Lisa Holzer at Kunstverein München

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"The resulting images at once mock and celebrate legacies of abstract painting while also teasing cliches and the expectations related to the photographic medium itself. With humor and critical wit, her practice addresses conditions of labor, exposure, visibility, and power confronting artists, artworks, and the art system itself."

We're going to just cross out the second sentence.
You know what the market has shown every collector wants walled? Abstraction, and so art has become a giant machine mining sources of abstraction. And the endless ironizing of abstract legacies with its remaking in different modes (fire extinguisher, silvering, abjection, food photography) ostensibly acts as critique. Pollock was just spurting cum, symbolically accredited decoration, abjection whatever; the critique fails to, despite 40 years of it, functionally do anything. It's like battling a ghost with a longsword. Abstraction is the inkblot that acts like silver, that acts like mirrors, to place whatever you want to see in it. And we keep digging mirrors.

There's a cake and eat it too joke somewhere in here.

Shana Sharp at Nicelle Beauchene

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Happening at Chris Sharp's Lulu was quaint, perhaps charming, endearing. It's a lovely gift, to give your mother an international art career. This feels different. Beauchene does actually show other artists besides Lulu family, they just rarely show up on CAD (4 in 5? (depends how you count)). So the layers here are complicated, enlarged by our magnifying glass to show this one texture. And charges of nepotism would of course be met with all other, more closeted, forms of nepotism that pretty much structure the art world. Transparency could feel like fresh air. Instead this weird magnifying glass.

Amy Sillman at The Arts Club of Chicago

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Maybe Sillman's paintings are uglycute in the way fetuses are ugly, there's not enough drawing to hold the shape nor body to give it viscera, which is why they have that newborn quality of looking like pink pencil erasers more than human, painting and fetus both. A confusion of painting and drawing (within painting specifically, the processes distinct from their materials we could say) that give them that uncanny modern nubility. Abject, sure. About to realize some full state if never completing it, the continual caroming off reaching full maturity.

Past: Amy Sillman

"A tragic affair collectors seek "signature" pieces, [...] requiring the artist already having a signature and thus emptied of its origination, adolescence, nubility and becoming etc, that Sillmans work, generally, seems about... "

"Sillman's painting too curdle representation, bodies."


Amy Sillman at Sikkema Jenkins, Amy Sillman at Kunsthaus Bregenz

Past: Will Benedict


"Thinking of Benedict like a gothicly depressed Baldessari is helpful."


Will Benedict at Gio Marconi, Will Benedict at Overduin & Co., Will Benedict at Bortolami

Jörg Heiser:      Do you think there is anything ‘polemical’ left in referentiality today?

Willem de Rooij:     Rather the opposite. It has become a completely mainstream convention. I’m amazed by the flood of art pieces I’ve seen lately that consist of a photograph of a book that the artist finds interesting. Or a book in a showcase. Or sculptures that consist of a bookshelf on the wall with a number of books on it. Or a photo of a bookshelf. Or a photo of a book in a showcase. These books might be interesting, but the photos and sculptures are usually not. I find it so unfair to art that the form of the work gets ignored in that way.

https://frieze.com/article/we-speak

Past: David Lieske

"Lieske was of the first of the cargo cults reassembling the totems of meaning in the desert of it, picking detritus. The issue was resolved not by necessarily by making objects mean again - which they couldn't - it's hard to make an empty bottle mean in arid land - but by situating objects so that they connoted meaning despite whatever inscrutable blankness. Like hieroglyphs. What was important was exuding the affect of meaning, regardless of whether there was any and that it didn't matter anyway was what we were all beginning to pick up on and what the commercial world had known for decades (that you can create "meaning" at will with attitude, aura) which while Lieske pondering whether this was a problem was suddenly flooded and drown by more ephebic artists already having decided for him it wasn't and now this is the water we live in, a flooded terrain of objects imbued, over-saturated "meaning."

"If so much art looks like Broodthaers today, it is because Broodthaers was of the first invested in the arrangements of display as a credence to meaning, institutional or otherwise."

"An ambivalence at the heart of much of art today displayed as presentations of objects left to the viewer with a "deal with it" coolness, figurative sunglasses donned."


Click to read full: David Lieske at MUMOK, David Lieske at Lovaas Projects