Ghislaine Leung at Museum Abteiberg

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The detective novel. evidence. monoliths. clue. diversion. Suspicion. Creep. examination under light. walls dusted for prints. reading for signs. to solve. to produce MEANING. a portrait, forensic psychology. But, you say, CAWD has railed against the viewer deputized as detective, making exhibitions as hunt for the story trailed clues. (i.e. That's a Kippenberger in a frame by Leung, the Beuys drawings have a history, the onions' backstory. The walls reveal writing.) And you, dear viewer, on the hunt. The goal of this art is to produce a meaning-like affect in objects. The greatest goal is a suspicion without end - a mechanized fount of art. On the other hand, It feels like we can get rid of all this, say these objects do not meaningfully add up, preferably, and still there is something here. A distinction important. What Hainley called "the affect and the sensorial in a tradition of conceptual or minimalist work." or question of "when is the smell coming from the item and when it is manufactured without the thing." Important:  a meaning not generally associated, a meaning dissociated. "an emotional response repeatedly evoked in situations in which the action tendency that is associated with the emotion proves irrelevant or unnecessary" causes desensitization. "WELCOME"

What Fatima Hellberg called Leung's "ambivalent logic spaces" - their care for us is dissociated- which is our general experience but which we are socialized to endure.  The replacement of [sensitivity, emotion, humanity, our utterance] with not necessarily colder forms, but more efficient. A provided more efficient sentiment. (A more efficient conceptual art? Museum space architecture as invisible socialization.) Made apparent by the continuous multiplying of forms, "Welcome", into a chorus of commodified sentiment. Signing "The Boss." Capital providing our utterances with balloons that kill turtles. ("The hospitalization of sentiment.") The socialization of space or more accurately that spaces are socialization. Now estranged. Ir-relational aesthetics?

See too: Philippe Parreno at Esther Schipper, Carolyn Lazard at Essex Street, Ghislaine Leung at Cabinet, Ghislaine Leung at Chisenhale & Essex Street, Ghislaine Leung at Künstleraus Stuttgart

Past: Ghislaine Leung

"...increasing modern "miracle" conveniences and the then latest "smart objects" is hard not to read as a fear of these conveniences, submissiveness, actually infiltrating us, until we became, if not kitchen appliances ourselves, at least frighteningly subservient molded to kitchen surrounding us. The fear of our kitchen as a mold. Such that options for expression become limited by the cultural detritus available in stores.  You join in union, with a multitude, a choir, signing "THE BOSS." Whether or not highlighting these cultural walls with a gloss is helpful, it does make for good scary. "

"...the gradual creep of its suspicion, the John Knight cold cut ominousness in staging. Why must the light be blackout? Why the floor silenced? Why does the carriage require staves? The creep builds suspicion: a house haunted under glistening sterile light. A crime scene scrubbed, we, detectives."


Read full: Ghislaine Leung at Cabinet, Ghislaine Leung at Chisenhale & Essex Street, Ghislaine Leung at Künstleraus Stuttgart

Past: Lucie Stahl

"the specificity of their slick digi-crust-materialism and resolution-as-sex, we loved, the scanner trash prints: what everyone else was at such pains to display with existential and overwrought, like, expression, Stahl had turned into cheap easy and fast slacker products that got closer to the existential dread of that material-reproduction by embodying all its cheap easy fast sexy disposability."

"No longer the romantic era representing ourselves as fathomless depths ... we are now better feared as plumbing: oils, flows, pumps, fluids directed, misunderstood as monsters. The human body is indistinguishable from any sufficiently complex sewer. ... A world already dripping black nightmare, that we pump from the earth, have constructed our world out of... A product pipe-capable. Art as fluids, pipes, same as any other product. We all are forced to become fluid, make a product for channels, be pumped. "


full: Lucie Stahl at Queer Thoughts, Lucie Stahl at Cabinet, Lucie Stahl at Halle Für Kunst Lüneburg

Guillaume Bijl at Meredith Rosen Gallery

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Wearing a mask of your own face. When does the movie set become actual?  An office attempts to represent an office. This nonfunctional office, dead, is the uncanny, painted corpse. A"transformation" of space in capitalism.The fun here is how easily it works, the distinguishing signs among commodities. The difference between a tarp, a trash bag and tent. Mere signs. Don't bring Baudrillard into this. This is not theory, but funhouse, fun. 

For many, a film's believability is important ... to maintain its dream-thrall and for its duration become real. We understand fiction as able to - even momentarily - become actual. And in [x's] work seeing false things we know have the power to become real is its humorous anxiety. The various distances from "realness" are its multiple punchlines. At what point are the arrangements are decor and at what point it is the authentic living room.... At what point does our decor function as a reflection of society and at what point do our living rooms produce their own image for Hollywood and your neighbors to reproduce, and at what point does suspension of disbelief just become permanent.

See too: Guillaume Bijl at Nagel Draxler, William Leavitt at MAMCO

 Past: Guillaume Bijl

"Sign detached ever-so-slightly from its signified, like wearing a mask of its own face. Tableau in which the performers perform themselves. And question of, 'How could I ever possibly be not be myself?'"

Full: Guillaume Bijl at Nagel Draxler

stonehengification

stonehengification - 

The "big dumb object." A more cartoon sculpture. Paleo-totemism. With a smile. The cruder it is, the more archaic it looks, the more permanent we perceive it. Interminably stupid rocks last an unfortunate forever. So paintings like pictograms, petroglyphs. Give a rock some eyes.

As the world feels precarious, moves closer towards its end, we find solace looking towards the primitive we might find as our future, the deities we will worship in the trees we once had.

We find some comfort in dirt smeared not because of its primeval "truth" but because it seems like it can't obsolesce, it can't be superseded, blown away as dust, which we mistake for being eternal.

Olaf Breuning at Metro Pictures, Solange Pessoa at Mendes Wood DM, Aaron Angell at Koppe Astner

Past: Heimo Zobernig

"[The work's] banality incites questioning [as disinteresting objects must expel interest elsewhere], and exposes its stage to skepticism [institutional critique]. The inanity of such an operation might seem at the limits of humane interest, but Zobernig's magisterial ability to continually wrest insipid rabbits from hats irrupts a comedy at the depths of that hat.

"The dizzying aspect of its practice: the ability to lack any particularness whatsoever, terrifying blankness as genericness as phantasmagoria, projecting ghosts of modernism on the backs of our brains."


Read full: Heimo Zobernig at Kunsthaus Bregenz, Heimo Zobernig at Simon Lee, Heimo Zobernig at Indipendenza, Heimo Zobernig at Petzel, Krupp, MUDAM