. You can read about it. There is a logic but it might as well be meaningless. It is merely the means to free associate another thing. Isn't that a metaphor for all art today? Conjure from air not an artwork, but a process that can endlessly generate artwork? Stecklow makes it more fun because at least the machine is transparent. Willfully arbitrary. Rhoadsian. Maybe Darren Bader. Qs of how is meaning generated? 

See too: Jesse Stecklow at Chicken Coop Contemporary & Adrian Piper at Hamburger Bahnhof

 Past: Cassandra Press

"... Cassandra Press is good and interesting thing and this is an exhibition to put the laurels around that. Basically proof that more interesting "aesthetic politics" exist - it isn't whatever generation of conceptual navel gazing we're on. (..."aesthetic politics" has been so gelatinized by art discourse PR that the "political" itself has become a non-sequitur.) So much so that just recollecting discourse for a reader is more interesting. Just like an imaged wall of culture is more interesting than a wall of art. 

Full: Cassandra Press, Kandis Williams at LAXART, Los Angeles

Sean Lander at Petzel

(link)

Look how the painter hath degraded himself. The banal subject, of the artist groveling to dirty populism. Warhol painted soup, but he would never have painted these. This is below commodities, this is midwestern, this is flyover content. The joke surely. 

"If Landers plays obsessively on the constant alternation between folie de grandeur and writhing in the gutter, he’s always playing to his audience, pandering a bit, begging for love even as he demonstrates—insists, well-nigh demands—that he’s a no-good loser fuck-head." - Rimanelli, Artforum

But it's a play. The dogs aren't even well painted. From afar sure, but up close the whole thing loses luster. If you're going to make the joke, commit to the joke. Eat the whole thing.

Past: Sean Landers

"A joke can only be told so many time. A joke is spent and exhausted. So an artwork - with its requisite implicit promise of eternalness - can't really make a joke without implying that it too will one day be depleted. ...  And Landers finds a similar interest in defeat, once the comedy is depleted you have reckon with what remains. Which, what remains?"

...commodified and neotenic rodent. ... And Landers' plaid animals, sad clowns, and now a pinocchio "plankboy" are the means of a lesser sort of identification. Landers' characters are not focus-group perfected. And their revulsion is "an effect of anticlimax created by an unintentional lapse in mood from the sublime to the trivial or ridiculous." ... The definition of bathos. Which Landers prances sad clown around. Landers paintings "arousing pity, especially through vulnerability or sadness," pathetic.


Read full: Sean Landers at Le Consortium, Sean Landers at Rodolphe Janssen, Sean Landers at Friedrich Petzel

Hans-Jörg Mayer at Galerie Nagel Draxler

(link)

Everyone knows eating a whole turd isn't bad. But finding poop in your hamburger is terrible. This is the small distinction of Mayer's from say, Shimizu, Smith, Oehlen - Mayer occasionally lets himself get it right. Which is an unnerving feeling. Most just force you to swallow the whole log, but when the garnish is brought to temp the whole order falls apart. We had been keeping plates separate. But then here's a well rendered face amidst the brown. Uncertainty we find difficult. 

Past: Masaya Chiba

"... always something pedagogically askew - like there's a presentation happening - there's some thing scientifically flat about the work - illustrative - but without information's answer. They seem to imply some big red arrow that would point out meaning, but lacking it..."

full: Masaya Chiba at Bel Ami, Masaya Chiba at Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery

Mark van Yetter at Bridget Donahue

(link)

Limbo. The doubling erects a structure which to suspend it. Hangs its image over some chasm. Threshold space. Can't quite be consumed wholesale. Have that non-time about them, that Goodnight Moon / de Chirico quasi-space.  Not quite painting, nor drawing; not quite comic books nor scene painting nor ideation board but more narrative in the way of IKEA instructions for building a BILLY bookshelf dream. 

Past: Sadie Benning

"...image's hard edge in the padded walls of cartoon that allowed the wily coyote to suffer enormous blunt trauma because he was soft stretchable taffy..."

Full: Sadie Benning at Susanne Vielmetter. Sadie Benning at Mary Boone & Callicoon Fine Arts, 

Past: Ser Serpas

"Hoarding as a sort of extended compassion for the derelict neglected of culture ... Composing it into art objects becomes a blessing into the "heavenly" afterlife ... Hooking the hose from the expelling parts of our cultural body to the part that feeds, getting it to eat its underwear."

"a particular type of flesh, between medical and Barbie, a plasticity of morgues or dough. ... new in the way that fresh infants resemble old corpses. "


full: Ser Serpas at Galerie Barbara Weiss, Ser Serpas at LUMA Westbau, Ser Serpas at Karma International, Ser Serpas at LC QUEISSER

Past: Ghislaine Leung

"...the gradual creep of its suspicion ... cold cut ominousness. Why must the light be blackout? Why the floor silenced? Why does the carriage require staves? The creep builds suspicion: a house haunted under glistening sterile light. A crime scene scrubbed, we, detectives."

"... is hard not to read as a fear of these conveniences, submissiveness, actually infiltrating us, until we became, if not kitchen appliances ourselves, at least frighteningly subservient molded to kitchen surrounding us. ... Such that options for expression become limited by the cultural detritus available in stores.  You join in union, with a multitude, a choir, signing 'THE BOSS'..."

"... a meaning dissociated. 'an emotional response repeatedly evoked in situations in which the action tendency that is associated with the emotion proves irrelevant or unnecessary' causes desensitization. 'WELCOME'"


Read full: Ghislaine Leung at Cabinet, Ghislaine Leung at Chisenhale & Essex Street, Ghislaine Leung at Künstleraus Stuttgart, Ghislaine Leung at Museum Abteiberg

Oscar Tuazon at Bergen Kunsthall

(link)

Wasn't aware Tuazon had gone Andrea Zittel, pods and geodesics. But apparently he was born under the dome. A school for water. It is difficult watching art's procedures escape its cultural sandbox and enter into the wider world - witness "creativity" against reality. Perhaps the goals are different, in art visibility tis the highest order, where in reality it's the bare minimum against a decades long trudgery toward enaction. Art relies on Buckminster solutions: "At best giving the boring problems of our coming environmental cataclysm at least ostensibly interesting solutions... ideas are less feasible-solutions than they are acts of branding and dissemination, where excitement is itself the solution. Whether or not you feel excited is yours."

Elza Sīle at Embajada

(link)

Our detritus starts to congeal again a painting. Rachel Harrison blew up the mall, the cargo cult aftermath of 00's and 10's left the Lieskian ontologists with totemic yard sales grasping at rubble's meaning, and now in the ruin and filth.. new life? Protozoa animism? Shrines to the stuf accumulating in our veins. 

See too: Yuji Agematsu at Lulu

Past: Oscar Tuazon at Le Consortium & Paradise Garage

"See, generally these things are so boring and ubiquitous, we don't notice them. These everyday things. So Tuazon uses all the common ways of making things, but assembles them in different ways that our brains aren't bored with, that allows you to recognize or see what your brain would normally be too bored to see. So you notice even the boring stuff. See he has a feti-, er, intense affinity for the protestant, er, blue-collar, or like, see, he appreciates the common job, son. The vernacular, er, that's why nothing is that spectacular, that interesting. The muted tones. It's a moral ethic, son. Have you ever seen Bruce Nauman's "Setting a good corner?" Of course not you're five. Right"

... or like those dog-eared books with cross-sections, cut-intos, of like houses and steamships? See Tuazon's sculptures are like that. You get to see everything, you notice the structure, you glean a moral appreciation for hard work. For the structure, son. Yes, son, endlessly romantic..."


Oscar Tuazon at Le Consortium & Paradise Garage

Oliver Osborne at Tanya Leighton

(link)

The Symbol. Archaic and X-rayed. Dressed and redressed. What could it mean, this puzzification. A clue is presented, then tortured, wrung for information, why won't painting tell us, why, speak dammit. 

Past: Oliver Osborne at Peles Empire (Matte Representation)

"Call the exhibition Clue. The puzzles of today's painting in which their individuated flat symbols present a real mystery of a subject. Looking like de Chirico designed a board game. Soviet Realism for the icon age, new devotional painting. Colonel Rublev in the museum with a candlestick."

"In our time textures are of utmost importance in creating realistic digital worlds. Objects are surface to be texture-mapped, painted, [artist]'s micro-attention to the variants of matte diffuse surface (something digital rendering has difficulty with)  deploying what [the digital} cannot. Artisanal Old-timey rendering, wrapping its cold surface in warm wool."

Read full: Oliver Osborne at Peles Empire (Matte Representation)

Richard Tuttle at Modern Art

(link)

You got to hand it to Tuttle, he never cashed in, never cast it in bronze. Instead still the pernickety things hard to swallow, like fishing lures they need only approximate the shiny fish of formalism. Provisional objects still hook us. Look how crappy that sculpture is. Is this cute? Coy? Useless? Still resolutely ugly in a formally confetti way, continually falling apart is what they were meant to. 

Cay Bahnmiller at Galerie Barbara Weiss

(link)

Unintentionally, our preservation of artist's lives come to resemble Thek's meat boxes. Most moving: tragedy as the post-mortem of life cut up and pieced out into sterile containers, a dead butterflies, we marvel at creation only god could create. Now separate from. Who do we pay alms to here? Science cannot adequately describe the natural world as it is lived, there is a disjunction between life and its evidence, autopsy. 

Claudio Coltorti at Galerie Hussenot

(link)

So close!