Dana Lok at Clima, Milan

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Coy maybe, or a little cute, but a least they follow their own path into a strange terrain of their own whatever. That's how a subject appears? It's all we ask, even terribly. 

Past: Trisha Donnelly

...abolish the possibility of a reference we can call common, bury it behind opaque markers. ... objects which, even at peak banality aren't really describable ... What you see isn't mine. ...The inability to derive equitable terms, a reference to talk about, looking like slack-jawed yokels."

It is this ability of Donnelly to separate and divide and make evil our inability to share feelings, to see christ (or not) in the photograph. The innocent question of "what you see"  becomes apprehensive.


Click: Trisha Donnelly at Galerie Buchholz, Trisha Donnelly at Museum Ludwig, Trisha Donnelly at Eva Presenhuber

 Past: Sung Tieu

"The point of art begins to be setting the spheres to rotate so they may occasionally align, a machine for semio-recombination we could call meaning. Artists become not merely the recombinators of signs, but the producers of machines to do this, to be turned to on, set to run. Endless interpretability becomes their function."

Astrology like tarot cards finds alliance with art since the artwork has mutated to be less an object of beauty than a fount for interpretation. Art having gone from object to oracle. 

Sung Tieu at Emalin

Ugo Rondinone at The Green Gallery

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Ugo Rondinone makes stupid work whose stupidity doesn't matter. That may be because he's Swiss and  the Swiss have a knack for stupidity, one that auto-destructs, abuses time, or is John Armleder. Swiss stupidity accepts a mechanistic uselessness. (Is it antidote to fine watches, knives?) It would seem joyless if it didn't build such elaborate contraptions for its own touched smile. The antecedents here of Ellsworth Kelly meets Yves Klein is a red herring to the main point of Rondinone turning stupidity back to its roots: flowers, bright colored whatevers made to attracts insects. It works. 

Past: Gili Tal

"The more pathetic and depressing aspects of commerce's reign are mirrored in Tal's reconstructions of it, like those half empty coolers: a lightness mimicking advertising getting closer to grim comedy alongside a press release from hell once again reminding us all of our relegation to capitalistic damnation..."

"a rain that is mass produced..."

read full: Gili Tal at Jenny’s, Gili Tal at Cabinet, Gili Tal at Kunstverein Braunschweig

Wade Guyton at Galerie Chantal Crousel

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Whatever happened to Guyton\Walker? That cute duo bring relinking Genzken to a Raushenberg root, and then turned it to comedy, printed it on everything. This was right before the algorithm, before KAYA, right before Walmart was caught selling a mug emblazoned with adults wearing diapers. Both Walmart and G\W were a parody of the same thing, mass appeal and the need to fill any and all space by placing everything onto everything else, both of the same quality. It seems prescient now, as the bargain bin of content rises to surface of every display possible. That these are starting to look like Gerhard Richter's priciest paintings seems to follow from the rest. You can put anything on a mug. Again, production is the product. 

Past: Wade Guyton

...Like Wade Guyton who rode a wave of funereal optimism that we would one day merely press print on our dreams.

... killing content in service to the machine of its reproduction... the fantasy of eruptions tugged from our subconsciouses plugged into the machine ... Eventually this got boring. The machine wasn't so much able to manifest our subconscious as provide brief illusion that this was possible, that we could print our dreams, creativity, whatever as a perfect reproducible commodity. Instead, they were just commodities ... And so the next perfect Warholian step was to print the newspaper, which itself was like the manifestations of the Giant subconscious of earth people...

...Because history is more interesting than painting. Because culture more surreal than surrealism. Because the unconscious of society already printed for you. Now it's a plaque-as-painting for a museum to own. To allow them to put the didactic next to. In a museum you need a painting to mark it.

July 19, 2023

This summer, Contemporary Art Writing Daily passed a major milestone: our database now includes over 2,500+(?) reviews all of which are available to the public for free. The vast drudging labor of writing, organizing, and publishing all of that review however, is not free. Our effort to collect the next 2,500+(?) reviews will rely on your support. If you have benefitted from Daily, the Library, and our other services please consider making a not-tax deductible donation in support of this urgent work.

Past: Kaoru Arima

"Brutalization ... human features bludgeoned to bloom bruise bouquets, apply rictus like geometries, portraits of a stroke. ... painters rushing to do injustice to portraits.  It became a joke...  potatoes exclaiming, “Hey look at me, I’m Picasso.""

"... a learned tolerance for pain."

Read full: Kaoru Arima at Misako & Rosen, Kaoru Arima at Queer Thoughts

Jacqueline Humphries at Modern Art

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The long and short of it is, Humphries always remained ahead of the zombies by making the embalming process more cartoonish, more itself, and gave us what we always really wanted: new paint, a shinier paint, a wanton paint. (The zombie formalist only had handwringing conceptual excuses for old paint, their endless search for "brains" to make 2nd generation Abex somehow refreshed with "process" but generating old looks.) Humphries looked garishly more - without excuse - bested abex by being even more airheaded than it - no search for brains, just new paint big. Humphries processes always felt mere wreaths to the dingdong, which they were, exceptionally beside the point. (That was the point, you didn't need them.) But lo this is the first exhibition where the first thing you see, a quotation, not delicious paint, a conceptual process foreground itself, which is like reading IKEA instructions for the sex promised.

Past: Jacqueline Humphries

"Like Richter whose painting exists in the netherworld of a stupid transcendence, instead just give us what we want, paint, flesh, dumbly."

"..the well worn jazz hands of "expression" aren't, for Humphries, totally choreographed yet by Dr. Frankenstein... the corpse may have its fluids replaced in technicolor, paraded around in chromes and newfangled chemiluminescence ... 

"the more vulgar excesses of Humphries's paint always excused by its obliviousness to the demands of "making a painting." ...

"This song and dance is actually a visual pleasure of a long dead corpse embalmed really well."

Click for full:Jacqueline Humphries at Modern Art, Jacqueline Humphries at Carnegie Museum of Art

 Past: Gaylen Gerber

The Gerberian support's proposal of a third party in the usual object/viewer duo, a middleman standing watch to serve you the art ... 

The general supports of art - walls, lights, pedestals - are, generally, ignored, and Gerber's proposition, their filling with blood, sedimented subjectivity, makes the walls seem alive and watching, that though they are painted white they contain just a different behind in them.

Read full: Gaylen Gerber at Emanuel Layr, Gaylen Gerber at Studio for Propositional Cinema, Group Show at Emanuel Layr

Past: Cosima von Bonin

...having attempted and failed to peel the stubborn adhesive from the surface, [the critics] claim, "ah look how stuck together they are!" And admittedly von Bonin's adherence to the commodity - despite every critical attempt to remove it from - is sticky stuff, and eventually one wonders if there is a layer at all, or merely a patch drawn to appear such. And the whole critical art world grouped around attempting to pick quarters painted on the palatial shopping mall floors while above their bent necks the objects transact. The critical establishment hallucinate quarters because they are needed to eat.

The commodity is the form we now think in, and these are the "good" commodities.

Read full:  Cosima von Bonin at Marianne Boesky, Cosima von Bonin at House of Gaga & Magasin III Jaffa, Cosima von Bonin at Friedrich Petzel

Mónika Kárándi at Anat Ebgi

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The Welwitschis mirabilis plant looks like something the surrealists would want to have sex with, so it makes logical fodder for painting today. A humanoid brushstroke laying out in the sun, that's how you get a Tanguy.

"Foundwork Artist Prize" Prize

Contemporary Art Writing Daily announces the open call for the "Foundwork Artist Prize" Prize, its first nonjuried award for short form essays on why the 2023 Foundwork Artist Prize is announcing:

Foundwork announces the open call for the 2023 Foundwork Artist Prize, its annual juried award for emerging and mid-career artists working in any media. The 2023 honoree will receive an unrestricted $10,000 grant and studio visits with each of this year’s esteemed jurors:

Alex Gartenfeld, Artistic Director, Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), Miami; Davida Nemeroff, Founder, Night Gallery, Los Angeles; Shinique Smith, Multidisciplinary Artist, Los Angeles; Emiliano Valdés, Chief Curator, Medellín Museum of Modern Art, Medellín; and Nicola Vassell, Founder, Nicola Vassell Gallery, New York.

For information on how to participate, visit www.foundwork.art/artist-prize.

(sponsored announcement) 

The 2023 honoree will receive an unrestricted CAWD tshirt and studio visits with each of this year’s esteemed jurors:

Contemporary Art Writing Daily, the internet.

There is no more information on how to participate; e-mail contact@artwritingdaily.com

Beaux Mendes at Galerie Barbara Weiss

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In the inky pool of the forest we have a press release seeing Heidegger, Hell, Nazis, Jews, home, Grandmothers, Rabbis, Orthodoxy. This is the power of the inkblot:

In dark forests we imagine predators, in trees see intelligence. In confusion we excel at inventing gods, or meaning.

Group Show at High Art

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It's an interesting art history illustration. That what might seem to be recent filters placed onto painting is actually a filtering though, of influence, one that arrives polaroid faded. Not instagram, just physical nostalgia.

see too:Ulala Imai

Group Show at Laurel Gitlen

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Sidner's ability to plasticize an idea. The lesson here is any idea, even a middling one, put into overdrive, excess 110%, might be something, just make sure its crystallized in glass.

Plasticizers: Camille Henrot, Camille Blatrix, Magali Reus, Benjamin Reiss, Anna Uddenberg

Past: Kate Newby

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

"attention to naturalism ... hauling reclaimed wood by the tonnage deep into the city, mass producing the natural, in attempt to reclaim some authentic experience separate from the glass we touch all day in pocket. But the glass and gallery can bring us anything, it appears on screen, in white fields, in front of you, your touch of nature, your finger grease smeared on it."

" further granularized to finer and finer pocks and us finally all staring at noise like a church for sensitivity training - commanded to the virtue of noticing.  ... removed all the signs asserting "scenic view ahead."

"Detail views. An enforced sight, enforced noticing. An almost moral underpin, asking for sight, a penance in attention."


Read full: Kate Newby at Cooper Cole, Kate Newby at Kunsthalle Wien, Kate Newby, Daniel Rios Rodriguez at Nicelle Beauchene, Materialphilia

Quentin James McCaffrey at Nicelle Beauchene Gallery

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The mystery of Vermeer is that the paintings see everything and look at nothing, the affect is a staring-through, at a point beyond the painting. A that paint only rims the glass of some void. This surely the effect of the photographic ground which is indifferent to the demands of painter/painting. Because the camera is stupid, doesn't care for subject, is uncanny. (A camera's alienation we have grown acclimated to, and it takes a painting to reproduce the effect. This is similar Cerletty's virtual, an anonymizing viewpoint.)

The point being these literalize Vermeer's void, concretely remove the subject to hammer home the point of vacuous non-subject, an everything-but. Subject is replaced with mirrors, glints of light, with air. Instead searching for it. This makes mystery.

See too: "Colonel Rublev in the museum with a candlestick, paintings mechanization of mystery", Mathew Cerletty, Gertrude Abercrombie at Karma

Sarah Bogner at Christine Mayer

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A real Matisse of smoking horses, is what they all said.

Diango Hernández at Nicolas Krupp

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This exhibition is like the first time you psychedelic drugs but if you could retain faculties enough to draw, notate what was so cool in the waves. Then of course you awake to sobriety, all that is left to wonder what precisely was so interesting at the time, why your camera roll contains 377 photos of your hand. What were you seeing dear psychonaut? A mystery, how art works. 

Past: Andreas Schulze

...against the distress of the constipation of painting today, jammed traffic...

Schulze seems willing to make it painful, reminds us what happens in our more porcelain moments, your exhaust pipe. This is the new moral nature of painting, look at the painter's, the writer's exhaust, self to the wind.


Past: Andreas Schulze at Sprüth Magers, Andreas Schulze at Team Gallery, Inc