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.