Past: Merlin Carpenter

"Has a more vacuous flaccid and dead show ever been done? An exhibition so empty it's like looking at ocean’s abyss. Carpenter has always been capable of the self-flagellating gesture, but this, this is like selling your flesh to pay the guy who owns your soul for its postage to hell, and you’re walking around bleeding without a shirt. This show makes Zobernig look like an academic painter. Codax like he paints Sundays..."

"Carpenter knows this is dumb, and knows that we know he knows this is dumb. But us all gripping chins wondering on which floor precisely the middle finger is resting. Our cerebral assessments of navel's swirl that 5 years ago couldn't have been less interesting now return in way that feels apt to the political moment. Because we're exhausted. And perhaps what Carpenter is actually trading in is the feeling of exhaustion. Can you imagine being forced to explain these to someone? Explain politics now to someone?"

Read all posts tagged Merlin Carpenter

Past: B. Wurtz

"...the details aren't trivial. They are the attachments of care, sewing buttons to close coats around a warmth when another can't.  Wurtz's more homely space is all about knots tied, and buttons threaded, plastic bags hung to dry. They're dumb objects rescued by so much care like a responsibility shown for them."

"...no longer just trash clogging our excretory paths but hopes clogging our recycling. Headaches as evidence of anxiety at the hands of trash, of which the Wurtzian model provides a relief in seeing the objects cared for, not amassed in landfill graves but given the second life in carousels. Our aspirations finally lets them levitate, holding them off the ground, where they would become trash. Which they are suspended from."

"The American Gym Sock. Tied to teenage boys, normally repositories of filth, seed, and feet, normally locker room attire. a pubescent attire. Pimples and athletics, is here given a fastidious clean, highlighting its cotton and comfort, restoring purity, virginal phallus and receiver of course."



Full: Paul P., B. Wurtz at Cooper Cole, B. Wurtz at Lulu, “The Crack-Up” at Room East (B. Wurtz), B. Wurtz at Metro Pictures, B. Wurtz at Richard Telles & ICA LA

 Past: Kinke Kooi

"...like green leaf lettuce and frill and Kooi's superfluity - increases in a descriptive power only release further metaphor, an excess of reference, description becomes the watering can, flowering a loaded lettuce content, a power for suggestion, leaving you, pervert, with pesticides spread against tumescence."

Kinke Kooi at Lulu, Kinke Kooi at Lucas Hirsch

Past: John Armleder

"Everyone loves the smell of their own brand, and the miasmia wafts in with a laugh of its aesthetic impropriety. A fart joke. The bastardization of the proper. Stray paint and design faux-pas.  Paintings which look the way 'oopsie' sounds. Whether or not anyone else loves is it in relation to how deeply trapped they are with it. Flatulence aesthetics in the high speech."

read full: Group Show at David Kordansky, John Armleder at Fernand Léger Foundation

Gene Beery at Derosia

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An "elemental usefulness" to signage.  We evolved to interpret signs, and there should be mutual respect in harnessing our primeval wiring. This is what the advert does. To speak to someone is an intimate thing. To have their ear. To be inside their head, my words. We should treat it delicately, erotically that it is. We were made to interpret this. To interface. The painter controls volume that poet does not. Treat it with respect, a mutual suspicion. Beery and I invent a third thing together through the handshake of the poem. Not a cruelty of font size.

Daniel Dewar & Grégory Gicquel at Antenna Space

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Can't help but think of the memento mori of Fischli and Weiss hand-carving trash. It was about "abusing time," the waste of labor, the clock. Here labor is venerated, monuments slow carved to it. Seating whittled with a snails pace. Again, the trend for stitching. Knitting that is engraved, like, do you get it? The look of craft, of labor, of farming. Concepts so alienated to us that they return as aura, as art. Nostalgia for a time that never existed. Now labor is a fun haycation. A thing for people who don't do it to experience as a novel other. 

"...it was a concealment: the aluminum clamshell of your laptop being seen as economic product of capital innovation itself, rather than the hand-sweat of laborers distanced beneath gloves. A price tag for a face. Almost nothing is this world is actually automated - everything you touch is hand-made by workers. This separation of our social relations we've so completely assimilated that labor itself returns as a literal fetishism, stitches mark this labor, look compelling, can be brought out onto white walls, as aura, as artwork. Every cheap objects is an equal tapestry. The stitches in time are smoother, hidden. Hold up your child's plastic toy and feel another at its end..."

See too: Stitching Labor, Daniel Dewar and Grégory Gicquel at Portikus, Daniel Dewar and Grégory Gicquel at Micheline Szwajcer, Peter Fischli and David Weiss at Sprüth Magers

Nora Turato at Sprüth Magers

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Scream! Yell! Weeee! Bang, bang, bang the pots of language! Feel the emptiness. Feel hollow in indiscriminate wailing. A child in a grocery store deprived, is, yes, this is the sound of our world, adverts, attention, corporation. You have described our terror, armed the artist with these weapons of mass language... now what? This is the point where I turn, I'm not interested in being made numb anymore, in this classic form of desensitization. It was fun for a little while. Now it just gets bigger? The arms race was already won, we have demilitarization programs in place. The artist need not a bigger billboard to prove large emptiness. 

See too: Desensitization, Modern Gothic, Nora Turato