Raque Ford at 321 Gallery

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need to manifest text as an aesthetic physicality. At its worst generally involves fabrication budgets for neon, like how little distance we've come since Nauman.
3. We don't trust text alone in space - god forbid we come across as pedagogical, or worse boooring, or, worst, wrong - so we aestheticize it, ironize it, make it sparkle, cut it to a koan, so the lash of language is tempered with comfort, which are aesthetics. There seems no art text not couched in some.
(4. While wall text is, oddly, left to its own institutional devices.)

Despite, when Ford's are their most direct, cut and left dry, they retain all the enjoyment of flipping through artist notebooks. The aestheticization is more the provisionality, but it's a natural form.

Gene Beery at Fri Art

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"Of course the painter feels a private respect for the signboard, it performs what the artist cannot. The handcrafted simplicity creating a directness of intention that art is forbidden. Artists' private esteem for the simple, functional object. These objects against which art feels inconsequential, inadequate against an elemental usefulness."

Beery toys with this functionality, a slight haywire version sparking in the walls, threatening to burn the whole thing, meaning, down. The trueness of statements, their ability to make sense, becomes if not beside the point, a thing to torture. Not the treachery of images, but the treachery of saying anything at all. 

Past: LaKela Brown at Lars Friedrich

"Commodity displays look a lot like our information displays, the Google images that look a lot like old toy catalogs, inventories of our blossoming desires anointed with the heavenly light of product photography pornography, offering a selection menu that is overexposed, bleaching like coral reefs whose left white skeletons trace a once thriving culture. The ecosystem remains a ghost of taxonomic fossils remaining, held for the assessment of all the dreams of a life embedded."


LaKela Brown at Lars Friedrich

Past: Gene Beery

"no wonder the surrealists and conceptualists loved Beery (artists handing him hundreds on the spot) words can perform in a way that art doesn't, forming an address almost inherently surreal, a transmission between people, almost infiltrative, allowing its horsemen direct access to your head, to say whatever it wants, and already there, words standing around inside you."

Gene Beery at Shoot the Lobster

Josh Smith at David Zwirner

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Maybe what Smith actually provides is relief. Against paintings overdetermined to like the nth degrees by whatever surrealist imago kool-aid the artworld currently swimming, Smith's is an interminable vacation to fields of ever stupid flowers. None of these painting individually matter. Functional. Require zero attention. Just exist like idiotic specimens of a genus Smith. Perhaps this is what Eliza Douglas was responding to, an idea executed, eventually you live long enough with it to learn to love your captor.

Past: Josh Smith at at Eva Presenhuber, Josh Smith at Bonner Kunstverein, Josh Smith at STANDARD (OSLO)

"What was with our fetish then for exaggerated manufacture remains a question, for since we've grown tired of zombies that Smith and the gang had some hand spawning, Guyton, Walker, Price, a group for whom production was theme: recycling, automation, dispersion and Smith's prolificacy spamming himself into consciousness with grotesque versions to prove the mass, beating his name and himself in the head."

"now they sorta look just like any other painting made today. The wild importance of Fordist speed (and its in-distinction) creating busywork spam into cultural consensus..."

"the final internment of line between critical and sellout"


Josh Smith at at Eva Presenhuber, Josh Smith at Bonner Kunstverein, Josh Smith at STANDARD (OSLO)

Eliza Douglas at Overduin & Co.

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Not so interesting perhaps from a PierreMenard/Sturtevantian vantage (the whole tongue louse, deterritorial author theft well trod), but maybe as a continuation of Douglas' clever ideas for coating painting in a candy shell, creating frames that exist as excuses for painting. Like before's hands which cast spells for some sloppy "painterly moment." They feel sorta cheap (it would not be the first time the artist has ordered paintings from China) and that seems too, the point, like Smith's lame name, a mere means to fill an exhibition.

In late 2014, hearing that many schools in Europe were free, she called a friend who had gone to the Städelschule in Frankfurt—one of the top art schools in the world, with a reputation for fostering experimental work. She set up a Skype date with a professor, painter Willem de Rooij. Then, with two weeks to go before the meeting, she got to work. 

Douglas began painting abstract forms on random objects around her house—aluminum foil, found images, a set of Batman bed sheets—and photographed the results. She reproduced the images on small canvases using the kind of print-on-demand machines you find at CVS and Walmart, then painted over them again. 

“I thought it was a good way to get a lot of decent-looking stuff made really quickly,” Douglas says now. “I was thinking about how I might be able to get him to think that I was doing something more elaborate than what I really was.” -Taylor Dafoe, artnet