Koak at Altman Siegel

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People bent like pipes for their decorative purposing. The painter demands composition, extraction, humans repurposed for painting's ends, how modern. Arabesque motifs get harsher until the ballet seem inhuman doll-like, Picasso rips apart models and we find this intoxicating. Our runway models and their own body's El Grecoing. Etiolated for the consumption. There is discrepancy between what things represent and what they are: beautiful.


see too: Julien Nguyen at Modern Art, Lisa Yuskavage at Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, Louisa Gagliardi at Open Forum

Charlotte Posenenske at Konrad Fischer

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PR states "she erased all gestural traces avoiding and dimishing [sic] any kind of subjectivity." which while not entirely true the attempt does feel apropos to our current scratching at the glass, less to feel something than touch its borders as well as mark it. Scratched glass tends to reveal itself. This is the edge, the limit. Posenenske found it. And then Posenenske, tellingly, left the artworld. Yet we keep dragging her back, out. Why does art love and mythologize the people that leave it? As Herbert recounts one of her last acts was handing out broadsheets at Documenta stating "You culture vultures, so here you are all gathered together to chat and lie and talk crap so as to gain the upper hand." Us all loving our artists while not listening to them, an exhibition like a condescending smile.

They come three, four, at a time. Zebra hard to chase not because the stripes provide camouflage but because the predator cannot single a specific focus, i.e. with overabundant choice the selector's (predators) cognition malfunctions; in nature videos you see lions, surrounded by cheeseburgers, acquiesce, lay down, stupefied by movement, flow, numbers which disrupt the ability for sense, sensation ruins, the surface effect which short circuits our ability for recognition, to choose, to see individuality for a moving surface of pattern and stripe across a broad plain of thing. Eventually the lions that do not starve in the face of such are selected for reproduction.

originally published November 15, 2017.

Thomas Hirschhorn at Chantal Crousel

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Hirschhorn provided fantasy. Conflated the constructions with construction work, of a philosophy being useful like plumbers, a pragmatic attitude that "fans" of philosophy armed with nothing but his packaging tape could assemble some good in the world. In hindsight much of it was tone deaf and not really useful. But it looked utilitarian. That was important.
This exhibitions "conversations" are a clever way to commodify another's thinking in a neat package AND provide a fantasy, of our communication being clever. Making your fandom pay through resale.

Özgür Kar at Édouard Montassut

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Our twitching little bodies. Cramped into screens, boxes, glass, chopped into talking heads, dismembered in little windows, in corners. And asked to fit in these broadcasts of personal nightly news, to loved ones, alone and connected. Excessive tech to just prove we are still twitching, murmuring night lights, stand ins for comfort.

Barbara Bloom at Capitain Petzel

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Displays themselves become uncanny; they are the living dead, lacking human they were designed for. They are stage without actors, so when we seen them we see death. (IKEA displays create anxiety that must be counteracted, feeling our homes could feel like death if we don't fill them with otherwise.)  This exhibition comes with a packet explaining which exact ghost haunts each.

Rodney McMillian at Petzel

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This seems to be Petzel's first solo exhibition of a someone black?  Is that possible? 25 years. The press release seemed odd.