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Sunday, October 30, 2022

Alan Reid at Nicelle Beauchene Gallery


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Painting converts to information, into design. Into sign systems. We no longer paint landscapes we paint the superhighway of adverts. This makes sense. We look at more iPads than we do trees. The iPad is more meaningful than a tree. We relate to the world as icons, fonts, swipes - this the grammar of our meaning. "We understand them implicitly, terrifyingly." And these prose poem.

informative painting: Math Bass





Friday, October 28, 2022

Gordon Hall at DOCUMENT


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The part, piece, glint is inherently evocative. It projects its missing part liked a dotted shadow, which we fill in. Everything here ready for something else. You stop the artwork from completing meaning so that it forever self renew, remain ungraspable, await its performance again.

Wednesday, October 26, 2022

Faith Wilding at Bortolami


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Wilding is precursor is this suggestive era, to our biomorphic and questionable lumps. The minimalist mantra no longer holds up. It is no longer "'what you see is what you see,' because what you see is sometimes sexually confusing, leather seats look like the lap of a tanned naked man." Think Nairy Baghramian, Lucy Bull, Ron Nagle, everyone using the word "bodily." The pareidolic. "a meaningful interpretation on a nebulous stimulus." You even start to see other artist in them."Surrealism works for today as art must be a fount eternal, and so the point today is to overlay as much as information as possible, until it blurs, slips, make inkblots"

Nairy Baghramian at Museo Tamayo, Lucy Bull at High Art
Past: Alex Hubbard

"it's become important that images are "striking." They look powerful on walls or bus stops. Big colorful bonanzas about an inch deep. This is the language of advertising. Painting, it turns out, is the advertisement that advertises itself. Self-advertisement in painting. It's what artists are becoming wise to. You could strap any tagline from Coca-Cola onto these paintings and it would make sense. It's just now the product name is scrawled on the back."

Tuesday, October 25, 2022

Past: Gene Beery

"The trueness of statements... becomes if not beside the point, a thing to torture. Not the treachery of images, but the treachery of saying anything at all. "

"Beery toys with this functionality," "words can perform in a way that art doesn't, a transmission between people, infiltrative, allowing its horsemen direct access to your head, to say whatever it wants, and already there, words standing around inside you. .. no wonder the surrealists and conceptualists loved Beery."

"a slight haywire version sparking in the walls, threatening to burn the whole thing, meaning, down.


 Past: 

"... which is then treated to a Kubrickian austerity, totemized as the monoliths, allowing the surrounding emptiness of space to lend all the pressure that the gallery symbolically can"

Full: Florian Pumhösl at Galerie BuchholzFlorian Pumhösl at Meyer Kainer

Monday, October 24, 2022

Past: Alexandra Noel

"... a psychic mess, more pollution than collage, tinged with repression. The shadow of a plane is the specter haunting here, but throughout is an "offness" that is more motion sickness than fear. ...  Noel's light too, toxic, the haze as permanent fixture, everything feeling smogged, poisoned. Pollution as repression, spectacular sunsets, and black oil beneath feet. The 9/11 in everyone's bedroom."

Full: Alexandra Noel at Freedman Fitzpatrick, Atlantis, Alexandra Noel at Antenna Space

Friday, October 21, 2022

SoiL Thornton at Kunstverein Bielefeld

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8 years ago CAWD noted that Darren's Bader's floor strewn with "regular objects" might be more interesting than art:

It would be more interesting to talk about many of these objects than it would most paintings in galleries today. Some of these objects are miraculous, a lot of the world is; who needs a painting, or worse, art.

It was true. And Bader was suicide bomb to the categorical dam of art, release the world into the gallery. Art had no defense.

[because] if we're going to take seriously the idea of [Carl Andre's] dead fire bricks arranged gravenly on floors, or [Michael Craig-Martin's] water become tree, then too so we must accept its ideological twin: shrimp tossed in a foosball table or muffins arranged. To argue one way or the other the importance of bricks/floor vs shrimp/game is to already enter into Bader's standoff, and lose to the man brilliantly willing to lose everything to win.

Like lucky quarters undifferentiated, Bader was willing to risk losing art into pile of ordinary objects it could barely be distinguished from - were it not the crowning halo of art accreditation, usually the oxymoron, certificate of authenticity. The merger of art and life was protected by legal documents. An unspoken sore point that Bader salted. Life was more interesting than art, and we defended art from it with notarized paper and a retrograde return to painting's definitive art-ness. 

Thornton OTOH seems to understand Bader's take - life's objects are more interesting than art's. But without wanting to suicide the category of art - and most importantly keeping art alive without necessarily a rebooting past genres. Everything here is neither sculpture nor readymade nor painting. It's like the world but also not the world at all. 

See too: Darren Bader

Shinpei Kusanagi at Altman Siegel

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This is our most nostalgic era. Our "great again" era, a rehash era. Our reboots. Remakes. The artworld nostalgia that pervades like Marvel universes. The broad brushstrokes are already all there, the script merely updated. Or not. All things must pass. Unless you just endlessly perpetuate them. 

Wednesday, October 19, 2022

Past: Lucy McKenzieAtelier E.B

...the modern question of whether we should believe in the sign or not, the surface or not, like clue boards we're not sure to trust, as the PR states: presenting legal grey areas in culture’s appetite for the genuine.

How many artists/art projects have started, or started as, a fashion brand? It's almost a genre at this point, the "art" fashion brand. ... Fashion is a perhaps more honest about its object, which is really the brand, the effort to construct the aura ... And honesty about what backs the work allows for a more complete control over the gesamtkunstwerk, the ads, the displays, the showroom itself. The walls don't even need to be white, the production line of aura.

Atelier E.B at Garage Museum of Contemporary ArtLucy McKenzie at Daniel BuchholzLucy McKenzie at Museum Brandhorst

Past: Lily van der Stokker

"Lisa Frank feminism posits an ironic fuck-all to neurotic questioning of gender paranoia's possibility of stereotype, of pink; e.g. “Parenting the non-girlie girl,” “Loving Pink for Boys, Haiting it for Girls,” “Pink and Blue,” “Toemageddon 2011,” “In Praise of Pink Polish,” “When did girls start wearing pink” “Saving our Daughter from an Army of Princesses,” and “What’s the Problem with Pink Anyway?” A baseline existential question: how am I not myself? I can be who I want to be, but will everyone know that I am being who I want to be? recursive mise-en-abyme into self’s abyss..."

"The cute design abutting flat footed niceties. That despite greeting card's insistence of overflowing sentimentality, van der Stokker’s skepticism over the clean pre-packaged prose instead inserts the more human version of awkward phrasing, misguided explanations and childish self-congratulation.."


Read full Lily van der Stokker at Koenig & Clinton, Lily van der Stokker at Air de Paris

Thursday, October 13, 2022

"...  Like, while Kosuth was concerned for all the mysteries of "Chair," Wex and Mary Kelly were like yes, but we also get pregnant. The "cerebral" of men's white concerns was treated as the higher plane and, for all its agnostic posturing, the "conceptual" allied itself with a reverence akin the religious divinity it ostensibly exiled. Men, oblivious to their own bodies that had never been in question by culture, had the privilege to etherealize themselves above everyone's heads to some assumed universal while women's were increasingly entrenched in politic ground war. ..."


Yellow

Wednesday, October 12, 2022

Catharine Czudej at von ammon co

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"the feigned resistance of the artists"

Admittance: I cried in the Rothko Chapel, left for fear of making scene. In an intellectual sense it was sham, big dumb paintings, built with a church! At the same time what unbelievable lengths to go for an artist to say, "no." Building such an elaborate stage only to wilt and retreat at its presence. I know the feeling. If Reinhardt rhetorically proclaimed the last paintings, then Rothko had accidentally found them, a trap, and so, retreated, eternally. It felt accidental, unintended, which was the pathos. Like, oops, all abyss. But now, "Reinhardt’s dictum of his as the last paintings taken as a challenge rather than rhetoric, certain artists since race to end painting in an escalating torture-porn of it." But now, now you can just turn off the lights. And since we believe, god or art, someone, somewhere, will turn them back on, we live forever. So long as the generator runs. 

Tuesday, October 11, 2022

Hannah Quinlan & Rosie Hastings at Kunsthalle Osnabrück; Trisha Baga at beacon




"The bedroom as terrarium, the girl as experiment"

"...The Model becomes predominate as the world's point of scale becomes unmoored, and reality floats between the virtual and material conditions abstracted by floating points of enumeration etc. etc. "Housing" replaces "houses," which replaces "house" distinct from "home," which is bombed out. The model encapsulates this world governed by virtual features, the planning, projected statistical everything, abstraction of everyday..."

Full sketch for the The Model 

Monday, October 10, 2022

James Bantone at Centre d'Art Contemporain

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"Plainly, Bantone is refusing the identification of your subjects and thereby refusing their exploitation." 

Perhaps similar to Pope.L tensioning a joke without the relief valve of a punchline, instead airs uncomfort - Bantone's horror is actually mere refusal to assimilate with a more gentle color. It's obvious but armor against normalization always is, always needs to be? 


see too: Pope.L“Beyond the Black Atlantic” at Kunstverein Hannover (Sandra Mujinga)

Sunday, October 9, 2022


Wednesday, October 5, 2022

Maryam Hoseini at High Art

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People bent to composition. A stress positions of beauty. Art's been holding bodies to uncomfortable tasks for forever. Models etoliated on diet coke and fashionable ambitions. Hieronymus Bosch. The garden of hell is scary not because we believe it exists, but because someone imagined it. And really this is painting that demands it, which is just us. Picasso beats his models to a pulp and Jordan Wolfson Real Violence. A trumpet out the ass, regaling. Wine or boiling oil, what difference. Think the Matrix-line virtual plane of painting's imaginative space, where anything can be conjured, and somehow Hellraiser exists, is a franchise. 

See too:Tala MadaniViolence Against Faces

Past: Maryam Hoseini at Deborah Schamoni 

"We like destroying people. Ambiguity in flesh. Bend their limbs like pipes for decoration, from Bacon to Matisse, Bellmer, Picasso, axe blades to the human doll. Gore from the 80s. To form a pleasure."

Full: Maryam Hoseini at Deborah Schamoni 


Max Brand at Harkawik


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Brand soup is better than generic? The same contents with a different emphasis. An evolution of today's trends: Abstraction AND surrealism. Surrealism as abstraction. An abstraction of. Any sticker placed on these paintings would affect it none. Perhaps that's what makes them great. Like a clown punching bag, no matter what you did, it would not make the painting better or worse, the clown returns to take another from you.
Past: Max Brand

"If you rolled silly putty across Painting's history, you'd have Brand..."

"Seeing the soup for its referents. ... hazy memories of once distinct tastes roiling in the surface. so clarified as to not single out any one flavor, any one referent, everything so blended, you could just keep naming ingredients. Which is where we're at today. Soup is easy to mass produce: a base prepared in advance can be used to a support a wide and readily available ingredients on its surface."


Full read: Max Brand at Off Vendome, Max Brand at Galerie Bernhard

Monday, October 3, 2022

Gabriel Orozco at Galerie Chantal Crousel

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Orozco used to make sculpture. Now Orozco sells tourist art, but as the tourist. Souvenirs not of your travels but his, buying his peripatetic romance. We purchase romance. - this is what artists sell, on Japanese paper. That they are almost literally inkblots is perfect. Because this romance is all you can project into it, interpret it. A diary of plants, us once again reading tea leaves left of porcelain walls, shit. 

The whole premise of "process-based abstraction"'s creating souvenirs of experience is premised on some vestigial trait of conceptual that may never have existed. Like, does On Kawara's "January 22nd 1988" on canvas actually mean anything outside a finger pointing toward it. Does an artist in the forest placing native plants on a canvas actually contain its sound? What information is stored? 

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. .... 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. 

souvenirs of experience: Sam Falls at 303 Gallery, their valorization: James Hoff at VI, VII

Tea leaves from the bowels: Yuji Agematsu at Lulu

and of course, inkblots.