Emily Barker at Sentiment

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This is a good press release.

Leave the world designed for your body and encounter "terrain." Recognize now how much of this world been groomed for you, molded for you. This is called Bushwacking and it is incredibly energy expensive, both physically and psychologically, and the explorer is encouraged to carry a machete, as removing the offending material is often less demanding than pushing through. 

You saw the Picabia retrospective. You've heard of David Salle. James Rosenquist exists. Now, in 2024, get ready for...

Past: Allison Katz

We - despite all - trust art to tell us something about subject, and Katz's "self-portraits" make this mirror between painter and self-subject anxious by threatening this trust: ...competing styles that delay any coherence in its subject, the painter, our trust for the text to tell us something...

Content becomes the lure to questions. PR: "the viewer is compelled to seek out connecting lines running through the apparently disparate subject matter... in order to complete the circuit." But content is the red herring. Questions are Frankensteinian death-in-life of art. The actual meaning is in this means to distribute meaning. To make it feel like there may be some. A meaning-feeling metaphor that's apt to life. There may be none!

Click for full: Allison Katz at MIT List Visual Arts Center, Allison Katz at Gio Marconi, Allison Katz at BFA Boatos

Megan Plunkett at F

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The anxiety of observing, the anxiety of art, the anxiety of being unable to produce "meaning." Feeling others eyes at "not getting it," a social panopticon appears and hex at it: "surely this is a joke."

Is this not haunting? A third presence?

"Haunting" and the paranormal share with art the expectation of a ghostly other. A presence that flits recognition and which we actively search. For art this is MEANING, the ghost we invented that now haunts all artwork. An expectation that preterrorizes the artwork. Mike Kelley inferred as much with his ectoplasms. And stating: ‘Occult rituals interest me because they are akin to art-making.’ Because for paranormal and art both begin with search.

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

Past:  Megan Plunkett at Emalin

Dear grad students: a history of the "Mona Lisa effect" - "paintings' eyes that follow you" - literalized in the trope of "portrait painting peephole" - villain's eyes peering out at meddling kids. Essays on Sherrie Levine explain the feeling of being observed. Michael Fried's viewer/actor stage. The anxiety of observing, the anxiety of art, the anxiety of being unable to produce "meaning."

Full:  Megan Plunkett at Emalin

Manuel Solano at Peres Projects

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Solano's might seem cloying because its sleeves are so obvious with themes and questions. A painter who can't see their paintings, like dutch artists dying before their fame, a childhood lost through the sieve of VHS decay. Is memory the same thing as seeing? Does the memory exist better the mind of the painter than the paint, than the VHS? Does the record recall better than what we contain? Is the painting always a failed handshake? Our paintings ostensibly live on past us, past our eyes. These only catalyze the already running processes of time. Like painting beyond your death.

Not sure our paintings need to be so cultivatedly disinterested, nor esoteric in questions. These are fine illustrations of the problem.

Past: Manuel Solano

The blind painter, it's like a Borges story, we see the creation the creator cannot. The preloaded failure in communication, the age old question whether the tree in my mind is the tree in yours...

Full: Manuel Solano at Carlos/Ishikawa

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

Lena Henke at Marta Herford

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Stardate january 1st 2024. The new year. An unexplained cubical object blocked our vessel's path. A large mass of rubber tires. The cubes have been awarded the Marta Award by the Wemhöner Foundation. On the bridge, Mr. Spock immediately ordered general alert. My location – sickbay. Computer analysis: "This interplay of kitchen furnishings, sculpture, and display becomes an ambiguous object in the museum space." 

Further analysis:

The fallout of the semiotic manicism/collapse/supernova, of the 00’s assemblage (Harrison, Genzken, Pernice et al) and the exploding of Unmonumental’ detritus, left the next generation picking cultural rubble. Artists became post-semio-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's gods who must be crazy. Post-Lieske - the real rabble 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.

Art is the cargo-cult to a mass culture whose droppings they rearrange as totems to stand in for understanding. In cave paintings the mystical prey were made many times larger than the people. The ancient people were thought to trek to the rooms to be extolled by the PR about the significance of. 

Star maps reveal no indication of habitable planets nearby. Origin and purpose of the cube still unknown. We've been here, held motionless, for 18 hours. 

Captain's Log, Stardate 1514.0. The cube has been destroyed. Ship's damage, minor. But my next decision, major – probe on ahead or turn back.

Past: Lena Henke

"Ambiguousness as a means for the simultaneity 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."

"... their genericism becomes strength. A low poly mesh provides metaphorical possibility [because of] its low resolution. ... Even looking digested, worn at by smooth muscle of artistic intestine... 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.

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