Nina Porter at Theta

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The mad scientist is driven to the fringes to invent something "against god." A monster. To surreptitiously photograph girls by the pool Tichý built a camera out of matchbooks and thread spools. An isolationist spy for his own perversion. A mad scientist's sympathetic intentions, desire, even if their methods are not. You can't take people's parts without asking. The doctor would have required permission from the health department for all that exhumation. That's why you need to build a suspicious backpack. To have a reason for all that gadgety. Build a peephole into the lab. The voyeured corpse stolen from Étant donnés.

Kobby Adi at FELIX GAUDLITZ

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Conceptual art mutated into three genres, 1, zombie abstraction; 2, art legalese, say Cameron Rowland or Daren Bader/Martin Creed; and 3, myth attractors. The myth attractors best illustrated by Trisha Donnelly for whom stories circulate as much as image. But a definition might be provided by this description of Adi: "an idea extending beyond any material work, disseminated by hitching rides on the memories of those who have seen it, on the words of those who talk about it, or within the images and accounts that document, or merely suggest, its existence. Still, the label is not the artwork. Wherever there’s water, All splashing and pouring can appear—that’s the point." While Donnelly has gone on to arguably more formal work, the setup remains, this air of suggestibility, the ominous object whose explanatory reference points are cut at some specific level, until reference begin pointing everywhere, until the air becomes perfumed with it. The gap is the mystery, is its interpretability. These are instruments made of gut string inside heat resistant tubing, which, like the internal temperature of animals, you can hear the music already. It exists in the suspicion for it. Reminiscent of Michael E. Smith's clarinets inside PVC tubes - documentation of which seems vaporized along with Susan Hillbery's gallery and website. It's just myth now. But they sounded great.

See too: We feel comfort with the artwork identified and labeled, packaged by the camera or work list, catalogue raisonnéd. We appreciate butterflies pinned spread behind glass. Explained. Removed from the packaging artworks and butterflies disperse, cling everywhere, etherealize into suspicion for them.

David Douard at Galerie Chantal Crousel

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in comparison to the raw sewage spilling onto gallery floors today ( see: aspirated trash ), this seems from a moment ago, when we would arabesque our garbage, assemblage a baroque. Our Ornaments of trash. Douard's look like Matisse at this point. Maybe the water we swim is so full of waste that's its just water at this point. Simply the material we sculpt with now. Valerie Keane, Robert Bittenbender, but really it's all Genzken's fault. 

See too: Valerie Keane

Kayode Ojo at Maureen Paley

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2006? Carol Bove, Martin Boyce, Patrick Hill, Michaela Meise, et al. VVork-core. "All the chatter about a 'new formalism' going on." It was our "Fuck the Bauhaus" moment. They're all in Artforum several times. Everyone was repackaging, recompositionalizing, a minimalist modernism. Presenting tableaus of a wonkified high culture past, like bent Ikea showrooms of minimalism. Now it is a micro-era, quickly forgotten. But the procedures remain fun, merchant stands for selling something back to ourselves.

See too: Every 10 years assemblage reinvigorates itself as the dumpsters picked through are modernized to the current castoffs and appear new, the waste that evolves along culture until finally an artist is able to rummage up enough LEDs, acrylic panels and Arte Povera catalogs to accumulate the update to our Rauschenberg cardboard clogging the pipes of our forward progress.

Leonor Antunes at Taka Ishii Gallery

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We don't need word pastiche or appropriation anymore because we invented the word "research" which allows influence to become a value-added in PR fodder. Recycled material is now green-washed as "investigation" and we purchase a brown product because of it. Begin to prefer the brown recycled product as nostalgia, as the fan-service and reference-bait of reboots which provide franchise fans with back-patting. The products' comfortization toward viewers becomes congratulatory prize: "I understood that reference." Our nostalgia becomes legitimated. The candy of easter eggs thus becomes a packaged and sold as the whole meal. In art this recycling gets reframed as connoisseurship, knowledge, a one-sided forcible "collaboration" with the past. With "overlooked" histories. The recycling machine is the same. In the cargo-cult era, the detritus of the world is a shopping mall, hang these references like jewelry around your neck. And these are good sculptures. 

See too: The benediction of sign systems. The highest order these relics can obtain is that they get put on Beyonce, as a Christmas tree of our sign systems, collective wreckage, past. The highest order of totems, shown back to us like a lighthouse reorganizing meaning.

SoiL Thornton at Galerie Neu

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Letting the world into the gallery. Sand or baseballs or pompoms. There is no meaning here. There is only the world, which is a shopping mall, which allows purchase of identity. This is good. This is the whatever of perfection: just a world. You can construct your own. The biblical "for dust you are and to dust you will return" is, as far as we know of entropy, scientifically accurate. A sand grain falls for each day in your hourglass. You can go into the world and order pompoms instead. This is the perfection of whatever: your dust. 

Jameson Green at Derek Eller Gallery

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"Pastiche" used to be the incantation to make reuse palatable. (Alongside appropriation and buggery.) Condo, for instance, made his unoriginality acceptable under the guise of ostensible mockery (implying critique, implying meaning). This was a cake-and-eat-it-too situation if there ever was one. Because eventually everyone stops saying the word pastiche and just says Condo- and this is the moment that the art self-justifies, magically, and Condo becomes sui-generis almost tautologically, as if it didn't need Picasso. It no longer looks like a stupid Picasso, it looks like a Condo. It looks like "expensive painting." And so in this way the world has rid itself of the magic incantation pastiche because its the aerosol we now breathe.