Autumn Ramsey at Crèvecoeur

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The decorative embellishments adorning the subject like Christmas tree, a structure for the hanging of means, that while Moreau's wreaths of ornamental doodadery shimmer with objects and riches, Ramsey's warble with the various means of representing those objects, the paint itself.  Us again gathered around the yule pine's glow, decoration, at an object that has more or less lost its meaning to act the tradition itself, history painting glitz.

Past: Autumn Ramsey

"As painter of things, and cat butts sensuous..."



Click:  Autumn Ramsey at Park View, Autumn Ramsey at Night Club

Fred Lonidier at Essex Street

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"1984 Benjamin H.D. Buchloh wrote '[Lonidier's] work addresses the questions of the detrimental impact that we would not normally be confronted with as a museum or gallery visiting art audience, since the system of representation that we traditionally refer to as ‘the aesthetic’ by definition extracts itself from the economic and political reality of the basis of culture in everyday life, in order to construct the aesthetic mirage that generates pleasure due to its mysterious capacity to disembody and disassociate our perception from the weights and demands of the real.'"

A blinding piece of criticism. The circuses of the aesthetic. Lonidier mending or "fixing" conceptual art's rupture of language to make it say actually something rather than serve up that effervescent lightheadedness I associate with it and deep sea fish. Ron Cook is a bricklayer or craftsperson, which is true, and there is no need to bring Tom of Finland into this despite my desires. We should attempt to recalibrate our politics not to the high drama of spectacle, but to the begrudging daily wear. Let's not get entangled with Ron's glistening bulk, but rather in how we can ease Ron's burden, even the unattractive Rons. Its hard to pay attention to these less attractive details, but this is something art and its sensitivities should be training us for is the point I guess. 

Ghislaine Leung at Reading International

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"For [Chris] Burden the question of, “How did our world end up like this?” is posited as the product of thousands of megalomaniac children grown never learning their childhood fantasies of the world need not be enforced upon it. That the train barons and real estate developers creating the world may have less to do with money and more with the latent remains of childhood fevers." - Chris Burden Metropolis II at LACMA

That we learn in childhood to act as gods. We are given realms. Build castles to smash, bricks to heights, dolls to have our way with. The megalomaniacism of childhood is rewarded endlessly with no wonder why later we are left with it blooming all over our world.

"Increasing prevalence of the diorama, the miniature, their vessels staging us as onlookers to worlds as sandboxes. A dissonance between our interior worlds that of course we find increasingly virtual and beholden to our godlike control of drag/drop materiality conjuring our desires that the outer world increasingly doesn't reflect, the world steamrolled at the whim of other's control. So our turning to dolls and miniatures and virtuality makes symptomatic sense, fulfilling our need for control over a world we increasingly seem to not have much over makes psychologic sense. The world providing ever further customizable habitats to busy ourselves with while remaining deaf to our desires, a lot like playing with dolls."- “Sylvanian Families Biennial 2017” at XYZ collective

See too: Mathis Altmann at Freedman Fitzpatrick

Erika Verzutti at Misako & Rosen

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Material excess, crust, small holes cut in flesh to place tiny stones. Little pimples to pop, nubbins,  to squeeze out excess, or pull an ingrown hair from under tender flesh. Feel bodily presence inside squares. Cut carrots in your belly button. Fill your ears with plastic beads, your salivary glands with pearls, your tear ducts with coral. Connect several puzzle pieces to feel that satisfying soft click. Fill your colon with concrete. Easily fit the average lightbulb's glass end into an open mouth to find it cannot come back out, the skeletal structure of your jaw is one way, leading to a series of horrible wet youtube videos. Remove the concrete to find a sculpture of your colon. How many apples do you think we could fit inside him? Surgically removed hangnails. Ingrown toenails. Rubbing mother's bunions. Rug burn so bad your uncle weeps. Reliquaries of saint's bones. Red swollen earlobes pinned to potatoes. Pizza face leaking. Red boogers wiped on pants. The entirety of childhoods perforations leaving a body like Spongebob. Pumice stones for exfoliant. Cartoon meat like cake. A pound of flesh removed without a drop of blood, just some sensitivity around the glands. I replaced my cheek with a smooth stone.

"Indeed, what the Pulitzer committee lauded him for was this precise ability to make something seen as highbrow, like art, seem less intimidating by his own buffoonery. They cite his “daring perspectives on visual art in America, encompassing the personal, the political, the pure and the profane” as reason for the award. But in a time when American politics has been profaned by the purely personal whims of one white man, the celebration of another doing the same in the arts raises some red flags for me."
-http://observer.com/2018/04/jerry-saltz-pulitzer-win-prompts-questions-on-the-aim-of-art-criticism/

see too: “Stories of Almost Everyone” at Hammer Museum

Past: Richard Aldrich

"Because surely there is actually a fool doing this full time."

Richard Aldrich at Adrian Rosenfeld, Richard Aldrich at Gladstone Gallery