Bettina at Ulrik

(link)

Most artists today produce "series" - their commodification of a single artistic thought. For many art itself has become a form for inventing processes to serialize, commodify, i.e. "the production method is the product." Developing a "viewpoint", "signature" or "conceptual framework" - pick your ballyhoo'd sales tactic. A historic development likely due to the demands of both filling an exhibition schedule, and the fact that "the exhibition" had superseded the object as art's measurable unit of thought. Perhaps one stemming from the other. Bettina was an artist who, without any exhibition schedule or inventory space at all, mass invented means for artistic mass production, and then followed through on that production beyond the point of rational good thought - eventually filling her apartment so full she slept in the hallway on a lawn chair (or so the myth goes.) It's like an artistic Sorcerer's Apprentice, one conceptual Library of Babel spell is invented and the things begin to spawn, producing and reproducing until you live outside in a different world, unable to invent the spell to shut the brooms off. 

Josh Smith at David Zwirner

(link)

What is left to be said about the mid career. In the early days of his career Smith was oft referenced as a machine, descriptors like "profligate," "hyper" "overproduction" of "meaninglessness." This is what made him interesting or critical or novel, what ascribed value, or, at least, what people talked about. It was the Guyton Walker Price Smith era - the production was point. 

What was with our fetish then for exaggerated manufacture remains a question, for in the era since we've grown tired of "zombies" that Smith and the gang had some hand spawning. Guyton, Walker, Price, a group for whom production was theme: recycling, automation, dispersion and Smith's prolificacy spamming himself into consciousness, beating his name and himself in the head. That Smith is now making painting that are fine, pleasant even, a sort of radical gesture of normalcy...

Now they are just Zwirner paintings. Just paintings. Smith's paintings were always impressionist flowers, dumb stupid arbitrary. But now death rides a bicycle. As a "Live fast, die young" analogy for Smith's slapdash, it is the first time the content seems anything but non-sequitur.  But really it is a leisurely journey toward death. 

See too: Wow.. this press release is practically bulging with self-pleasure: "First" "Infinite" "instantly" "absolutely everything" "A whole new world" "immediate" "now" "the spirit" These are the words you can buy with blue chips. The artist is pure experience, sensation. Plugged into the raw. So, it doesn't matter they look like bad post-impressionism, the point is that the artist is electric 

Fredrik Værslev at Stormen kunst/dájdda

(link)

How much corpse fucking can we do? The necrophiliac painter retorts, "But I was only fucking that beheaded boy ironically!" "An intentionally ugly act, here, in an otherwise bourgeois showroom!" Okay. Yes, the formalist zombies were in search of brains, and yes, Værslev always knew he was humping corpse. But questions remain whether knowledge of shitting your pants makes the act any better? Perhaps worse, to intentionally desecrate one's own pants. At the very least you could be a little ashamed about it. Instead, again, mass produced desecration of our pants.

 

Lily van der Stokker at Gallery van Gelder & Emil Michael Klein at Galeria Federico Vavassori

LVDS at GVG, EMK at GFV

Wacky line day down at CAD. One line is trivial loose air, the other a serious river sculpted line. Which of course is false. Van Der Stokker's PR wants to impress the laborious hand process of inscribing all that nothing. Emil Michael Klein's lines may be as arbitrary as any, the whims of the painter, the water tracing the softest riverbed. Why do we attach an authenticity to the drab? A nothing to doodles? What is important finding a reason to autograph the picture, any scrawl will do. There's difference but no reason to see them differently, no difference at all.  

Group Show at OKEY DOKEY KONRAD FISCHER

(link)

We're only missing Robbins' Talent and Heji Shin's portraits of Kanye. To exemplar the exploitation of your social scene, and the big uselessness of image. To add to the Becherian desire to own everything. Sekula's invisible labor, people set to work. Capitalistically, everything must be harvested. Pornographize your social circle. Visibility above all. 

See too: "Robbin's Talent was funny because it wasn't a joke. It dryly announced its commercial moment, no art to it at all. Artists as their headshot. Artist as professional. This was before "Top 10 Under 30"s. It was saying the quiet part loud. Here the caricature is alms paid to deny the horse of it all. Barely caricature at all."

"Notable to the migratory flocking, Henkel and Pitegoff decamped to Berlin and opened a bar. In business it would be called a "blue ocean strategy ... The theater that came next placed their social capital literally on view, staged, showcasing the finer patrons on a pedestal and brightly lit to be gawked upon... Whatever institutional critique it held was mostly in the fact that it could do it better, insinuate itself better, prove the sporting of it, point dull yellow lights at the gameroom of it."

Hans Kupelwieser, Rudolf Polanszky at Galerie Mezzanin

(link)

A sea clamoring of artists painting abstraction, but you crush one anodized can and everyone yelling Chamberlin! Koons! Reyle! For painting abstraction's ubiquity creates referential camouflage- painterly abstraction is differentiated through the reasoning/process of getting the paint on the canvas, basically conceptual art at this point. (This how you get people "examining painting," "reframing modernism," "critiquing abstraction" - but never actually just painting.) This ubiquity is herd safety, is safe - which safety we ostensibly don't want in art and yet somehow do, the format cannot be killed, all attempts to kill/critique abstraction have only furthered it along, zombie, etc. So it's interesting to have something so daringly recognizable. Big shiny things. Like holding your breath to get high. Fun.

Georgi Alexi-Meskhishvili, Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili at LC QUEISSER

(link)

The relief of art not made for art's sake. Made for something else. (Sketches for film design.) Why is it so relieving? The burden is lifted, not forcibly performed meaning? Or it is that the meaning is already there,  (film design) - that we don't need find it - that we don't need to pretend it is there. No pretense. Both set-design and art-as-meaning-generator excuse their object as useful. Both point outside the object while incinerating it, but set-design requires you look at the object first, rather than conceptualize it. Is this what we want? A return to flowers?