Deondre Davis at CASTLE

(link)

As far as animism in art goes, gluing eyelashes to your fetish is funny. Literally attaching human traits onto an object. A functional anthropomorphization. To yassify your copper pipes. Bat their lashes to plead for the mercy of your sympathy. Don't laugh. Marx would warn us against not recognizing the social relationship of objects, not seeing another human at the end. Objects become subjects, subjects objects.   The drawings did sorta cast a spell on me though. 

See too: "...And so if the landfill is hell and the museum is hermetically sealed heaven, art is a practice of purgatorial suspension, hoping to place them onto the helmed cultural ships that navigate time, rather than fall to the abject slaw of whatever-mud at the bottom of the bin."

Sylvie Fleury at A MAIOR

(link)

Sylvie Fleury in a store sort of closes the loop, no? Returned to its home. Wasn't displacement its content? Now its just the language of shopping.. in a shopping mall. It short circuits by not short circuiting. It just .. is.

Eloise Hess at Chapter NY

(link)

How to objectify photography. Encase the elusive "moment" into something more ... preservative. Not the fetal pigs' brine but a wax. The rise of endless photography filters eventually irrupt an ultra-sepia, casting it in mud, the nostalgia of stone. The contradiction of etching our fleeting into earth.

See too: 

"We find some comfort in dirt smeared not because of its primeval "truth" but because it seems like it can't obsolesce, it can't be superseded, can't be blown away as dust, which we mistake for being eternal."

"..a gloss of preemptive nostalgia. Like instagram filters made to affect 70’s grain on crystalline microlenses - implanting an artificial comfort into the cold of its technologic clarity - Davey went from photographing the dust and stains that mark human touch and embody nostalgia, to pre-placing that touch on the photographs.."

 "art often feels like a process, technology, for imprinting nostalgia. Casting banality in bronze, silver, with a halo of rose. " The Sontagian elegy as an Instagram filter.

Seamus Heidenreich at LAILA

(link)

Trend for a pastoral return. Our agrarian retro. A new Blue collar chic. Distinct from "Stonehengification" - which loaned its cred from the eternality of rocks. This is labor as aura. We're so detached from work that it returns as a tahitian exoticism. "At least sticks are still in vogue as symbols of the foraging, our original human toil, production."

Here labor is venerated... 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, to experience as a novel other. 

...it was a concealment: the aluminum clamshell of your laptop being seen as economic product of capitalist innovation itself, rather than the sweat of laborers distanced beneath gloves. A price tag for a face. Almost nothing in 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, ... look compelling, can be brought out onto white walls, as aura, as artwork. Every cheap object is an equal tapestry. The stitches in time are smoother, hidden. Hold up your child's plastic toy and feel another at its end...

As the world feels closer and closer to destabilization, autocratic leaders, isolationism, far-right tolerance, moves closer towards its end we find solace looking towards the primitive technologies we might find as our future, and the deities we will worship in the trees we once had.

 Is this prep for our medieval future or nostalgia for a fantasy past. 

*a nod to the PR for the lucid essay. One would channel Bourdieu. "The Field of Cultural Production, or: Economic World Reversed": "The cultural producers, who occupy the economically dominated and symbolically dominant position within the field of cultural production, tend to feel solidarity with the occupants of the economically and culturally dominated positions within the field of class relations. Such alliances, based on homologies of position combined with profound differences in condition, are not exempt from misunderstandings and even bad faith."

See too: Stitching Labor, Stonehengification, Hana Miletić at Basement Roma, Daniel Dewar and Grégory Gicquel at Portikus, Daniel Dewar and Grégory Gicquel at Micheline Szwajcer, Magnus Andersen

Tina Girouard at Museo Tamayo

(link)

Icons hyperlink, signs point elsewhere. Lead to a history of New York's creative mythos. Symbolic capital as collateral backing its symbols. It is part of a consecrated history. So can't be a loss. Must have value. To say nothing of the paintings.

Sherrie Levine at Aspen Art Museum

(link)

There's something suburbanite sexy about theft, libidinal about owning. Converting another's artwork to a commodity. To yours. Like a coworker showing pictures of someone else's children as their own. An act of lost desire. And Levine presented a philosophic question of paternity that Prince later converted to a legal one. The contrast makes Levine's in hindsight feel less political and so much more about intimacy in this deranged adoption. You let the coworker "have" the children because it's in the realm of fantasy's safety, meaning art. The coworker's devotion is real.

Shaun Motsi at KIN

(link)

Chocolate was what the artworld wanted then. Color on your walls. "Chocolate bars" rife for inference, wordplay, poetical inkblots for the viewer to see what they wanted. Suggestive and blank. A Rorschach lure, and trap. Now here they becomes a silver mirror. Now here we've got holes cut out for white "spectacles," peeping for a history of scientific racism, for our gawking and calling it erudition. Which is another apt metaphor for recent turns in art. Never seeing the white for the walls. Turn around, look inward, calls coming from inside the house, etc.

See too: "The Rorschach inkblot is the ultimate symbol of art."

"In gaming, "the meta" is the strategy created by players using knowledge of the inner workings of the game mechanics."

"in the style of ancient plated mirrors, an object of vanity for the rich, giving them back exactly what was loved most, their surroundings, their homes, their empire and visage. To prove the point the more well silvered even reached higher prices."