“Verlörung” at Art Berlin

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Why not maximize the product, increase the wallspace into a complex, non-Euclidean like lettuce, a surface area excessive of space. Like lettuce. Make it baroque, grotesque, caricature of the exhibition. It's the same but more. Frilled with lettuce space. This is interesting, this is a cartoon, the one we live in, a maximization, like an efficiency, like an apartment, hoarded toward labyrinthian conditions, scraping everything we can get out of it, to make stone soup.

Past: Deana Lawson at Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis

"And not necessarily treating her subjects kindly, the best light remains Lawson's, photographic adeptness bending subjects to her. [...] These are what photographs live for, the construction of a subject, here a person. At least these curtains seem properly adhered."


Click to read full: Deana Lawson at Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis

Past: Anna Ostoya at Silberkuppe

"[The office paper shredder's] futurist and Sheeleresque overlay a quasi-destructive act that reviews of spend most space ignoring to tell you about the images buried because its usually easier to elucidate history than art."


click to read full: Anna Ostoya at Silberkuppe

Leda Bourgogne, Ida Ekblad at Kunstverein Braunschweig

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The excess physicality in painting, the scabs one end and wall vents on the other, perhaps because we're so beholden to virtual environs that we need a new harder visceral materiality to reach across screens, so we can feel like we're feeling something other than glass.


see too: Ida Ekblad at Herald St (2) Ida Ekblad at Max Hetzler, Ida Ekblad at Herald St (1), Tony Conrad's Glass

Past: Lutz Bacher

"If Bacher's theme of the erosion of the monument-as-sign's ability to mean isn't still apparent, the spamming of its images should make it: The semantic satiation of saying it again and again mirroring Bacher's interest in the loss, in its signification photocopied to death..." "into the noise of their granular flooring, synecdoches of stellar scales spilled across expanses like baseballs or sprawls of sand. Mountains dissolve in grains that resemble liquids in geologic time."


Read Full:
Lutz Bacher at 3320 18th St
Lutz Bacher at Daniel Buchholz (3)
Lutz Bacher at 356 Mission
Lutz Bacher at Statens Museum for Kunst
Lutz Bacher at Daniel Buchholz (2)
Lutz Bacher at Daniel Buchholz (1)

Past: Ida Ekblad

"Paint coagulates, a crust like Ekblad's Mr. Kellog's Cornflake Scab stuck to fine surfaces. Scabs are excess of bodily presence, we want to pick them, peel them from our elbows, remove the corpsing exuberant. It's itchy [...] Like Lasker's stupid strokes, a clownishness, an exaggeration of the painterly ... forcing painting to speak with a mouthful of bubble gum."

Click for full:Ida Ekblad at Herald St (2) Ida Ekblad at Max Hetzler, Ida Ekblad at Herald St (1)

Diamond Stingily at Freedman Fitzpatrick

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The transition from handmade dolls to mass produced Teddy Bears had to be meaningful for the unconscious of humanity. All sorts of issues for what it would mean with children grown on loving sweatshop objects. Units of CareBears moved. To move you. Shouldn't the Toy Story characters speak Chinese? Dominant culture gets to force its cast to speak its language, dub them against their natural speaking voice, force adoption of its language. It's called localized for a market. It's called acting white. It's called "he's eloquent." called AAVE, a vernacular nonstandard but "equal." They surely will speak whatever when localized for market. Giving commodities to children so they learn to love their master. Because really they'd speak Mandarin. Klaus Biesenbach's apartment has nothing in it and is entirely white, which is a lie since minimalism is basically predicated on closeting the workers you're standing on, but we'll give him several architectural and NYT magazine spreads anyway, a new advancement in whitewash interiors. Because pretending the working body isn't there, pretending everything spontaneously generates on store shelves clean, without indentured sweat, is important to our culture. Corporate production gets so massive it takes pains to relocate itself, force adoption of itself, anything outside it gets the searchlight, brought back under eye that is pretended as benign with total market share, control.


see too: Melvin Edwards at Daniel Buchholz, Diamond Stingily at Queer Thoughts