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.
Contemporary Art Writing Daily
Friday, April 26, 2024
Thursday, April 25, 2024
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.
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
Tuesday, April 23, 2024
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
Monday, April 22, 2024
Christine Tien Wang & Ken Lum at Galerie Nagel Draxler
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At root both artist's text/image relation is a vibe ambivalent, cynical(?) The reproduced memes, the ironic signage. The story in the PR is telling. A European artist at dinner casts designation: "oriental." Surely one can understand an apathy with words, surely empathize a distrust to identification, "organization." In relation to words a vibe that might be described of white knuckling, teeth gritted, smiling, polite laughter. The detachment in relation to words might be one of self survival. Of cool rage. We ask for violence to be turned to comedy to make it palatable. For trauma turned to NPR bites, the "asian" section of grocery store. For both its served cold and you get to turn it over on your palate and question whether learning to like it makes you a better liberal. It is fun for the chef. I like it.
Sunday, April 21, 2024
John Riepenhoff at Broadway
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Yesteryear's zombie movie pulled a punch: all this boring abstraction was actually a process! of [x]! Cue the conceptual gong. Riepenhoff extended the thought, "what if all that process orientation went toward making paintings that looked marketable, looked like the candied past. That looked like so many things your rapid fire reference uzi couldn't debrain the hordes. They have fast zombies now. This was akin to interest. It was always how zombies win, a press release to explain it.
Art has become a giant machine mining sources of abstraction.
Friday, April 19, 2024
Claude Rutault at Federico Vavassori
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"two canvasses mounted on stretchers, of identical size and shape, painted the same colour as the wall on which they hang,"
Rutault, as if painting were some side project of interior design. An object springing from walls, architecture's mushroom. Whether or not this is true, the thought is better. You don't have to think about Painting, instead you get to think of air. You get to think of a painting that serves something else. It is pleasant to watch painting be useless like this.