Contemporary Art Writing Quarterly

In case you’d like to spend a while absorbed in anything other than listless documentation of art, you might like to visit Contemporary Art Writing Quarterly, where we publish deeper, uh, "expanses" on art. Pick your essay below:

Yellowing Conceptual Art

Material Porn 

Choose your own Intestinal Adventure

Violence Against Faces

The Model

Modern Gothic

CAWD on Fetish (Featured on CAD!)

Denny's Fast Food Criticism

Interview in SPIKE
Find more in our Office Notebook

Jean-Luc Moulène at Chantal Crousel

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Moulène riding fine line of decorative tripe and experiments unnerving enough to shrug easy swallow - a straddling that tensions each. Moulène always threatening to fall into the high powered kitsch of Urs Fischer or Ugo Rondinone but never actually doing it. The automotive sex of the purple shiny thing is made explicit by the inflated concrete tits, its latent sex unhidden.

Nancy Lupo at Sydney

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Stuf becomes subject. Curdles a skin, a flake to slough. Contaminates, spreads. "Disposable." "Flushable." Problems in city pipes, amassing with congealed human grease to create clogs from hell. "Behold The Fatberg: London's 130-Ton, 'Rock-Solid' Sewer Blockage" A world unable to contain our disposability. Reamasses elsewhere, waiting in the night, leaking nightmare. Find toothpicks in veins. Lupo's associative juicing. The process of paper making and the accumulation of sewer blockage aren't that different. A more human pulp. A calendar of waste.

See too: Nancy Lupo at Kristina Kite, Nancy Lupo at Swiss Institute, Nancy Lupo at 1857, Nancy Lupo at Antenna Space

 Past: Gaylen Gerber

"The Gerberian support's proposal of a third party in the usual object/viewer duo, a middleman standing watch to serve you the art ... The general supports of art - walls, lights, pedestals - are cold inanimate and, generally, ignored, and Gerber's proposition, their filling with blood, sedimented subjectivity, makes the walls seem alive and watching, that though they are painted white they contain just a different behind in them."

"Objects Curated to displace their center, their aboutness, diverting it to dissolve and we looking around, feel a presence, the object juiced to mean. The dumb object speaks in the noise of the viewer reflected."

Read full: Gaylen Gerber at Emanuel Layr, Gaylen Gerber at Studio for Propositional Cinema, Group Show at Emanuel Layr

Fredrik Værslev at Gio Marconi

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"The electrified corpse of symbolism." Made to jitter again. Not just flags, stained flags the audience gasps, amazed at the corpse twitching. The symbols already existed, the idea already existed in Johns, but these paintings pull the corpse out for display again. A dead thing. Stare into the abyss, the abyss give back to the theater of your skull: this is called Prisoner's Cinema, a lack of stimulation causes the perception of phantasms. We write 10,00 word essays expounding the ghosts. They're symbols. They point. That's what they do. You perceive a content, like a corpse. But that's not grandma laying there.

See too: Fredrik Værslev at Bergen Kunsthall, Fredrik Vaerslev at Centre d’Art Contemporain Passerelle

Past: Nancy Lupo

"Like eye goo, stuff's service is its waste, a continual sloughing, so we can remain fresh, clean. Stuff accumulates, piles, is shed. Stuff is quasi things, is transient, transactional. A disposable fork is, like, quintessential stuff.."


Read full: Nancy Lupo at Kristina Kite, Nancy Lupo at Swiss Institute, Nancy Lupo at 1857, Nancy Lupo at Antenna Space

Past: Fredrik Værslev

"... smoothed and well worn into comfort: the softness of acid-washed history, whose untreated denim is stiff, abrasive, and has edges that Værslev happily washes away, with the already pre-distressed historical material."

"There is no trap set, no one is going to “read into” these, only conceptual fracture of others moves loaded onto a canvas to re-package it as virtual corporate franchising... everything stolen and printed. A race to the bottom in derivative deflection en abyme. Not so much preferring not to, mass producing it."


Read full: Fredrik Værslev at Bergen Kunsthall, Fredrik Vaerslev at Centre d’Art Contemporain Passerelle