Isa Genzken at Galerie Buchholz

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This exhibitions just smells of car showroom, huh. The point surely - the ellipsoids look like cars, liquid in time. 

Benjamin Buchloh criticized my ellipsoids for having too much content. He said to me, "You haven’t even understood Carl Andre yet." I said, "Of course I understand him. But I can hardly try to outdo Carl Andre." Of course, it was exactly this "content" that I wanted to bring back into the ellipsoids so that people would say, "It looks like a spear," or a toothpick, or a boat. This associative aspect was there from the very beginning and was also intentional, but from the viewpoint of Minimal art it was absolutely out of the question and simply not modern. 

See too: Isa Genzken

Mernet Larsen at James Cohan

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Low poly people, decidedly clear, in disorientating perspectives. The perspective always rigidly inscribed and then denied, aloft. That nauseous feeling is intentional. A painting that elicits seasick. We consider this modern.

Past: Isa Genzken

"To make one of those statements that art writers have tendency to make based upon an inflated assessment of their own opinion's import... Bruce Nauman has passed the torch of most influential living artist to Isa Genzken. It happened in field about 4 years prior as part of a much unpublicized ceremony 28 miles due south of Santa Fe. Without fanfare, neither artist even leaving their respective vehicle, handed through lowered windows, Nauman reported to have said "Best of it." The two made eye contact and somewhere off a small goose was made to fly along with several terse press releases from the agency that assess such matters. It was said that Genzken's speed finally attained escape velocity from the crushing gravitation of Nauman's iron mire."

"Genzken founded strategies rather than objects, an artistic down-shifting, a speed that could overtake. "the most influential living artist not because everything looks like it, but because it predicated a conglomerate speed absorbing any last vestiges of particular attention to individuated objects" i.e. When we see Genzken we react to the deployment or manipulation/alteration to its strategy, the means of attending the object rather than object itself. Weirdly deny the consumptive act of looking by permanently existing in a state of limbo.."

Past: Isa Genzken at David Zwirner, Isa Genzken at Institute of Contemporary Art, Isa Genzken at Hauser Wirth & Schimmel + Daniel Buchholz

 Past: Peter Fend

"Art has been co-opted for worse things than environmental boostering. Fend's utopic aspects seem nice if not necessarily utilitarian, but since when has art been confronted with actualities. Art is a space without expectations of internal success, of even internal logic. Fend is capable of a grin ... At best giving the boring problems of our coming environmental cataclysm at least ostensibly interesting solutions. ... ideas are less the feasible-solutions-for-actualization than they are acts of branding and dissemination, where being excited-for is itself the solution. Whether or not you feel excited is yours."

"It feels good to send out the rhetorical curses of the protest sign's curtness. ... How can one invest in getting Musk to stop? To take a break. How could we invest in shutting off the wheels for a day, and we could all go outside. The internet shuttered. The lights dimmed, the rare earths would stop being mined, iPhones depleting their charges, and the capital would be stored in whatever vaults they now use for dust. The fossils we burn as fuel could be temporarily cooled. We could stand blinkered at the sun we haven't seen. For a while, we could erect giant balloons, for the firefighters to watch the world be set afire. It feels good to take down, to erect fingers."

Read full: Peter Fend at Museo Nivola, Peter Fend at Embajada, Peter Fend at Essex Street

Chadwick Rantanen at STANDARD (OSLO)

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The PR opens with a scene of torture. And which, these are torturous objects. They are the cutoffs, the excess of standardized goods, the bits that exist because it is cheaper to produce excess and waste it than to produce exactly what is required. A quirk of capitalist efficiency, physical hiccups. They are waste, and this is upcycling from hell. This is trash into an agnostic crucifix, into a "devotional object," something the PR hints we may supplicate to... Which there is a read here that capitalism is religion (or god) and the waste is the new christ on the cross, sacrificed again and again for everyone's sins. But that smells bad - that's just appending symbology to make your fetish seem rational. Rantanen just seems to love torturing the stuf of capital. Pretend to asphyxiate it. These are a kink, and we don't shame for that.

See too: Chadwick Rantanen at Essex Street, “May the Bridges I Burn Light the Way” at STANDARD (OSLO), Chadwick Rantanen at Team (bungalow)

Past: Chadwick Rantanen

"...intentionally crafting kawaii critters to abuse in the circuits of his machinery. The gestures seem less absurd than frustrated, Rantanen's exacerbation of late-stage-capital's more aggressively abject objects. Self-inflicted. 

"The director of fetish "crush" films Jeff Valencia speaks of desiring to be the subject under the feet of the crusher, identifying with the object/animal being crushed."

Click for full: Chadwick Rantanen at Essex Street, “May the Bridges I Burn Light the Way” at STANDARD (OSLO), Chadwick Rantanen at Team (bungalow)

Alice Tippit at Nicelle Beauchene

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Ambiguity becomes the new force, rupturing our ability for exchangeable shared common experience, unsure whether you see a penis or if that’s just... So we get quiet. “What do you see” becomes a loaded question. The schoolgroup is led elsewhere. Nudity we can bear, it’s natural, but here the penis may be inside your head. The big red thing was a sunset always.

see too: Alice Tippit at Night Club

Past: Lena Henke

"...apparent in those like Henke for whom physical things act as moments of duplicity, locus for multiple apparencies... There is too many things to say about these things, ... their genericsm becomes strength. A low poly mesh provides metaphorical possibility [precisely because of] its low resolution. The harder it is to define things the larger their aqueous potential..."

"Ambiguousness as a means for the simultaneity of image, of surrealism. A tree sort of looks like a horse so we can put them together; a cloud can look like anything, much like a turd, some will see interest."

"Because the turd is a form morphing in a viewer. The dimensional Rorschach, the sculpture everyone makes to turn down and see themselves reflected in the water at, a picture of you for your interpretation. Even looking digested, worn at by smooth muscle of artistic intestine."


Click: Lena Henke at Bortolami Lena Henke at Kunstverein Braunschweig & Louise Bourgeois at Cheim and Read, Lena Henke at Kunsthalle Zürich,

Past: Alice Tippit at Night Club

"Between the anthropomorphic and the pareidolia is the seeing ghosts in images that contain a sort of liquid content, innuendo, form to the container-viewer"

See full: Alice Tippit at Night Club

Tatjana Valsang at Konrad Fischer

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because there is coldness at the heart of big beautiful dumb paintings, a thing that exists without us, the way rocks are fascinating and inhuman. Ostensibly art would be the human ability to create their own rocks, plinths, and means for, but it's still not human's, still not ours, it's still always some nebulous swirling thing that hints at being ours, aromas ours, but its not, its cold, inhuman, spiteful.

Howie Tsui at The Power Plant

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There's no actual video included but eventually institutions will provide so much documentation you'll can assemble the film yourself, frame by frame, just like the artist, fill the missing pieces with frog DNA, reading between the lines, enough lines, eventually document a blank screen to create your own projector, eventually you will be the artist.

Past: Pedro Wirz

"We all fear for lumps inside us, unchecked growth, a malignancy, 'matter out of place,' 'the contaminated diversities that proliferate in the dump.' Fear of toxins, poisons, heavy metal build-up, of heavy concentrations of micro-plastics in the great Pacific beverage, in parts per million, in tumors, cysts, bio-cucumlative, they add up in sediments in your blood, fat, balls, monuments, these fears into nervous objects, art."

Souvenirs of our demise!

Pedro Wirz at Longtang, Pedro Wirz at Marc Selwyn

Kim Jones at Bridget Donahue

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We, cargo cult, attempt to reassemble meaning in the wasteland, our culture. The artists become shamans, build totems, we look to them to create something that we could relate. Finding some lovely in the filth over here. Jones is proof that these inclinations are not recent trends, the muck has been around a long time, and the senselessness we attempt to coalesce otherwise in. Was going to say Jones is the missing link in lineage from Keinholz or Bruce Connor to the psychic mire of Rachel Harrison (the above was made somewhere between 1973-1999) - and then today's David Lieske and the Berlin ontologists - but you start to worry that artists are proleptic, that this is some time continuum goof, because while Jones is obviously working out some trauma of his time in Vietnam, unfortunately, trauma is intergenerational, actually encodes itself in DNA, at least in rodents, which Jones has a uncomfortable history with. So it tends to reappear. And you worry it will in the future. Heading towards mud.

Shannon Cartier Lucy at Hussenot

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Painting is a cultural structure such that painting's prize is "what it is about." Rather than creating meaning within a culture, the object itself is said to mean. Whether it's painting containing "truth" or a mysterious set of eyes that follow you, there is something to be unlocked, understood. There is something to be won. This is the belief. Even the hardest attempts to slap the viewer with just fucking looking at the thing are always already subverted into questions of what this visceral slap means. Painting begins to be prized not for painting but for this mystery. And a mystery, should it not spoil itself, cannot tell you its answer. A mystery instead must load its objects with intent, clues, an ambrosia of noir, an affect of meaning. Thus the puzzification of painting. Symbolist clue boards. "Colonel Rublev in the museum with a candlestick"

See too: Matte Representation, Mathew Cerletty

Mariana Castillo Deball at Modern Art Oxford

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Devices for the torturing of craft, a carousel for flaying, spread it open, craft wounded and open for art "interrogation." The fine line between torturing to gather truth, or just enjoy distribution of pain. Fucking the "kill hole" over and over, no longer useful, just a beautiful bloody mess. 

See too: Chadwick Rantanen at Secession

Eleonore Koch at Modern Art

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An almost modernist press release - understated, distant - a life scraped, condensed.  And paintings like de Chirico meets Goodnight Moon - emptiness at twilight. Stilted. A world barren, devoid. In the absence of god we, painting, look to make things mean. Because the abyss is worse. Which these paintings dangle objects over - so latch onto them, find something to mean in them, because otherwise it's waste. 

The Wasteland: Gertrude Abercrombie at Karma, Alexandra Noel at Freedman Fitzpatrick, Atlantis, Adrian Morris at Galerie Neu

Bradley Davies at Clages

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Cartoon pastoral peasantry, and the like. An ever so slight hallucination.

Tyler Vlahovich at Lulu and Marc Selwyn

(Lulu, Marc Selwyn)

...perhaps impressive deftly avoiding any specific painting reference - not quite any particular - but being obviously loaded with it... Kaledioscopes of image that sift though. They accumulate reference and abandon it, as if the abstraction of reality wasn't enough, we're abstracting the abstraction. ... seems to have something to do with our current phantasmagoria. On a day of images. The battle for who controls the fantasy.

Past: Bri Williams at Interface

What a time for an exhibition about soap. Soap we consider clean but we wouldn't want to touch a bar found on the floor of a public shower. If I covered you in lye, your body would turn to soap, a simple process of an alkaline solution mixing with fatty tissues. Your body itself is barely not-soap, and soap opens your body to becoming not body, cleanses you by blurring self with soap, which goes down the drain..."

Read full: Bri Williams at Interface

Philip Guston at Hauser & Wirth

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That belabored plodding brushwork that conjures and sediments its act, painting - the stress and sweat of it. You can practically see the anxiety in the glass of it. Which is why everyone been so thievery with Guston - at a moment when self-consciousness in painting was hot (the Krebber vs Barre 2008 World Championship moment) - people were looking for ways to display that anxious hesitation and still have their painting too. Guston had self-consciousness, and painting, in spades. Thus a corpse was looted. And we looked at goopy tenuous abstraction for 5 years until someone invented a figure again and everyone lost consciousness again and now here we are. Guston again.

Anyway someone should really curate an exhibition of Guston's early pre-abstract figurative work, the real de Chirico meets Ensor moody mirror shit. That's the rare stuff, give us that stuff. 

Frida Orupabo at KOENIG2 by_robbygreif

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Better than most instagrams curating an [a e s t h e t i c] - Orupabo's @nemiepeba seems actually haunted, everything pulled from lead or poisoned. The trend for a "cursed aesthetic" usually provides the relief of first world absurdity - Wonderbread loaves smeared Crest toothpaste, at the bottom of a pool - allowing both the balm of capitalist recognition and absurdity. Orupabo's curse, lacking the palliative of small humor, instead threatens misrecognition and loss (the subjects always on that cusp of being blown out, periphery, but most importantly frozen - almost embalmed) and the relief valve long lost. Which feels like true curse, hints at the actual possibility of a curse carried.

The difficulty of transferring the accumulative/sifting force of Instagram to a gallery is obvious, and Orupabo's seem like attempts at a medical and forensics means to make something of them.

This seems less an exorcism than an attempt to wire the instagram force of the punctum into the extended life of the studium. To ask us to do something with these images that while affective we pass through with an ease. Into the ashes we pretend is "history." There's something Frankensteinian about it, electrifying it to dance over and over, not allowing to pass into death. Make it do it again. Make it haunt. 

202-

 So what happened this year. 

Painting got worse. The techno-conceptual gasped its dying crescendo of interest - but likely not money -in lavish SciFi fantasy film sets sprawling across gallery floors - Matthew Barney excess without its libidinal bucket. (This will probably get worse.) The bodily lumpen material thing continued its trench. Jordan Wolfson didn't release anything interesting. Pantone colors still reign in young painting - Duplo colors in adult.  Painting continues to treat bodies as rebar, maybe more-so. (Atomically correct would look refreshing.) We continued rearranging our museums to pretend they were like this all along. "Better late than never" became the only phrase we could scrape together. Still couldn't muster that often. Petzel gave a solo show to a black artist for the first time in their 25 years? (Still can't believe this is true, is this true?)  Teenage bedroom motifs still an undercurrent not quite peaking and poor Rob Pruitt. I thought about Park McArthur's foam a lot. "Online viewing room" an immediately stale punchline, people saying it with straight face insulting, serving it like we'd continue to love gruel. Art publications all too happy to repeat it. Everyone immediately bored with it, digital fairs just like why - Essex Street said something like "no limits on space, size, or shipping, and this is what we get?" The most transgressive art continues to be photos of Kanye. (This is fine.) Ser Serpas. More documentation of people wearing VR gear, lol. Paintings like Tarot cards on an iPad, still. Zwirner's PR for Josh Smith's rooftop won the award for full self-ass-suck. Trevor Shimizu started making pretty paintings, instead of kitty coprophagia. Salman Toor today, so Salman Toor tomorrow. I can't tell if neo-primitiv-animism is on the way out or way in.  Less surrealism, but still way too much. Everything boring in comparison to the news, like an eclipse, and art like roaches scrambling in confusion to exposure. 

Past: Jacqueline Humphries

"so Humphries' drip, brushstroke, mark, neither expressive nor quotational of expression, paint is instead already perfectly dumb. This separates them from the hordes of zombies: no search for brains. 

"The thin distinction from the song and dance of all those other abstractionists is that the well worn jazz hands of "expression" aren't, for Humphries, totally choreographed yet by Dr. Frankenstein... the corpse may have its fluids replaced in technicolor, paraded around in chromes and newfangled chemiluminescence ... not just silver paint but making the silver paint shine like candied yams."

"the more vulgar excesses of Humphries's paint always excused by its obliviousness to the demands of "making a painting." Humphries's almost without-composition but still composed, paintings like an accident, car or bed sheet."

"Instead the cannibal-without-purpose seems pleasant after so many decades of painting's conceptual juicing."

Click for full:Jacqueline Humphries at Modern Art, Jacqueline Humphries at Carnegie Museum of Art