Thursday, November 30, 2017

“Symbolisms” at Cooper Cole


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Walls evaporate in backgrounds tuned to pornographic white, shadowless, paintings and sculptures float in the fog, as though tossed in the air, into the html space they drift, gallery neutrality moving ever closer to the anywhere/everywhere of globalized affairs. Galleries were the slow form of the internet: a networked system for image trade. CAD is the new silk road, the trade route of social fabrics. 
The "willfully retrograde" of gallery logistics, still shipping images across seas to see them sprout in back in the internet's ether, and of this exhibition's stated rose-colored eyes for a past long passed it, oddly, framed in the context of reactionary politics' goosechasing for a golden age, exemplified well in most of the work here. But the surrealist assimilation of Santiago de Paoli seem the most futuristic despite their decrepitude.

Wednesday, November 29, 2017

Tom Burr at Bortolami


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This Holiday season pick up several copies of John Waters and Bruce Hainley's Art: A Sex Book as the perfect-for-pretty-much-anyone gift. Friends, family, even enemies will be delightfully displeased by the vulgarity, and any extras to be kept pre-wrapped in your office all year as impromptu gifts for occasions you forgot.  There's something for everyone inside including a lovely short conversation between the authors on Burr, and the latent uses of architectural forms, objects of ulterior services.

Until your copy arrives tide your yule with George Baker's "The Other Side of the Wall" a primary essay on Burr online here.

Excerpt:
"Besides objecting to the sculpture’s interference with the way the plaza functioned, Titled Arc’s detractors were prone to fantasizing about the life of Serra’s sculpture at night, about the graffiti and public urination that it seemed to attract, attributing larger social problems to its form [...] Upon its first exhibition in Germany, Deep Purple was positioned by Burr in such a way as to exacerbate the functions for which Tilted Arc was originally vilified. Sited in order to create a pocket of empty space between the museum and a hedgerow that serves as a border between the museum and an adjacent public park [...]

"What, one might ask, does Burr’s Camp vision of sculpture do to Minimalism? My list is partial (as this project cannot be said to be concluded, and has only gained strength in Burr’s most recent works): Camp fixates on the Minimalist object’s surface. It makes Minimalism purple. Or it makes it shiny. Or, if it keeps the black-and-white neutrality, or retains the naked industrial material, it makes Minimalism all butch and sexy, often by comparing it, via photo-works, to icons of excessive masculinity like Jim Morrison. Camp might then value Minimalist surfaces as “superficial,” but it also invests these surfaces in depth: Camp likes Minimalism’s fakeness, revels in its extreme challenge to nature. Camp turns Minimalism into theater, into so many duplicitous stage sets ripe for the enactment of “drama.” Camp takes a Minimalist form and makes a bar of it, throws an imaginary party around it. Camp makes Minimalism festive. Camp turns Minimalism into objects of decor, into furniture or things to be used. Camp here means smoking a cigarette and snubbing it out dramatically in the rakish ashtray placed on top of a Minimalist form. Camp sees Minimalist geometries and refuses their abstraction, linking them instead to fashion, say, or to glamour—as when Burr’s Deep Purple took Serra’s “arc” and shrunk it, exhibiting it first in an exhibition called Low Slung, as if the form evoked a plunging waistline, the curvaceous splendor of a pair of low-rise pants, some new form of sartorial Minimalism. Sontag again: “Camp is the attempt to do something extraordinary. But extraordinary in the sense, often, of being special, glamorous. (The curved line, the extravagant gesture)” (284). Camp values Minimalism and the avant-garde more generally for their extremism, their naiveté, their artificiality and failures. It pays special attention to the moments when the Minimalist object was torn down or censored, or to Minimalist artists who were rejected (by their critics, by their peers—i.e., Tony Smith) or who died young (Robert Smithson). [...] Camp focuses on the Minimalists who were macho, or sometimes phobic (Donald Judd), exposing And, above all else, Camp simply adores the fact that Minimalism, in perhaps one of its greatest failures, thought it could escape the condition of subjectivity altogether—Camp really thinks this is so cute (and so sad)—for Camp is nothing if not an extreme exacerbation of subjectivity, sensibility, taste..."

Tuesday, November 28, 2017

Simon Fujiwara at Dvir


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"In Dvir Gallery in the south of Tel Aviv, Israel, Fujiwara is showing Hope House, a life-size reconstruction of the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam.""The installation is based on a 3-D model of the Anne Frank House sold at the house’s gift shop." -artnet.com

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 and that it had since undergone several renovations to make it look as authentic as possible."


The "Authentic" being the sort of transpositional point for slippage, i.e. the selection of what is an "authentic" experience of a house that people wait 3 hours to see hungry but full of preconceived notions of what the Anne Frank house is. Accuracy isn't necessarily Authenticity (and even "accuracy" historians will note allows the latitude for ideologic creep). An authentic experience becomes the decisions of a group of people whose individual definitions and desires of what constitutes "authentic" are physically manifested in decoration, their subjective desires as carpet choice, photo arrangements. Fujiwara's garishly contradictory furnishing provides a sort of metastasized version, cartoonification of ideological creep, a funhouse of representation, the subject of the creator on view more than any historical artifact, like any historical retelling.



See too: Mathis Altmann at Freedman Fitzpatrick

Monday, November 27, 2017

Past: Gina Folly at Ermes-Ermes

"The box is a headspace, and cardboard is like a reconstituted tree flesh, and the diorama is like an architecture, ventilated to breath, did you know a lot of planning into a building's breathing, it's HVAC, like lungs, controlling moisture, soggy cardboard is like a rotting flesh, we are repulsed by it, and looking into the flesh pool in the grotto is like the oracle, shimmering like the laptop screen, whose lid can be closed, locked and sent, it is transportable, and it is like a transportable headspace, and these objects are like primitive waypoints between many..."



Click here for full: Gina Folly at Ermes-Ermes

“Portikus XXX” at various locations


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A plucky young venture-idealist somewhere online collecting the mass sum of the artworld's published photographs of people giving readings, an art genre unto its own: a great instagram feed awaits.

Saturday, November 25, 2017

Barbara Hammer at Company


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Merging the physicality of the female body with that of the film medium, Hammer’s films remain memorable for their pioneering articulation of a lesbian aesthetic.”
-Jenni Sorkin, WACK! Art & The Feminist Revolution

"more or less inventing lesbian cinema" - PR

Invent or discover, it's hard to decide, but it's true you can see in Hammer's films and photography the angiosperm of 80% of the New Museum's current "Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon" a survey of the current landscape of gender-avant art of which Hammer is conspicuously absent, truant.
We are creatures of reproduction, it's how we learn language, self, and the images' powerful means of constructing identity. Who didn't learn to kiss from seeing it on screen? Why we seek "representation" of peoples. The ability to see new forms we can adopt. The ability to not reproduce the structures previous but instead inventing new forms, paths, images, ways to be, that's queer


See to: Alvin Baltrop at Daniel Buchholz, Leidy Churchman at Koelnischer KunstvereinA.L. Steiner at Koenig & Clinton

Thursday, November 23, 2017

Martin Puryear at Parasol unit


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You've seen all these imaged a 100 times before but now tinged with today what had been its throwback vintages, traditionalism, seems now prescient of trends of biomorphic sculpture and its use of vague forms, distributed or unplaceable referents, the sort of innuendo formation of meaning, whats in your head may not lay in mine, contemporary even.


See too: Ron Nagle at Modern Art“Ungestalt” at Kunsthalle BaselNairy Baghramian at Marian GoodmanNairy Baghramian at Museo TamayoNancy Lupo at Swiss InstituteKlara Lidén, Alicia Frankovich at KuratorPark McArthur at ChisenhaleOlga Balema at Croy Nielsen

Wednesday, November 22, 2017

Olga Balema at High Art


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In other words - images, unable to be tactile, an inability to make sensuality palpable irrupts strange fetishes: pornography must materialize its sensitivities by finding visual equivalents for touch. Textures which express similar reactions in viewers. You see it in taut inflated anime breasts, shiny PVC covered genitals, leather, sheers, frill, an entire wikipedia article about "breast physics." The ornate knots of bondage are totems to the practice. Art too in attempts to manifest materiality in what that cannot be touched must adopt hyperbolic visual equivalents. Bodies that photograph well.


See too: Olga Balema at High Art

Tuesday, November 21, 2017

Olga Balema at High Art


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Like grubs mating, the touch of moist plastic, people with fetish for balloons rubbing: there's a materiality present in the touch of latex forms, of stuff touching. Rub the vinyl, feel the taut leather naked and plastic man. 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, like pornography learning new sensuousness through seeing it commodified as objects, sexy.


See too: Olga Balema at Croy Nielsen

Monday, November 20, 2017

Jonas Mekas at Missoni Boutique


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Should art be banned from markets. Must we continue our lip-service against, shrouding the commerce of art, attempts at closeting it, pretend our silence is pesticide against it instead of allowing it flourishing in darkness. Expose it to air. Why shouldn't art be traded publicly beyond the stores we call galleries. Let it sell at retail. It would take a legend we can't possibly hate to do so.

Sunday, November 19, 2017

“Gótico tropical” at Centre d’art Contemporain Passerelle


Popular De Lujo (Gonzalo Díaz, Arnulfo Herrada)
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Google translated: "Populardelujo is an interminated, interminable, empirical and mutant project dedicated to ordinary Bogota. We are particularly interested in the popular graphic call, understood as all those images produced outside of the mainstream media and outside the circuit of advertising agencies, design studios and universities.

We believe that by reviewing this visual culture with affection, grace and respect we are recognizing not only the value of an underestimated aesthetic expression, but contributing to give greater visibility to people, communities, experiences and customs that have not had enough representation."

https://populardelujo.wordpress.com/solo-populardelujo/

Friday, November 17, 2017

Sayre Gomez at Ghebaly Gallery


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Painting the walls of your cage generally comes in less literal forms. The artist as tempestuous gorilla acquiescing to perform his own repairs on the prison of his cell, look how nice these bars I have erected are, how polished this fencing. When you could simply change the focus to what's outside. Instead some vague construction. The old predicament of art, to peel away the stickers marking the surface of cynicism: our Bad Boy Attitude. Elegiac Walls. All of this is obvious, it's right there, legible; the point is that it’s alluring. We want to keep them around.

Monday, November 13, 2017

Carlos Almaraz at LACMA


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“He was the depictor of that community and scene just as well as Monet or Renoir depicted their communities,” Marin says. Its true he got LA's acidic light right, the car "Crash in Phthalo Green" is barely brighter than the astringent sun, all the colors in Almaraz's paintings seems chalked by the sun, bleached to a sort of wasted otherness, just like LA.

Sunday, November 12, 2017

Sherrie Levine at David Zwirner


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Images both are and aren't generic, even the most bland are still specific singular instances of a larger regime of similar images, like stock photography's multi-cultural workplace theme. Images become soft by their ubiquity, their dispersal, a continual re-staging erodes their specific edges to become some semi-solid substance of genericness. And any new instances are based on the patterns of the last one. Iconic photographs are often predicated on a tension of specificity given to a ubiquitous theme, a concerned mother, a puddle jump, a flag raising, each iconic image eventually returning to some blank marker of vague icon. Each remembrance is like an appropriation, a rephotographic theft of its specificity to soften it back to the soup of ubiquity, of theme, of trope, back to stock image.


See too: Sherrie Levine at Simon Lee
Past: Sherrie Levine at Simon Lee

"...a less cruel and more seductive version of Mosset monochromes, whose destruction of content made their opaqueness a violence, and more like commodity forms, whose reproduction was their content and total-allure of surface their meaning..."


click: Sherrie Levine at Simon Lee

Saturday, November 11, 2017

Daniel Dewar and Grégory Gicquel at Portikus


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Totems hewn of old-timey techniques, preloading new content with the time travel of the ancients. It works, the objects and their symbols feel pulled from primeval wells, they affect - despite their modern gastrointestinal - the look of something deep rooted. When Hirst applies gilt to goat horns or barnacles to statues it appears as chintz patinas; DD&GC's abraded by the time's digestion by building techniques pulled through with it.  In 2017, we desire wood, representations of the natural, a connection to a time when we touched things with our hands and our stores name themselves after objects of such lost: Iron Oak Spade Copper Rooster mad lib titling. Wishing our objects to connect us with a mythic past when we weren't cognitively fritzed socially gamified cyborgs, even if it isn't true the affect is there to make us feel better.


See too: Daniel Dewar and Grégory Gicquel at Micheline Szwajcer

Thursday, November 9, 2017

Chadwick Rantanen at Secession


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"For his sculptures, Rantanen extracted the protective layer from rolls of new fabric, peeling it off like a layer of skin" like hospital's common procedure on horribly disfigured patients is to shave off sections of intact flesh into luncheon-meat-like sheets then run though a press into a mesh to be grafted over raw violence, like wallpaper pasted for cheery buildings hiding this slaughter, skins of paper garbage caught with arrows like St. Sebastian trussed with nice bondage knots, plastic bags caught in razor wire fencing, our trauma over mass trash hung over industrial steel drain pans portending the dripping we don't see but Rantanen has us inferring looming, like the plastics entering our blood, another sort of sublimated torture chamber type of deal.


Wednesday, November 8, 2017

Josh Kline at Modern Art


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Deploying the strategies of retail spaces, SFX, digital tech, political adverts, i.e. the corporate technologies that prove, with money, you can deform the world to your whim, mold plastic to your hand, replicant people in bags, get dream Obama to pass basic income. It's Magrittean dream-tech for the whatever you can buy sort. Now 3-D printing the apocalypse. Enemy or ally to its strategies, everyone wanted to Instagram Kline's militarized Teletubbies, proving them valid in an economy of attention, the high-production gloss of mass culture virtually demands it.


See too: Venice vs TriennialTimur Si-Qin at Carl Kostyál


Tuesday, November 7, 2017

Jesse Benson at Michael Benevento


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Making sense of the world through difference, categorization, exclusion, separating objects under different labels to make language, names, we, when paintings "involving the painstaking brushstroke-for-brushstroke hand replication of painted images" "re-painted by Benson with at least one visual deviation from the original" "and subtle gallery space alterations," difference and repetition becoming a see through thin, the asymptotic approach to image, falling towards the ground it aims at and missing, closer, closer, closer, feel vertigo.


Past: Jesse Benson at Michael Benevento

Monday, November 6, 2017

“On Half a Tank of Gas” at various locations in New Glarus, Wisconsin


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I wonder how many people came, I wonder how many stayed. I wonder what the people thought. I wonder if they felt it was an enriching cultural experience, I wonder if they had fun. I wonder if they talked about it afterwards. Did they laugh and later drink wine. Were they disquieted. Was the art, distinctly coalesced for this "Little Switzerland" town, only able to communicate nuance with a cultural context, finding Mike Kelly & Paul McCarthy's adaption of Joanna Spyri's most renowned Swiss novel, Heidi, and finding interest in the adaption's latent violence with characters as puppets for violent marionetting as revealing something instrinsic to it. Is the US's absurd level of interest in personal heritage, roots, DNA home testing kits hitting 2.6 billion$ market in 2014, assigning themselves sister cities, and "where your family is from" a cocktail question, is this interest undone by the fact that most contemporary artists today have little cultural heritage, besides the "international style" of Art, that contemporary artist implies the jettisoning of tradition besides the giant global one we conform to.



See too: “Work Hard” at Swiss Institute


Sunday, November 5, 2017

Julia Feyrer at Potts


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Celluloid is a glass projecting images, frames and films seen through, the screen need not necessarily be silver, images are already projected on all the substrate of our heads receiving them. We see ourselves reflected in an on, the world's contaminated surface, us, seen reflected.

Saturday, November 4, 2017

Keith Edmier at Friedrich Petzel


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Traditionally sensitivity isn’t emblazoned in high production's hard materials. Sensitivity is softness, not the fine detail of edges, resins, supermodels. The supermodel is, generally, not a thing of sensitivity, but violent eruption for complicated affinities, like Edimer's own relationship to precious romanticism, exemplified in Hainley's pop quiz from hell "20 Questions on Keith Edmier and Farrah Fawcett" leaves a sweating testee over multiple-choice: objects not complicit with categorical determination but manifold intakes:

"2. The best adjective to describe the overall effect of Keith Edmier and Farrah Fawcett, 2000, is:
a)Romantic
b)Ironic
c)Kitsch
d)Erotic
e)Sincere
f)Vexed"


See too: James Lee Byars at VeneKlasen/WernerSusan Cianciolo at Modern Art

Thursday, November 2, 2017

Anne Neukamp at Greta Meert


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Recognition is a visual strategy used by the advertorial (logo) or systems (icons) that has reached saturation with touchscreens, GUIs, facebook forums. Our brains, wired for recognition, are berated with this, icons forcing recognition of themselves. Painters begin adopting this as their history, the magrittean version of objects as linguistic symbols. These paintings delay the force of recognition as a palliative, lessening the slap of apprehension by averting it.



see too: Amanda Ross-Ho at The PitCharline von Heyl at Capitain Petzel, Charline von Heyl at Gisela Capitain, Richard Aldrich at Gladstone Gallery, Jana Euler at Galerie Neu & PortikusNina Beier at David Roberts Art FoundationEmily Mae Smith at Rodolphe Janssen,

Wednesday, November 1, 2017

Elaine Cameron-Weir at Hannah Hoffman


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Detail: Elaine Cameron-Weir, FOR MAKE ADMIT THIS VOIDE, 2017, Rubber jacket, leather, orthopedic jaw fixation hardware, stainless steel, amber

New Sex-assemblage - barnacling fetishes, totems, trends for the dental, bondage leather, medieval role-play. Accumulates objects operating sublingual, registers of the dog-whistle objects that affect all the tools of kink, advertisements, and Dwell, touch you in your feels, pseudo-witchcraft creating concoctions of objects emotional, touching us.


see too:  Camille Blatrix at WattisAjay Kurian at Rowhouse ProjectKatja Novitskova at Kunsthalle LissabonNairy Baghramian at Museo TamayoNairy Baghramian at Marian Goodman