Clayton Schiff at Real Pain

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Transcendence and medical technology illustrate themselves similarly. Cartoons become the hollow container you fill yourself into. The body illustrated becomes a cartoon you can inflict. Both art and sales require this permeable vessel. It supplies the identification for its product.

Adam Henry at Candice Madey

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Like op-art turned to info-graphics, there seems to be something we are being diagrammatically informed of - which - conflicting with the phenomenological fuzz creates an artistic ambiguity we associate with smiles. 

Ryo Kinoshita at Fons Welters

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So why does labor reappear? Why does "stitching" make a comeback? Impressionism's strokes showcasing its painterly labor. It had been that eventually genius embedded itself into the canvas, itself signifying "art," and blankness was fine. Does canvas no longer back painting's monetary value a priori? Do we need proof of work? Like the ornately etched lines of paper currency, making the labor of reproduction more expensive than the bill itself - proof of scarcity, value. Time equates to money. But now we have copy machines, CNC routers, childlabor and interns. Perhaps proof of work is just nostalgia for when there was infinite time, for when there was time. 

See too: Diedrick Brackens at Various Small Fires

 Past: Diedrick Brackens at Various Small Fires

"A stitch correlates to time, it is a labor visible in increments. While brushstrokes may have been the impressionist equivalent, modernism seemed, somewhat, goal orientated toward removing the more intensive marks of labor (first for a performative "expressive," the work was not labor but expression) before culminating in Minimalism and Conceptual art, two legacies infatuated with things ostensibly springing from ether. (The instructions being the art, not the 40 museum interns drawing it.) I'm not sure what this meant for them, their desiring to be capitalists, desiring to wipe the sweat from their aluminum, but it's still a desire today, no wants want to imagine previous fingerprints on their new iPhone. So the workers hands are latexed. Work, labor, sweat is the parcel of something we denigrate to the great purity of "good design," that cerebral craft we revere, which should be clean, elegant, and without a trace of sweat."

Past: Diedrick Brackens at Various Small Fires

Sharon Hayes at Kristina Kite Gallery

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"It's days like this when you realize you are just looking at promotional vehicles, you haven't left the house in days, the world being advertised to you. There's no content here, just a dark room for your projection of how interesting this could be. The advertisement."

Artworld films live or die on their promotional images. A succesful film still, you can almost speak about the films without having seen them. This is how they succeed.

i.e.:

"If Matthew Barney somehow didn't know of Ulrike Ottinger's oeuvre then a medal is in order. Others have made the connection in terms of gender, surrealism, mythos, which is accurate if vague horoscope retro-prediction. But the more distinct fingerprint lay in Ottinger's use of the promotional still image as a mode itself, able to connote and transact meaning equivalent to the film, a received token with through which to speak, a common communal currency. Barney had to have known of this when he turned the promotional image into a metastasized hypertrophic version involving stylists, lighting and image consciousness to an extreme, into basically Levi's ad campaign of artistic hubris. Cremaster succeeded, regardless any filmic merit, on its ability to manifest excitement and intrigue as a promotional vehicle, a cultural mythos that mirrored the mythos within. At the time you could almost talk about Cremaster without having seen any of it, the image was so omnipresent. Seeing was of less import than having being able to have an opinion and know of it. Having gained traction ever since, this form of promotional vehicle cannot be understated in importance post CAD/insta etc. when pipes and what they can funnel is tantamount."

"Towards a language of the promotional still, which, brandishing the act it can only suggest but never actually capture, becomes a sort of gestural pool, an we infer. In this way the promotional image, suggests narrative, a story we can't see, making them function the way altar paintings once had: creating icons for stories, propaganda for their churches.

"The promotional image has a leg up on art since it doesn't finalize itself, it withholds its decisive utterance. It gestures a story, but we are not allowed to speak of it, since we can't "know it." Serving cake and keeping it too, spread, replicate without depleting itself."

"Important for performance to begin to swallowing its own promotional material. The relevant info being self-contained is part of good documentation. Everything there, apparent. Punctured back in, the reason we're here, promotion."

Towards a language of the promotional image: Ulrike Ottinger at Kirchgasse, Lawrence Abu Hamdan at Secession, New Red Order at Artists Space, Paul Maheke at Vleeshal

Emanuel Seitz at Christine Mayer & Tess Jaray at Secession

(Christian Mayer, Secession)

Painting becomes an organization system for color. For "painting". Which then work backwards to find the logic, organization system. Which is something like meaning. 

Derrick Adams at Rhona Hoffman

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Hard to be critical of a warm breeze. Hard to find injustice in pleasant days. A curmudgeon with the weather so good. The color amped to electrified sign. Color as a sign. Force fed pleasance. Not to rain on someone's parade. A "tropic interlude." Art becomes a fantasy, a vacation. A kindness we live vicariously through. We do a lot of living through these days.