Gay Outlaw, Helen Mirra, ﾠﾠﾠﾠﾠﾠﾠﾠﾠ at soda, Kyoto

(link)

The question of "what does this mean?" is replaced with, "what am I looking at?" An ostensible glitch in the visibility production machine. The above - guessed to be an - Ian Rosen project gotten more baroque, a mutation, succeededon the demands of infection, the host CAD. Which is where our previous golf metaphor breaks down. The putt was sunk. Admittedly in today's news real success is transmission. (Sanchez et al.) There's very little to 'gram. Surely the point. Whereas it had been that sinking your art into good gallery placement was key to the laurels - something the Rosen project had been surely adept at - this is no longer the ultimate conditions of art. “what had been a process of legitimation, attributable to particular institutions or critical bodies, now becomes a process of simple visibility, attributable to the media apparatus itself.” Accreditation today looks more like JoshSmith/Kardashian spamming yourself into cultural consciousness. "Fame is only predicated on sight, not value: eventually a critical mass of people know you and then you are famous." If we're unsure what we're looking at the machine can't transmit. This where we're teed up for the art writers' questionable duty, to answer for the question, the point. But we renege. We're left holding a glitch, a hole. Containing a golf ball.

See too:  Ian Rosen, Nandi Loaf at King’s Leap, Sophie Nys at Crac Alsace

Christopher Knowles at Bridget Donahue

(link)

If Knowles had gotten famous back then we could have entirely prevented Jonas Wood. Possibly several others. An artworld revolving around paint rather than ideas. 

Motoyuki Daifu at Misako & Rosen

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An odd fact that we let dogs piss all over the world. It's, like, totally cool. "It will rain someday," thinks the dog owner, letting god take the reins on this mess. Dogs emit the color of hazard, signaling their species' - on the whole - dehydration. 

But here the artist splashed water - it's not pee - which, I don't know, I guess complicates it something. The Pollockian waypoint: dribbled abstraction and marking Guggenheim property, your territory, drunkenly, yelling "I am nature" to the policeman explaining, "you can't pee here, Pollock, dog."

Past: Susan Cianciolo

"...Your touch leaves a mark, sews a patch, you reproduce yourself in the objects you attend. Preciousness in warm cardboard, wearing touch, eroding to someone.."

click here for full: Susan Cianciolo at Modern Art, Yellow Archive

Sophie Giraux at Etablissement d’en face

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Art becomes affect tunnels. This one goes warm, the next one goes cold. You standard repetition-as-desensitization chamber. Under the Leckyian bridge. Or in the next room cuteness, rubberized. That we are asked to process. Art is always asking us to process. We lift its chaos like weight, to get stronger, a more resilient muscle at its tinkering your head. 

Major theme in current art: Desensitization, corruptive affect. "the diminished emotional responsiveness to a stimulus after repeated exposure to it. It also occurs when an emotional response is repeatedly evoked in situations in which the action tendency that is associated with the emotion proves irrelevant or unnecessary."

see too: Zak Kitnick at Clearing, Morag Keil at Real Fine Arts, Desensitization

Astrology

 "Astrology like tarot cards finds alliance with art since the artwork has mutated to be less an object of beauty than a fount for interpretation. Art having gone from object to oracle. The point of art begins to be setting the spheres to rotate so they may occasionally align, a machine for semio-recombination we could call meaning. Artists become not merely the recombinators of signs, but the producers of machines to do this, to be turned to on, set to run. Endless interpretability becomes their function. This is art, possibly. "

"your level of trust in the celestially telling matters less than the overall strategy: turning an artwork to an interpretable state and blinking, tea leaf divination in sporty Vegas-odds inkblots. We're primed to see meaning in information, in art, particularly when so bright and shiny, and thus here's lots to be said about these works, interpretation to be done, they'll pour forth all you are willing to extract from them. Perfect analysands. Like the wacky inflatable arm man drawing eyes to dealerships, Arakawa understands the qualifiers for "art," performing them with wacky panache, theatricalizing the artwork as a caricature of attention, art played to show its now quite standardized set of rules."

Astrology: Ei Arakawa at Kunstverein Dusseldorf, “Hecate” at Various Small Fires

Tarot too: Juliette Blightman & Dorothy Iannone at Arcadia Missa, Caitlin Keogh at Bortolami 

Saturn at Vigo

(link)

Burst Pants? Posted on Christmas Eve? 👀

Rachel Harrison at Galerie Meyer Kainer

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An information processing app asked to process our world. The premise reasonable. The results are deeply midcareer. Literal. Instead of a Terminator HUD, we get a generalized mess, abstraction. Harrison has a struggle, recompressing the diamonds after the explosion of her star, the mall, our world. But every group show looks like you blew up a mall today. Harrison's influence is prevalent. CAWD has written more about her mostly through other artists. Her work explains a lot of other artists. Our exploded semio-wasteland. We're all just garbage pickers now in Harrison's ruin, even Harrison. A trash become good god. 

Past: Rachel Harrison

"The hipster too was a semio-naut; whose careful balance of fashion’s signs were an additive and appropriative construction of appearance and identity, a careful facade of references, and so the concurrent rise of Rachel Harrison [with the hipster] makes symptomatic sense for its ability to thematize semio-collapse and short-circuits in a way that was jokey, pranksterish and light relief against undeconstructable-tuber confusion of “the real” having really ascended into code that both Harrison and Hipsters were obviously responding.

Condensing the mall into the diamonds of its peak 2006-08 moment we have to admit it was a pretty neat trick, the things just felt like collapse within singular objects.

The fallout of [this] semiotic manicism/collapse/supernova, of the 00’s assemblage (Harrison, Genzken, Pernice et al) and the exploding of Unmonumental’s detritus, left the next generation picking cultural rubble. Artists became post-apocalyptic cargo-cult, artists, still wanting to believe, began to reassemble totems of cultural meaning. Staedelschulites rehashing a form of ready-made-marxist-surrealism, societie's tchotchkies made to “speak” the tongues of the Invisible Hand, worship of gods who must be crazy. Post-Lieske - the real rabble of Neue Alte Brucke, Pro-Choice, etc. - Ceccaldi, Yngve Holen and everyone else - rearranging/collaging/juxtaposing the signs of capital as some sort of anti-altar to them - the whole "arrangements" phenomenon, tableaus of cultural artifacts, seen again and again and again on the rugs of art fairs everywhere - finally hitting bedrock in the strip-mine of Darren Bader just arranging capital’s objects on the floor."

Rachel Harrison at Whitney Museum, Rachel Harrison at Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler

Past: Amy Sillman

"...the way fetuses are ugly, there's not enough drawing to hold the shape nor body to give it viscera... that newborn quality of looking like pink pencil erasers...  A confusion of painting and drawing"

"A tragic affair collectors seek "signature" pieces, [...] requiring the artist already having a signature and thus emptied of its origination, adolescence, nubility and becoming etc, that Sillmans work, generally, seems about... "


Amy Sillman at Sikkema Jenkins, Amy Sillman at Kunsthaus Bregenz, Amy Sillman at The Arts Club of Chicago

Tomm El-Saieh at Luhring Augustine

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We keep repackaging old things. Finding new ways to get it. Nostalgia is so powerful. The Marvelverse reboots like the Artworld a canon. Even if Schjeldahl is correct that these might be best in show. As galleries onboard difference it's a sensitive fact the chosen are generally working in a language that "fits the program," looks the part, variations on the "universal language" that buyers might find familiar. Now, certainly this is the language the galleries know, ostensibly wield expertise, not necessarily trusted judging Haitian Vodou, but it should be noted that El-Saieh is curating them into view, Myrlande Constant for instance, but we're just not seeing it here. 

Past: Thomas Eggerer

"The painting’s tension exists in whether or not Eggerer cares about his subject matter. Richter may have shown care for his but then masochistically bled it, and as this cold blood trickled down, through Tuymans and Sasnal, it finally reaches the ambivalence of Eggerer’s young men as vessels."


Thomas Eggerer at Friedrich Petzel, Thomas Eggerer at Richard Telles

 Past: Bill Lynch

"...but believe that these are perfectly honest, earnest, miraculous paintings, as if untouched by human crappiness, whether or not its true and which we can’t know..."

"... brushstrokes with a tendency not to touch, distinct and fragmentary, the paintings continuously coalescing rather than any rigid stasis, like particles exploded on their mean free path to collision and the cups ready to slip from their plates."

Bill Lynch at Tanya Leighton, Bill Lynch at White Columns

Mira Dancy at Chapter NY

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The Futurists is female? Returning a style with more acceptable copy. The Futurists are cancelled right? So something needs to take its place.  "You put the referent in the shredder to make a puzzle appear. Which looks like a painting."

Art in America, Alina Cohen, 2017: "Countless styles of NASTY WOMAN T-shirts, a Secret deodorant campaign focusing on women’s work-related stress, over four thousand results when you search for “feminist buttons” on Etsy—the evidence abounds that consumerism and feminism are more deeply entwined than ever. Brooklyn-based artist Mira Dancy’s recent exhibition of paintings, neon signs, and works on paper—which spanned Chapter NY’s two Lower East Side spaces—fit squarely into this entanglement."

See too: Anna Ostoya at Bortolami

"the 19th century's joke was painting faces positioned next to flowers and 20th century's joke was painting a face like it was flowers. Now what? A face is just the putty we rearrange in hopes of arranging something like meaning. An endless mine to profit from, our faces. Something we can pump."

Leave our faces alone. Be nice to our faces. Be tender. Love them. Like a mother would. Stop expelling on them, peeling them, colorful horror on them. At one end of culture we've got advertising turning us all into real dolls, and the experimental end turning us into polychrome wreckage. I want to feel like I have something worth more than torture attached to me.  I want the painting equivalent to wearing sunscreen, to eating a banana, to staying out of the light.

Past: Kaoru Arima

"Brutalization ... human features bludgeoned to bloom bruise bouquets, or apply rictus like geometries, portraits of a stroke. On and on painters rushing to do injustice to portraits.  It became a joke...  potatoes exclaiming, “Hey look at me, I’m Picasso.""

"...We find its horror almost playful, cute, even interesting, a learned tolerance for pain."

Read full: Kaoru Arima at Misako & Rosen, Kaoru Arima at Queer Thoughts

 Past: Sylvie Fleury 

“Fleury suggests art can be liberated from its reliance on constant innovation and complex physical formulation and relax instead into a sort of ne plus ultra of laissez faire 'whateverism' which ups the ante on American 'Slacker' culture’s aesthetics of resignation.”
-Adrian Dannatt

read: Sylvie Fleury at Karma International, Sylvie Fleury at Karma

Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg at Gio Marconi

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Getting tired of flower art, all seeming to do the same thing, excess excused. Flowers are their dramatic overage, that's the point, they're sex on a stick. The more pornography the better, when it comes to flowers, there's fields of it, empty like porn. "an orgy of saccharine beauty." So they drip and spray and amass color and form as no other object could handle. You wouldn't do this to your mother's face. But flowers take it. An object absorbing all artistic abuse.

Flowers: “Miranda” at Anat Ebgi & “A Change of Heart” at Hannah Hoffman, Willem de Rooij at Arnolfini,  Tom Allen at Chris Sharp Gallery, Tom Allen at Air de Paris, Tom Allen at Lulu, 

Past: Max Hooper Schneider

"Well these sure make our ecological collapse seem beautiful. It surely won't be this ornamented to us. "

"the Chuck-E-Cheese Animtronics begin horribly signing a new dystopian that is lush."

Read full: Max Hooper Schneider at Jenny’s, Max Hooper Schneider at High Art

Monika Stricker at dépendance

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This is the second time we've reviewed excellent paintings of nutsacks. (Is there something about today that makes testicles right?) Whereas the last painting was an exotic gum, these paintings are soft creatures -  Stricker can turn a nutsack into a malignant growth. This would seem obvious or easy - the thing is an alien enough gum - but her nutsacks are like the baby in Eraserhead, there's an uncomfortable paternity. Occasionally even looks like a crowning child, the penis removed entirely, and the bulb swells. A monstrous sex, and painting a strange care for the creature.

see too: “De Por Vida” at Company Gallery

Nancy Rubins at Rhona Hoffman Gallery

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Nancy Lupo noted in a PR that MOCA's Nancy Rubins sculpture, located in the plaza, had become a bird hotel. The cleaning fees likely astronomical. Lupo's proposed plaza sculpture, a bench to feed the pigeons, was rejected by the museum, sadly. But all I can think of is Rubins being bird houses. Machines to amass pigeon shit. Beautiful nests for sky rats. It's hard to return from the thought. There's a long history of artists deterritorializing the previous generation, like David Hammons' pissing on Serra. Tom Burr's cruising spot Serra. Or the kids you find using Serra as hideouts to smoke pot. Punctures the artistic bloat. Return the public sculpture to the ecosystem of the urban, wasp and orchid. A sort of embrace as ruin. Alter myth.

Eliza Douglas at Neue Alte Brücke

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The setting as the halo, the performance as the backer to the souvenir. Literally. Swirl the cultural object. "appends the abstraction we want, that we associate with painting while giving the value of the photographic, the 'abstraction' performs the work of 'art'. ...the mechanistic process of reproduction doesn't ruin it." The symbolic processes of art become literal, literalification.

Is all art just twirling culture into composition? to make it mean as art? Finding the twist you like?

See too: Eliza Douglas, Calida Rawles at Various Small Fires, 

 

Pippa Garner at JOAN

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Garner's parodic invention seems dark. Invention becomes the lash of capital, the driving force - internalized as self-flagellation, forced to invent, the jester marionette. Even Garner's description of gender transition is less dysmorphia than novelty, something to try, something new. The [novelty] artists are shackled to, forced to seek, find, commit themselves.  Invention becomes survival, requires our renewal continuously, Sisyphean, invention a plea, please, allow my survival, make me interesting.

Haena Yoo at Murmurs

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Rhoades' pearoefoam was brilliant in its mockery of art mythification. The "factory of art" became actual factory, cartoonifing the symbolic conveyor belt, the transubstantiating of stupid object. The fact that it worked, that the objects became highly sought after art, was twice the fun. The above similarly mocks the potion-izing of certain essences, identities, importances. The things we put in the potion to make Aura. Press Releases or dolphin tongue, everyone has their own secret sauce. Which, like Rhoades, would be a joke if it didn't work so well. I mean you have artists today selling actual magic potions - wondering a question of what's the difference. Secret sauce is to taste.

See too: Masaya Chiba at Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery, James Lee Byars at VeneKlasen/Werner

Monika Baer Am Rhein Kunsthalle Bern

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The small shock of a joke, just enough, a surprise to the viewer befuddled. A balancing act: not too much be rejected as random, but just enough to be comedy. Painting was long ago converted to interface, an conscious interaction between painter viewer. Painter has the mic. The surprise is fun, funny, played for laughs in the deadpan space of art. 

See too: Monika Baer at Neuer Berliner Kunstverein

Past: Monika Baer

"Baer playing her own game of painting, our fun is figuring out the rules. There are many ways to play [...] Pleasures are denied and reinstated, the picture plane is mocked with cartoonified sweat but open to atmosphere, the viewer is asked to look in only to be pressed out by a little turd. I'm not sure how you win."


Read full: Monika Baer at Neuer Berliner Kunstverein

Julio Le Parc at Maison Hermes Le Forum

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This same artwork appeared on CAD exactly 10 years ago. The above is today, the below yesterday. There is probably nothing to be made from this info, from the difference, but you could. 

Ed Atkins at Sant'Andrea de Scaphis

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"...We continued to live through a distancing world held increasingly close, more finely detailed, not so much nuanced as mictorized: microscopically huge, a memory that was infinite, thoughts reappeared haunting you from underground server vaults, friends since ghosted returned with body supplements. Viral punishment: forever indoors. Forever asked to participate in the rooms where you could be viewed, thumbed, generally commented on. Like suddenly everyone is an artist inviting anonymous critics. A person we liked less you than her. Every teenager learned numbers/statistics by an emotional battery. The bodies got online, got ever more perfect and you got ever more, well, [blistery]."

CAWD wrote the exhibition texts, you can find them here, hosted by CAD.

see too: Ed Atkins

Tom Allen at Chris Sharp Gallery

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Don't tell me that brick wall isn't about to embroider a sphincter, navel, fistula between. Perfumed sexual flora otherwise soured on anus. Don't let them fool you, that's a butthole. A Google deep dream of. Pants opening reveal. Don't let them tell you otherwise, don't let them be coy, saying the asshole-like-an-opinion is in you, everyone's got one, this one is yours, abating ruined meaning, its not true, that is a butthole, next to a flora, next to an entrance, in an opening, a cleft of meaning, and I'm telling you yours is this.

Past: Tom Allen

"Flowers ...the Vegas sign advertising sex and nectar to bees, birds. What did Zizek say about tulips, 'an open invitation to "Come and screw me."'... this crass evolutionary productivity ... 'the lowest of the genres' gaming the system with hardwired desire. ...what artist has ever been above cheating? Flowers are an experimental-constant through which an artist may perform tortures on a cultural concept of beauty...

"...more Berghain than cottagecore - to paraphrase the press release. The pleasure here seems in twisting the dial to the humming point between saccharine pleasure and spoiled overripeness - between day and night - a painting your mother 'likes' with uncertainty... pleasure in this sweet spot hum."

"Tastes change however, but let these be a marker of 2020s - that this was the edge, the waver between sickness and wealth. Painting as stakes planted, this was the limit. So if you start to love these, see how far we've moved."

Tom Allen at Lulu, Tom Allen at Air de Paris

Israel Aten at What Pipeline

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Our childhood figures of action, action figures, painters, seminal spray webs from wrist, paint from sabres - blur together literally, figuratively. Arms dripping musculature of paint. Linework delineate form and forearm, masturbating, spraying Herculean abdomens, Doryphorian sixpacks, statues now with battle damage! a Kouros spiderman, carved lionman, power figures nailed wood, gods of the old style, men in the new style, a sistine God who benched heavy touched man. History's palimpsest of juggernauts Zeus to Antman, a framework to hang paint, "masculinity."

Ibon Aranberri at fluent & Joseph Kusendila at Essex Street

(fluent, Essex)

A visual homology, empty displays, technical drawings, broken wood. Bones we could contrast and compare through ancestry. Or look to the future, the takeaway is, against the visual overload, there is a turn to an emptiness we find appealing, and competing visual cultures move toward symbiosis. Visual art an extension of sexual selection, plumage, or the ability to lay waste to, handicap theory. "honest signals" "authentic art". Move from a sociologic read of art to a biological one, a funnily fertile metaphors. 

Raqs Media Collective at Kunstverein Braunschweig

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Art that always sorta looks like a brand launch. An IPO party. You're not quite sure that the media company does, but the brand is built, swirled, holds feelings. The aimless affect spins. Maybe all art is a brand launch for what promise might harbor. Profits don't matter, what matters today is the excitement it can be made something great tomorrow. Buzz.

Past: Bri Williams

"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, Bri Williams at Queer Thoughts

Jordan Casteel at MASSIMODECARLO

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Totally fine paintings, everything plain, explicitly about what they're about, a direct representation. They're a product for which most museums, fashion mags, genius lists, are in dire need. And the press releases actually temper the gold that they have. A pearl too large for anything good. Jealous neighbors whisper, trackers follow for market value, the little coyote dies in the tumult. The script written by a white man. The gem comes with peanut gallery critique, that this is its "moment," that eventually fashion passes, and everyone holding bag of passé pearls. (As if the last twelve "intellectual" movements haven't been.) But by this time they will be in the halls, spaces previously occupied by shadows, tidal floods reroute the river, and we learn to respect collected water. 

Reynaldo Rivera at Reena Spaulings Fine Art

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Documentation awaiting its documentary. Its context, life, backfilled into it. You feel it when the reviewer recommends the catalog. The loss. The ruins of a once beautiful citizenry. We now vampire. Not only its pain, but its life too, brought to cold hands of art's Wunderkammer. "Dominant culture lays the concrete of its social conditions, proclaims 'look a dandelion has grown,' hangs its photo in our halls as testament to humanity. But it can seem like a testament to the concrete." I'm not sure who is at fault here, no one really, I guess life should be bottled, the only way to continue ours. 

See too: Alvin Baltrop at Hannah Hoffman, Peter Hujar at Maureen Paley

 Past: Sophie Reinhold at Sundogs

"Unsure how fun it is to watch someone melt into a bubble bath."

Full: Sophie Reinhold at Sundogs

Naoki Sutter-Shudo at Crèvecoeur

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The trinket functions like a flower, a desirous other, holding some promise. We don't know what it is for, but it feels for something. The flower was beautiful before we knew its sexual radish. A promise on its lips. "the fantasy of [function], that thing that serves us. Of course something erotic about that. A table accepts your feet on it, the meat grinder barfs sausage by the mile, generates. A complaint-less subservience, erotic." An object that gestures its need, its promise for, with wet eyes blinking.

See too: Matt Paweski at Park View/Paul Soto, Naoki Sutter-Shudo at Bodega (1), Naoki Sutter-Shudo at Bodega (2)

 Past: Pamela Rosenkranz

"...[Rosenkranz's] substances are often fictional, and Anemine appears an artistic bruhaha in a long line of "doctors" with liminal connections to good medicine ...  So long the as the promotion outspeeds due diligence the product will remain valid. And they are fun to say: NeuroSafe, Anthroplex, Brain Safe, Myco-ZX, TB12, Super Male Vitality, medical leeches, ... "gives consumers a sensation of security: the less they understand the terms used to describe the product, the more reliable it seems, because it's at the cutting edge of technology." ... everything there for a real good narrative."

"As ostensible critique of pharmaceutical, technological and advertorial strategies, Rosenkranz instead deploys them to great affect in art, using their strategies in consolidating attention and maintaining lure over the viewer."

Pamela Rosenkranz at Karma International(2), Pamela Rosenkranz at Karma International(1)

Takako Yamaguchi at Ramiken Crucible

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Setting aside the Domenico Gnoli question for the present, there is something continuously robust in the breast of your facade. Blank and interpretable. Art fount. We turn identity into inkblot. 

Issy Wood at Carlos/Ishikawa

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Lost in the glass of virtualization, surface itself become artifact. Becomes the valuable relic. Do you get it? Touch is lost, becomes pornography, feeling through image. It makes sense, Wood, a cataloger of surface matte, already a year ago described with phrases like, "rising" "growing rapidly" "up-and-coming talent" while these thing plummet - we want what is lost, or more importantly, about to be. Nostalgia for the current. 

Also lol at the model standing 6 inches from the wall.

See too: Matte Representation

Dawn Williams Boyd at Dodd Galleries at the University of Georgia

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Explicitly religious, overtly narrative, even the lighting/photography doesn't have the contemporary virtuality. And this little fear that these, unfit, are scrolled through as "inclusion" - as the logic that explains it. The indiscriminate napalm of explanation. This while every NYC gallery attempts to revise its roster with 20 somethings that "fit the program." Which is the paradox of visibility. The things that don't fit the program, don't fit the program. Because the program of scatalogic seminal male nappies is prestigious. Instead a great pair of tits called Nurture.

Robert Kulisek at VI, VII

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In the sky, written overhead by plane, "Leave the youth alone. Stop extracting their joy to be sold like a vampire pleasure for vaults. Youth is not some fount to be bottled. Youth is not wasted on the young, attempts to preserve it the cold hands of those knowing is. A canned and brined youth. Advertorial youth. Youth to sell perfume. Youth to be enjoyed as youth is not youth. Put your plastic bottling devices down. There is no fount here, only cold hands."

John Giorno at Almine Rech

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Words given oomph, pain, the racket of advertising on poem phrases, hijacking your attention less as an ad than a koan-like image, "chrysanthemum and skulls," in graphic megaphone. "Lots of artists like to put phrases on signs, do it in a similar way. A particularly satisfying gesture: language, propelled with advertorial oomph, instead deadpans with its empty cymbal crash; understand the words but, devoid of context feel a little haunted, disembodied, ghosts of something far."  The generalized airiness of poety instead at 11. Shouting a phrase that echoes empty in your head. It's nicer to have strange image ringing in your ears than some ad slogan selling weiners in a jingle. Less the ideology of LIVE LAUGH LOVE and more the crush of screaming listless image.

see too: Matt Keegan, Kay Rosen at Grazer Kunstverein, Hanne Lippard & Nora Turato at Metro Pictures, Gene Beery at Shoot the Lobster, Karl Holmqvist at Sant’Andrea de Scaphis,

Raimer Jochims at Jacky Strenz

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Like rock tumbler jeweling its stones, Jochims smoothes his. A simple process, wiping away the rough, a polish, revealing pools. Dumb rocks become gems. Why we like polished rocks, that is a good question.

See too: Raimer Jochims at Jacky Strenz (1), Raimer Jochims at Jacky Strenz (2), Raimer Jochims at Jacky Strenz (3) 

Billboards at Joy Seine-Saint-Denis

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The art billboard ostensibly reclaims space from the commercial commandeering of your senses, to return to some more mythically "creative" or "beautiful" use. This is the classic "poetic fissuring" of art. And Gonzalez-Torres's billboards were pinnacle art billboards, performing the usual art thing of reneging on the advertorial demand to shout something, and instead using the usual artistic silence as its loss, an empty bed, a space for your own private thoughts, the missing partner, communication, just you to project you own on white sheets. 

 Past: Gina Beavers

"Appending painting the body it both does and does not want. Inflating it to bulbousness, we want body but we want it sleek and slim for transaction, shipping, but here we find painting's brushwork metastasized and images become their nightmare: embodied. "How to achieve a flawless look with NO CAKE FACE."

Read all: Gina Beavers

Past: Diamond Stingily

"...forever ambiguous until looked upon which like the quantum cat's vitals inside a box, a physical attribute achieves a superposition in culture, a sort of walking contradiction as a symbol of power at the same time it leaves open the wound for the bitter slight, Becky with the good hair.'"


Diamond Stingily at Queer Thoughts, Diamond Stingily at Freedman Fitzpatrick, Diamond Stingily at Wattis

Hanna Hur at Kristina Kite Gallery

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Perception is individual, it is not art's usual shared image/object. Instead almost non-transactable. Possibly what Majoli means when saying "If our survival is tied to the capacity to perceive stability, vulnerability is made apparent at the root of--caused by our sense of sight." Because the optical instead flights. The realm of the biological, the immanent instead of the transcendent. Eye test patterns instead of television. 

See too: Hanna Hur at Feuilleton

 Past: Hanna Hur at Feuilleton

"Op-art was a cheap imitation of the purer form's sanctity; Op-art rested on physiologic parlor tricks rather than the more strict and thus universal forms of abstraction that could [ostensibly] communicate with dolphins and gods."

 full: Hanna Hur at Feuilleton

Past: Jay Chung and Q Takeki Maeda

"In the smoke of Matias Faldbakken's rocketship ascendancy the artworld was left blind scrambling to adhere a politic for it, to make a critical foundation for the artworld's hot new power iconography, unable to accept that how it looked, rather than any little content it contained, was its appeal. ... Issues of interest for Jay Chung and Q Takeki Maeda, ..."

"Artists continually forcing a reading between the lines they force distinctly apart. So that the blank white space feels ominous and full, like a detective novel... Jay Chung & Q Takeki Maeda adept at objects in aura of evidence or clues..."

"Making interpretation a matter of delicacy."

"It is like a cliche in reverse, watch it be structured, maintained."

Full: Jay Chung & Q Takeki Maeda at Essex Street

Jay Chung & Q Takeki Maeda at House of Gaga

Jay Chung and Q Takeki Maeda at Francesca Pia
Jay Chung & Q Takeki Maeda at 356 Mission

Past: Tomma Abts

"That despite Zwirner’s PR qualifying Abts as “continuously explor[ing] the activity of painting,” and not simply “painting” like a Neanderthal, Abts is a painter, and, since we’ve long forgotten how to speak about “dumb” painting, everyone instead argues why these aren’t, and instead speak of an “emotional rationality” and “anything but expressionist,” spreading pesticides against the fear of the subject reappearing like selves in the mirror.

"The pleasure of Abts’s paintings is that of origami, or well constructed puzzle, like setting a good corner in New Mexico pasture, solving simply its own internal puzzling, like shaker furniture, a clever construction in a protestant like satisfaction of a few-frills job completed."

"a triumph of deafness, buckling-down to the same task endlessly, slowly, stubbornly insisting on the cobwebbed autonomy of painting long ago cut and bled out."

Read full: Tomma Abts at David Zwirner, Tomma Abts at greengrassi, Tomma Abts at The Art Institute of Chicago

Greg Parma Smith at Galerie Francesca Pia

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Faceting jewels of symbols in cultural stone, painting, to attribute the glyphs a more meaningful nonsense. This is what painting is, a burning of effort, an expenditure of culture, to ordain the halo on cherubic vessels, whatever vogue angel. The potato chip company values their crisp by turning the packaging auburn, the natural halo, this is moral. The painter asks for investment in his through something else, but it is also moral. The cultural search for taste, gems in the temple. 

Past: Shannon Cartier Lucy at Hussenot 

"... painting's prize is "what it is about." ... there is something to be unlocked, understood. There is something to be won. This is the belief. ... Painting begins to be prized not for painting but for this mystery. And a mystery 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...."

Full: Shannon Cartier Lucy at Hussenot 

Brook Hsu at Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler

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"Monochromes denied the pleasure of painting," someone once said to me. And Hsu's are like looking at a museum through Heineken bottles to deny the pleasure of the world. Turns out the world is still pretty good. And this chromatic loss only instead heightens desire, want for the full spectral ecstasy, denied in your beer-glassed body. Maybe this is what Homer meant by a wine dark sea, looking out its liquor bottle like a telescope, at a world in viridian. Drunk captains of the museum. But, this continually applied loss could be metaphorically over attended, it is too meaningful, and wants for. Its erotic denial is itself a thing, no metaphor please. 

Ei Arakawa at Artists Space

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Was Arakawa's always just a relational aesthetics program upgraded for networks? A restaurant of friends, a social gathering as exhibitionary lighthouse beacon? The Radiants. Less exhibitions than event organizing. You make it up on the spot. This begets The Fear: a "low-grade Stockholm syndrome that many people engaged in participatory art suffer, the primary symptom being their inability to accept that something quite underwhelming could result from so much time and energy spent in captive social engagement." ... "to begin to understand how art institutions might be attracted to participatory art as an instinctive form of biological survival."

Because: the system shifts from content generation to interactivity itself, turning itself into interface for the user/viewer to self-produce. This is the turnkey-operation entrepreneurial dream, in which as long as the structure is up and running "content-revenue" will self-generate, perfect museum lobby bait. It fulfills the institutional functions in their programs whose goals like "outreach" have kids painting in the style of those artist to see themselves as, and mimicking the corporate strategies [speaker invites] as a manic oversized art-as-cartoon-absurdity version constructing a real crowdpleaser if there ever was one.

Elliott Jamal Robbins at Park View/Paul Soto

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The commitment to drawing, rather the juiced paintings they could be monied as, seems important. "A difference between cartoons/comics and paintings is that comics ask you to understand them but paintings ask you to identify them." A drawing seems intended that you understand it. And so when the murky demands of painting enter them, there becomes a confusion of subject. Hazing aesthetic demands. The artist waits to pull the light-cord of an idea, the phallic gun of abstraction's seminal order, onto a conveyer belt of canvas, gets his identity in order, Tap, Click, POW, Splash, Whoosh, Whir, and Tssk, a production is all too mechanic, paint a depressing fog, maybe a spray of brains. 

See too: Elliott Jamal Robbins at Kai Matsumiya

Past: Elliott Jamal Robbins at Kai Matsumiya

"...psychologic desensitization, feeling a lot like living slumber.

Full: Elliott Jamal Robbins at Kai Matsumiya

Mark Grotjahn Backcountry Blum & Poe, Los Angeles

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Probably one of the best parts of being crowned with the blue-chip, you get to start mass producing absolute eye-gougers and people accept it, are forced to take it, saying thank you thanks, asking for their slaughter. 

see too: Mark Grotjahn at LACMA, Mark Grotjhan at Karma

Alison Yip at Noah Klink

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Art in becomes reading the tea leaves of abstraction. (Stated previously.) The viewer made seer. The point of art, seemingly, is to create stronger affect in said tea leaves. To make the more desirable lures. So Yip's reversal here, having her fortune read before making the painting here, is a literalization of art's more mythic, latent, process of viewer-seerization. Sort of like explaining the joke as the joke. 

 Past: Mark Grotjahn 

"Production itself becomes interesting, massing it, output. As Bayrle, his own resurgence now, called it: 'The quality of quantity.' Remember Josh Smith hanging his name into our heads, how villainously insipid it seemed, and now here we are, assaulted again with a man hammering his signature at us. We're not even post-warhol ... the corpse artificially warm for all these artists to wring it for one more drop of blood, standing in his Shadows, except there aren't any here, instead how white those walls, how pushed to verge of overblown, photographically enhanced to candy. A Museum for Ice Cream. Neapolitan! Mint! The sugary libidinal to quench our thirst."

full: Mark Grotjahn at LACMA, Mark Grotjhan at Karma

Louise Lawler at Metro Pictures

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It's lights out. The big sleep, render art in some purgatory, between the ghosts of artistic mythology, and their cynical corpse: "they are but objects." Render an inkblot: whether you see spirit or corpse depends on your personal faith in an afterlife. There are two types of art person, and the afterlife is a dividing idea of whether art's sacrificial Christ-like MEANING have intrinsic value/spiritual uplift to a culture, or whether it's just a story told for comfort against a great yawning cold. I.e. What you see in the shadows. An inkblot.

Night at the Museum would show that, at least culturally, we believe in some form of afterlife. Ben Stiller gesticulates. 

Liao Wen at Capsule Shanghai

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[H.R.] Giger for whom the mechanical and biological found a waypoint in the skeleton, the complex curvature of the arthropod's organic exo-shell, the crabs and muscle cars who share the PVC fetishist's interest in shiny hard bulges; it wasn't hard a move to the erotic.
And these find waypoint of flesh and bone in wood. A confusion of Ripley and her Alien queen, a newborn mess of biological scaffolding, saying "please kill me" and under flamethrower, flesh that burns like kindling. 

See too: "Unspecific Objects"

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

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: Huma Bhabha at Clearing

"sculpture's totemization ... the mystique of the runic object, stonehengification"

Full: Huma Bhabha at Clearing

Altoon Sultan Paintings at Chris Sharp Gallery

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I was told you have to see these in person, that they're on calfskin, that you're missing half of it, the dusty tempera, the supple egg. A shield against digital suck, prizing your IRL. The sensuous preserved from its extraction/production by image. Protected. It could feel a bit christian, chaste, the erotic guarding, what's not revealed. Which the compositions support, they are roadblocks, closed and hinting, like... O'Keeffe, but the pants stay on. Looking through the fence of your jeans, finding denim, seeking calfskin.

Lynda Benglis at Xavier Hufkens

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Everyone owes a big [x] to Benglis. The "unspecific objects." What made her outré from post-minimalism then is everyone's laurels today. The "theatrical," an excess of reference, too many things at once. I don't even mind the gold bronzini in the other room - sometimes you get to give yourself a trophy. 

See too: Pamela Rosenkranz, "Bodily Innuendo", Nairy Baghramian, Ron Nagle at Modern Art

Past: Megan Marrin

"... there's something about "mechanistic" and "shower" that will always dredge some historical subconscious. These are the afterimages of such. If Foucault were alive we'd already know the spa is a prison. But he's dead and these linger with some notion of. ..."

Megan Marrin at Queer Thoughts

Oscar Murillo at Taka Ishii Gallery

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This is the fallout of On Kawara conceptual art. What he posed as a question - whether a sign can contain its moment - has metastasized into marketing strategy.* The PR tells you the locale of these paintings making - their "downloaded content." Against modernist universality, the big dumb abstraction of today localizes itself, we resurrect the author to make sure their symbolic laurel is branded into the painting by the press release, this is the On Kawara stamp. You don't contribute anything to geopolitics, the point is to chant it. 

*"While this was the central conundrum to conceptual art since its inception, the rupture and distance between sign and object (always at risk that its sign didn't actually contain its object) it has since been taken as granted, as a granting agency for value added. While On Kawara's July 21st 1969 poses the question of whether it actually contains the weight of a moon landing, the paint sprayed is given to absorb the history. If an artist goes into the woods and there is no cellphone service around to hear him, does it imbue itself into the copper objects as significant? Jason Rhoades built a career of mocking this value-added system, performing it under absurdly comical conditions, to create his referentially seminal signature: PeaRoeFoam, a mess of so much reference and history and jest that it self imploded. Or Seinfeldized by Arcangel. .. So a word for this value-added process based absorption/valorization of reference."

Past: Oscar Murillo at Carlos/Ishikawa

"like Water Lilies, spilled in crude oil. Painting history, a denim we distress. 'The hardship that is reclaimed like wood for collectors.' ... While the ultra-wealthy trade the scatalogic nappies of adult-child-brutes whose own naive styles self-declare their idiocy as avant and thus valuable as coins amongst collectors..."

"A distress we can apply like paint... "

"There's never been anything particularly subtle about Murillo's work... hulking metaphors writ in barn door sizes. A grandiosity that shadows whatever the work is "about," allowing a fleetingness, an evasiveness. ... The arrows are huge, blinking, blinding, cover for what-you-want-it-to-be-about aboutness."

Past: Oscar Murillo at Carlos/Ishikawa, Oscar Murillo at David Zwirner

Pentti Monkkonen at High Art

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Life averts entropy, says the press release after a sorta synopsis of oil and marketing. Basically life is complexification, sews ornate carbon chains that we now crumble, burn to release their energy. I.e. we simplify life to power our cars, putting out chaos, exhaust, (traveling to a localized heat death before a later big one. (Plus your own personal.)) Returning to the dust we once were, without order, everything again sand. (See too: Lutz Bacher.) Your own personal dust machine. This would have the minorest semantic connection to the paintings on view, if it weren't that Monkkonen didn't seem continually hellbent on slicing container from content, brand from form. So the infra-thin PR addendum is just another onion skin peeled. It's the marketing, the butterfly preserve to pretend the rest isn't belching smoke. Painting as advert for its claim to avert chaos. Pretending, like me, to, against a law of the universe, produce order worth burning.

Everything Pentti Monkkonen

Past: Pentti Monkkonen

"Monkkonen's box-trucks literalize the metaphor: painting as commodity vessels in transit. What were rectangular become parallel grams sent for accelerating markets. The vessels are moving fast, the trucks skull cab and silver toothed grill portend their too-fast-too-young market crash. The flow of brand. Graffiti, produce, logos, brushstrokes, artistic identities all competing for recognition.  Like many interested in the cheap plastic promise of fantastical playthings, it is found perfectly in the toy-form’s commodic pleasure whose projectable fantasy's complete dissolve of use-value mirrors art’s ostensible own."

"The package as product, medium masseuse, the vessel which projects its internal object, which here isn't anything, instead the subject of art, the artist."

"That like childhood figures of action, producing their jism all over town to heroic ends, painting an identity placed over a muscular blank, the vessel, creating a subject."

Past:  Pentti Monkkonen at High Art(2), Pentti Monkkonen at Truth and Consequences, Pentti Monkkonen at High Art(1), "Paris De Noche” at Night Gallery, Pentti Monkkonen at Jonathan Viner

Merlin James at Kerlin Gallery

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For all our interest in "pushing the boundaries of painting" or whatever, James shows how weird painting can actually be. So far outside current tastes that not even sure we like them, ugly as hell, but beauty is dead. These totally void the question of the painter alignment chart -  what did Hainley say about Dianna Molzan, they "vogue their structure"? These are like painting trying to turn itself into a car. Even the dumbly painted ones, paintings trying to pretend they're a cat. 

See too: Richard Aldrich at Gladstone Gallery, Torey Thornton at Essex Street

Carlos Reyes at Soft Opening

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It's about time the techno-conceptual and the surreal had their current vogues assimilated. Martin Creed's lights turning on and off with a more technically advanced press spanking.

 Past: Carlos Reyes at Waldo

"aboringdystopia or the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey. A time machine built in Self-Storage by incompetent tech bros in Dallas. That vaguely sci-fi style of Artviewer.org. There's something that draws us to tech-fantasy in the ruins, the outskirts and desolation and the way capitalism inhabits it. ... Worth it for the photos alone.."

 full: Carlos Reyes at Waldo

Goutam Ghosh at STANDARD (OSLO)

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Anyone spending anytime reading Tufte understands that information is more interesting than painting. (Tufte should be handed out in drawing/painting 101.) This because we are hardwired to seek and the roulette wheel of information skimming (more than actually discovering information) is what triggers dopamine reward centers. So when a painting lures a visual array that we might could process, there's an intrinsic nervous response to its search. Surely our rat brains will make some meaning of this. We're desperate to. Twombly or Griffa, yeah. Information age symbolism? But a bit yellower, warmer, threatening its loss. 

See too: Antek Walczak at Jenny’s, Jordan Wolfson at Sadie Coles HQ, Yellowing