Adam Pendleton at MUMOK

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Pendleton's work is supposed to look like photocopied art history, a zine of bricolage referent, and in this repetition we are told is some new space that "renews the instability of discourse and identity" or "refashions history into something that opens out into the new." But this new space that art continuously opens always seem to be more trophy abstraction.

 

You know what the market has shown every collector wants walled? Abstraction, and so art has become a giant machine mining sources of abstraction. And the endless ironizing of abstract legacies with its remaking in different modes (fire extinguisher, silvering, abjection, food photography) ostensibly acts as critique. Pollock was just spurting cum, symbolically accredited decoration, abjection whatever; the critique fails to, despite 40 years of it, functionally do anything. It's like battling a ghost with a longsword. 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.

 

see too: Lisa Holzer at Kunstverein München

Past: Michael Krebber

Krebber's "preferring not to" the herald of his artistic progeny, fantasizing that maybe they wouldn't have to either. And so artistry's lack became a claim of radical "protest," artist's claiming "strike" on the walls of the institutions that would have them, taking sumptuous bites of the hand that had become feed. Promising the academic artist a taste of social cool.

In 2013 Krebberesque was actually academically defined in the 8th edition of Quinton and Rohling's Aesthetic Jargon falling between between Kowtow kraut and Kremlin Stoogism.

The famous “digging into the mirror” photo's context reveal much less conceptually prescient images of Krebber for instance with a boot dangling from his ass.

See full: Michael Krebber at Morena di Luna, Michael Krebber at Kunsthalle Bern, Michael Krebber at Greene Naftali, R.H. Quayt­man and Michael Kreb­ber at Museum Ludwig, Group Show at Greene Naftali

Yaerim Ryu at Peres Projects

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Advertising so robbed the corpus of idealization from the hands of artists that now artistic representation is doomed to forever paint us as lumbering buffoons. As canon fodder, to painting's demands. "A state of painting that has sunk so far into endless permutable bent-figuration - that someone actually tending to the body feels like free healthcare." A desire for the tender of wounds. 

See too: Karen Fan, Caroline Zhang at Gern en Regalia, Erwin Wurm at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, “Automatic Door” at Park View / Paul Soto

Past: Reynaldo Rivera

The ruins of a once beautiful citizenry. We now vampire. Not only its pain, but its life too, brought to cold hands of art's Wunderkammer. "Dominant culture lays the concrete of its social conditions, proclaims 'look a dandelion has grown,' hangs its photo in our halls as testament to humanity. But it can seem like a testament to the concrete." 

All: Reynaldo Rivera

Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff at Reena Spaulings Fine Art

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A conceptual beartrap, the inkblot asks that you spill forth the contents of your head with its innuendo as lure. What is the contents of your head.

Inkblot, inkblot, inkblot

All: Calla Henkel & Max Pitegoff

Rirkrit Tiravanija at MoMA P.S.1

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A dinner enshrined, behind closed doors, enshrined in an image. Posted on this day of our own relational aesthetics, Christmas Eve. So when you pass your uncomfortable uncle the taters imagine the utopian world foods you could be enjoying. Think of art as your moral compass, the curry you could be sharing. 

We need someone to unpack what happened here. And this is it; this is the case study. From utopian salespitch to museum display.  The salespitch is enshrined as meaning. This is the machine of art. It's not quite history, not quite record. It's a series of things that point elsewhere, are elsewhere. But we're here. Asked to be elsewhere. A long explanatory text explaining the process of this. How art in its current regime promotes this, basically corrals all art into this, endless meaning elsewhere.

Past: Amy Yao at Various Small Fires

" ... Surrealist juxtaposition in an age bio-medical cybernetics, aerosolized industrial waste and food packaging with endocrine disruptors distributed between ever more complex global conglomerates makes war and diamonds seem quaint as juxtaposition is dispersed into further and further micro-artificialities, plastics outweighing plankton in certain parts of the ocean. The sculpture here is called Doppelgängers..."


Click here Amy Yao at Various Small Fires

Thomas Sauter at Bernheim Gallery

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The PR's commitment to nailing these to the board of expressionism is something. These are paintings. With color and form and feeling.  "an inner feeling gives way to exploration, guided by what happens when a red meets a yellow..." About "the touch of the brush on the canvas..." and genius. "Such feelings can only be transmitted from an object through a deeply focused and committed approach to work. We may find ourselves asking, can’t I too produce this? No. Not like this." It's heroic. And looking into the distance between heroism and magenta/viridian/yellow is a pathos almost too much. 

Mimi Lauter at Mendes Wood DM

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In the race to excess, these currently run 1st. Not just color but adrenalized Bonnard, Redon - the positive effects of doping "oil pastel thick as frosting." Important that color, texture, perfumes, not be burdened with anything other than raw id, naiveté. Not images of the garden, these are the garden. Just arrange the bulbs, let them grow color. This is a positive review. 

Jennifer Packer at Corvi-Mora

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These seem transparent about intentions, to get color at scale. Bouquets of it. The linework, the drawing, an excuse to hang wanton libidinal paint. Watermelon theory. Conceptually we prize art for what it means, for its "politics," but then occasionally we remember that the beach exists. That candy tastes sweet, and chefs, chemists, need reinvent it. 

Reinhard Mucha at Francis Irv

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Probably one of those artists in deserving the retrospective. So we can all collectivize our memory of him. Put him on speaking terms, a common language. Is that what retrospectives do? Not interested in the past but about the fact that looks like today, no?

Jannis Marwitz at Lucas Hirsch

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It's easy to talk about symbols, reference, history, they practically unfurl their themselves - but it is hard to talk about images. A painting stippled with rattails or tentacles don't lend well to consulting the familiar cultural texts - and there's no PR to relieve its burden. Ostensibly that's the critics role. Which, delight in the refusal. Just let the worms perforate the surface, your head. An interest in not having the Tarot Cards read. The worms, the painting, does the consumption, digestion. 

Jannis Marwitz at Lucas Hirsch

Noah Barker at Lodos

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I think we're supposed to find something spooky connecting the guy at the RAND corporation (and later developing intercontinental ballistic missiles) also having invented windsurfing. Same guy who designed Tomahawk Missiles and the X-15 rocket plane. But don't care about any of that. This whole thing is better as not art. As just a boat.. An object whose design criteria doesn't care about art. As just a story of a man who loved developing really fast ways to harm people. An engineer who wanted to completely eliminate boredom. That's the art. 

Anna Uddenberg at The Perimeter

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The Greeks revolutionized ancient sculpture with contrapposto serving cunty, but now we've appropriated whole new asanas. Update figuration with fashion, this makes new. And new fabrics, new frills. You no longer paint the model, you tell the model how to dress. A thrill to play with dolls - they'll wear whatever, bend however. Matisse proved bending women till they're blue everyone found fun. Compositionalizing women for culture. It works! This is cynical but it is maybe naturalism.

Art loves women in culturally approved bondage gear: Cindy Sherman at Metro Pictures, Amalia Ulman at The Gallery at El Centro

 Past: Anna Uddenberg

"The reason we've gotten into upholstery, into couches, chairs is that...  every chair is a bodily innuendo. And the pervert knows what the decorous don't."

"The detailing designates the meaning. Meaning emerges like gender identity.Think of the distinction between "tactical" t-shirt, "sport" t-shirt, "yoga" t-shirt."

"Uddenberg works with the obvious message that's unspoken ...  there's a sexuality to the leather curves of car interiors.  ...  And everyone now tearing at couches to reveal our innuendo's innards, digging for the implication from the things that caress us."

"Uddenberg's recent sculpture are weirder than Jones' because they seem to emerge from the surrealism of culture itself..."

Full: Anna Uddenberg at Meredith Rosen Gallery, Anna Uddenberg at Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Anna Uddenberg and Nicolas Ceccaldi at MEGA Foundation, 

Past: Liz Deschenes

"A career spent negating the photographic window, viewer left at surface, like looking out a window and seeing only glass...

...The photograms now are the result of a photograph without a lens, no focus but collecting all the light it touches into its photo-sensitive halides fixed as silver, photographs that feel like the information paradox of black holes: does the light that falls into the traps retain any of its information? Could you put back the time or place? ... it doesn't matter, the point is to accumulate the gleaming of pressed diamonds."

"... a question on life support, unanswerable and asked for affect of evoking it. "

Full: Liz Deschenes at Miguel Abreu, Liz Deschenes at Fraenkel Gallery

Max Hooper Schneider at Maureen Paley

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There is little difference between the vitrine and the television, a box for growing an amoeba-like sentience - be the longterm point MHS has been making. And its parallel to painting. The petri dishes of a culture medium. Culturing culture. These grow lights. It's fun to open up a TV and see a brain, cut open a painting and see anything but art, splice into fantasyland, the casino shrunken, it's a small world afterall. 

Read all: Max Hooper Schneider

Theresa Chromati at Tureen

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Like a Miro pulled through the navel of Murakami - it's an orgy of "design." Like dragging your finger through still-wet modernism, and sprinkling some sprinkles. And apparently testicle flowers. But tugging content through a bellybutton an interesting idea. 

Mandla Reuter at Croy Nielsen

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When you start to look at exhibitions as a crimescene and art as its evidence - you can't unsee it. The art is the mystery. Which makes clues of everything. Clues lend aura. Aura is mistakable as art. The documentation plays up the murder mystery. The artwork placed in forensic baggies. This is a continuous vibe of art today - with its disparate elements array on floors.

Simon Dybbroe Møller at palace enterprise

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You can take a picture without a lens, make an image of the world. These displays are apparatus that are camera, they make an image of the dust. The photograph they create is the distance from that object dust. This is not a metaphor. They make an image, a distance, they are a camera.

 
"Photograph" has become synonymous with "image." This is top 10 historical blunders. Through this historical snafu, we have chosen a specific technology as defining image. Photography is actually a niche form of image. Photography is a subsidiary of printmaking. It should not have come to represent an entirety of "image." 100 years before photography, the “picturesque” was a term invented for painting. Or Mt. Vesuvius explodes, exposing its human to its ash albumen, and awaiting the development by plaster handling archaeologists. This is an image without photography.

Anna Glantz at The Approach

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Glantz's surrealism has become more subtle, repressed into the paint itself, making you the fool explaining the surface of a face, painting. 

Past: Magnus Andersen 

"It's impossible to measure earnestness. Time de-ironizes and jest is made serious by attention. ..Andersen knows that to survive is to triumph. ... Thus straps a bomb to his chest walks into the vault of images, which we his visual hostages, on a long enough timeline, learn to love, and pied man leading children to their deaths."

"An exhibition titled 'Stockholm Syndrome' ... a decades long acclimatization to certain types of aesthetic abuse, where an artworld begins to actually like the Jeff Koons, or Josh Smith.   To deny it would simply place you outside it. ... and as always with hideous painting, 'half the fun is learning to love it.'"

Read full:Magnus Andersen at Neue Alte Brücke(2), Magnus Andersen at Neue Alte Brücke & Dorothy Iannone at Air de Paris

Group show at Astrup Fearnley Museet

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You could say it's an "everything but the kitchen sink" exhibition except there's actually multiple kitchen sinks. Which the PR is exemplar of the mythic language crowning art in which art can hold a seemingly endless paradoxical traits, until art can seemingly do anything, represent anything, timely timeless, individual, universal, and back again. A magical property of being in the eye of the beholder, an inkblot. And so one would like for a straightforward list of what exactly art cannot do, that is the art exhibition we need. 

Ryan Gander at Disneyland Paris

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Maybe i'ts more art's interpretability as its highest duty. The crime scene and art are both given this role. The movie detective, the painting, allow mystery's imagination of answers, thus light the candle that there is an answer. While we speak intelligibly of there being "no truth" - we rely on these mythic scenes, art and crime, to provide possibility in the belief of interpretation, giving it a truth potential without having to actualize answers. Interpretation, made as interminable as possible, already provides the same comfort as answers.

 Past: Ryan Gander

"There is a parallel between conceptual art and murder scenes. Not in the interpretation of clues, but of detective and conceptual artist turning a messy world into object, language, into document. Turn a world's blood and guts into evidence, into levers for the legal, testaments and a shared concern for documentation.."

Read all: Ryan Gander

Michael Ho at High Art

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The painter's goosebumps, the matte scumbled frission - Oliver Osborne, Nolan Simon, Caleb Considine, Jennifer J. Lee - rough textures through gentle painting - is easy to symptomatize: we desire a materiality to show though vulnerable image, to watermark them with that rarity, the real.

See too: (Matte Representation)