Ruben Ulises Rodriguez Montoya at Murmurs, Los Angeles

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Book title; Elongated Necks: Italian Mannerism through Anime Mech: mutant figuration throughout history. There's some type of desire for a new form of physicality. The mutation on the mutation, an ever growing corpus. Necks selected for desire. John Currin comedy. Your veins pumping microplastics. H.R. Giger's sudden high art popularity. Akira: Tetsuo's corpus extrapolates itself. Ballard's Crash, surprisingly sensuous. Biological tech atrocity. Calvin Klein models, their own El Grecoing body. Etiolated males. The Thing. More potent forms of body. Harder forms of body. Evangelion EVAs, a mech that bleeds. Transformers, no coherence to their machine, only endless CGI particles. Gore is just a body undergoing process based abstraction. Teratomas. The body goes rococo. Your face goes baroque. Not to even mention the cyborg. An unidentified animal washes up on shore, decomposing, mythical. New forms of body always giving torture of yours.

Simon Fujiwara at Fondazione Prada, Milan

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It is easy to say what's good/affective about these. It is ideology uncanny, the way the arcade is the cultural mythos machine, made topsy turvy. Fujiawara's production of meaning is a big cartoon factory. Artists blow up a mall, rearrange cultural debris. Edutainment gone haywire: Dr. Frankenstein reanimates a trade show. The ideology of display into comedy for it. Etc. Learning, but like, stupidity is the funhouse of meaning. Which the exhibition was always the factory of, and we ostensibly liked this, meaning, and ostensibly this was good meaning, rather than ideology. But this became two meats hard to slice. The ability to construct meaning itself became the ideologic function of the gallery that its look lended. And here it was in a kaleidoscope. 

"This is how my world looks – diverse, confusing, exciting, incomprehensible, fearful – and I can only make work that is close to my experience. ... And then, from that, how we construct meaning for ourselves now, amid those ruins. Throughout everything we haven’t lost a desire for meaning or belonging but maybe in a ‘post-meaning’ world we can still have a meaningful existence. I’m trying to understand if this is possible or if the search for it is meaningless."

There's no truth here, just the carnival of experience, fun house made from the funhouse glass of cultural knowing, the warbled mirror of art's stuttering experience. 

see too: Simon Fujiwara at Dvir(1), Simon Fujiwara at Dvir(2)

Past: Simon Fujiwara

"Fujiwara's accumulations of content are not the endless permutations of cultural arrangements that make culture "speak," ala Danny McDonald et al. Instead they seem a return to narrative invested in its display systems that constructs that cultural story, history, myth, not just our garbage. Whether or not it actually assembles meaning, it at least looks a little more like it, by rebuilding the structures that construct it."

Fujiwara: "I was teaching in Amsterdam and wanted to take the students to see the house as we were discussing monuments and how ideology translates into material language."
"The Anne Frank House [...] is one of the few places where every mundane detail of a home—door handles, wallpaper, floorboards—transcend their material status and become symbols of tragedy and hope."
"Inside the house, I was told by the guide that almost nothing of the original house remains except for the structure. That the house was only purchased after the making of the first Hollywood film about Anne Frank"

Full: Simon Fujiwara at Dvir(1), Simon Fujiwara at Dvir(2)

Martine Syms at Bridget Donahue, New York

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Thomas Hirschhorn also started as a graphic designer, also invested in tape construction, but Hirschhorn sold his fandom of philosophy as philosophy (a Gramsci t-shirt in the form of artwork) which was bogus if endearing. Syms' constructions are less the constructions of phallic monument broadcasting the big self than a collecting flotsam of identity, the graphic ring of scum clinging each our cup's rim. The debris of culture, a collective identity. This is our stuf. The undigested matter clogging our pipes and our consciousness. This is afterall the post-Harrison/Genzken aftermath. It's all a bit Unmonumental, which like Maggie Lee, an interest in the becoming stage, self-consciousness and construction. We become the diggers, forced investigators, of our own world. 

See too: Martine Syms at Human Resources, Maggie Lee, Thomas Hirschhorn 

 Past: Martine Syms 

"Proposals for a radical graphic design often denotes expensive fonts and overlaid text, merely beefing up the intensity of its devices whereas a real radical design would be one which self-exposes the mechanisms of its influence. There is a lot of very unradical graphic design in museum exhibitions whose stark posters and mild conceptual parameters stand in for radicality by being visually and thematically aggressive. This isn't now to put forth Syms as radical graphic design but that a graphic design actually filleting itself probably wouldn't look like graphic design at all and within Syms' claims to be a designer in the visual production of identity is at least closer."

Past: Martine Syms at Human Resources

 Past: Nina Canell

"not entirely convinced art's absorption of the technologic look isn't simply a means to bring something it doesn't understand into a realm it does in order to feel some small control over it. Let's face it, the world has moved beyond pretty much everyone, we only get our small corner of it, and it would make psychologic sense to develop pathologies in order to feel control of something you have little over."

Full: Nina Canell at Wien Lukatsch

Past: N. Dash

"swatches of touch, the anthropological preserves of our dissolving physical world. These are like catalogs for its remains, our once sensual pleasure distributed over digital networks."  "The Kunstkammer conveyed symbolically the patron's control of the world through its indoor, microscopic reproduction" "but no one is that hubristic today, these are about the loss of that, mourning it, our desire to once again touch things again, like all those salvaged wood paneled Brooklyn bars, churches for mourning"

 at base they are still the butterflies, material, pinned behind glass, catalogs of physical sensations you see but cannot touch. Materiality porn. "...art is the world's development project in all the ways to [build] a materiality so strong it visually empaths itself, feel something through glass.""Our touch, now more than ever, comes from sight, comes from packages of it in the high definition of images and advertising, we feel through sight"

Read full: N. Dash at Casey Kaplan(1), N. Dash at Casey Kaplan(2)