Josh Smith at David Zwirner

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What is left to be said about the mid career. In the early days of his career Smith was oft referenced as a machine, descriptors like "profligate," "hyper" "overproduction" of "meaninglessness." This is what made him interesting or critical or novel, what ascribed value, or, at least, what people talked about. It was the Guyton Walker Price Smith era - the production was point. 

What was with our fetish then for exaggerated manufacture remains a question, for in the era since we've grown tired of "zombies" that Smith and the gang had some hand spawning. Guyton, Walker, Price, a group for whom production was theme: recycling, automation, dispersion and Smith's prolificacy spamming himself into consciousness, beating his name and himself in the head. That Smith is now making painting that are fine, pleasant even, a sort of radical gesture of normalcy...

Now they are just Zwirner paintings. Just paintings. Smith's paintings were always impressionist flowers, dumb stupid arbitrary. But now death rides a bicycle. As a "Live fast, die young" analogy for Smith's slapdash, it is the first time the content seems anything but non-sequitur.  But really it is a leisurely journey toward death. 

See too: Wow.. this press release is practically bulging with self-pleasure: "First" "Infinite" "instantly" "absolutely everything" "A whole new world" "immediate" "now" "the spirit" These are the words you can buy with blue chips. The artist is pure experience, sensation. Plugged into the raw. So, it doesn't matter they look like bad post-impressionism, the point is that the artist is electric 

Fredrik Værslev at Stormen kunst/dájdda

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How much corpse fucking can we do? The necrophiliac painter retorts, "But I was only fucking that beheaded boy ironically!" "An intentionally ugly act, here, in an otherwise bourgeois showroom!" Okay. Yes, the formalist zombies were in search of brains, and yes, Værslev always knew he was humping corpse. But questions remain whether knowledge of shitting your pants makes the act any better? Perhaps worse, to intentionally desecrate one's own pants. At the very least you could be a little ashamed about it. Instead, again, mass produced desecration of our pants.

 

Lily van der Stokker at Gallery van Gelder & Emil Michael Klein at Galeria Federico Vavassori

LVDS at GVG, EMK at GFV

Wacky line day down at CAD. One line is trivial loose air, the other a serious river sculpted line. Which of course is false. Van Der Stokker's PR wants to impress the laborious hand process of inscribing all that nothing. Emil Michael Klein's lines may be as arbitrary as any, the whims of the painter, the water tracing the softest riverbed. Why do we attach an authenticity to the drab? A nothing to doodles? What is important finding a reason to autograph the picture, any scrawl will do. There's difference but no reason to see them differently, no difference at all.  

Group Show at OKEY DOKEY KONRAD FISCHER

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We're only missing Robbins' Talent and Heji Shin's portraits of Kanye. To exemplar the exploitation of your social scene, and the big uselessness of image. To add to the Becherian desire to own everything. Sekula's invisible labor, people set to work. Capitalistically, everything must be harvested. Pornographize your social circle. Visibility above all. 

See too: "Robbin's Talent was funny because it wasn't a joke. It dryly announced its commercial moment, no art to it at all. Artists as their headshot. Artist as professional. This was before "Top 10 Under 30"s. It was saying the quiet part loud. Here the caricature is alms paid to deny the horse of it all. Barely caricature at all."

"Notable to the migratory flocking, Henkel and Pitegoff decamped to Berlin and opened a bar. In business it would be called a "blue ocean strategy ... The theater that came next placed their social capital literally on view, staged, showcasing the finer patrons on a pedestal and brightly lit to be gawked upon... Whatever institutional critique it held was mostly in the fact that it could do it better, insinuate itself better, prove the sporting of it, point dull yellow lights at the gameroom of it."

Hans Kupelwieser, Rudolf Polanszky at Galerie Mezzanin

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A sea clamoring of artists painting abstraction, but you crush one anodized can and everyone yelling Chamberlin! Koons! Reyle! For painting abstraction's ubiquity creates referential camouflage- painterly abstraction is differentiated through the reasoning/process of getting the paint on the canvas, basically conceptual art at this point. (This how you get people "examining painting," "reframing modernism," "critiquing abstraction" - but never actually just painting.) This ubiquity is herd safety, is safe - which safety we ostensibly don't want in art and yet somehow do, the format cannot be killed, all attempts to kill/critique abstraction have only furthered it along, zombie, etc. So it's interesting to have something so daringly recognizable. Big shiny things. Like holding your breath to get high. Fun.

Georgi Alexi-Meskhishvili, Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili at LC QUEISSER

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The relief of art not made for art's sake. Made for something else. (Sketches for film design.) Why is it so relieving? The burden is lifted, not forcibly performed meaning? Or it is that the meaning is already there,  (film design) - that we don't need find it - that we don't need to pretend it is there. No pretense. Both set-design and art-as-meaning-generator excuse their object as useful. Both point outside the object while incinerating it, but set-design requires you look at the object first, rather than conceptualize it. Is this what we want? A return to flowers?

Em Rooney, Eric Veit at XYZ collective

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Both artists attending art's shamanistic means to append care-as-aura to waste. The mass of photography or found trinket. It's that Wurtzian impoverished combover. The way mom sews on a button's cuff. Visible mend. What if we detailed a car like that, scrapbooked a framed photography like that. A human goo, a visible mending. A parental small attention means as much as all the brushstrokes in the world. Possibly.


See too: ".. despite cheapness, a care that is fastidious. Like a mother combing her child's hair, a job well done. It's picture day. Mildly doting. but mostly, sympathetic. Wurtz seems sympathetic to his materials, even sanding to round the corners of cheap wood, like polishing a pair of meager shoes. Not all artists are sympathetic to their objects. Most use material for scorching stabbing churned molding into the god-whims of their creator hands. What little fascists most artists are. It's picture day."

Marc Kokopeli at Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi

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From diapers to schoolroom PSAs to adolescent television, Kokopeli's body is pubescing. The forms more attractive, sleeker bodied, and the content, still puerile. It is nostalgia cheese - "playsets for oversized children" - but Kokopeli is always wrapping one more seductive form around another poopier one. (Maybe this one is just prolapsing its seduction.) And as always, Freud-bait: a cigar that isn't a diaper-cigar, a mother's sexual assault content, and us wishing the pyschoanalyst was around for South Park's expulsive toilet humor, so anally expressive. The infantilizing transgression: I express my individuality, my independence, by acting as juvenile as possible, Disney Adults. "With disturbing nonchalance, Marc Kokopeli’s exhibition packs uncomfortable material into zany shapes." It's all so much trojan horsing. And TV was the ultimate device for Empire's smuggling of social indoctrination - the thing we brought into our homes to let someone else program, our choice of monoculture. No matter how toilet the napkin. The point being, what if the artist could get you to identify with the Funko pop, the culturally abject, the diaper?

Julian Irlinger at Galerie Thomas Schulte

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If we're in the moment of returns-to, it is important choosing a corpse that feels fresh. And while midcentury modern design would be the past a sell-by date, its animation techniques the least picked over carcass we have (despite Jordan Wolfson and some others dabbling in the 2010s.) Animation nostalgia still has a bit of bite. And a narrative lure. It's made to tell stories, be legible. So the hook is set. The Trojan horse armed for delivery. Every window is an animation cel, part of a larger story. It just needs you to do the illuminating projection. 

Thomas Eggerer, Jochen Klein at CICCIO

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Always surprised when the US rolls troops or tanks into war zones since its greatest weapon is capitalist aspiration. Military's territory attrition is primitive compared to bourgeois comfort's assimilation. After all it was the sight of an American supermarket that ended communism. Why go to war with a neighboring tribe when given a battle to "keep up with the Jonses." Today new levels of tyranny creep over US politics and no one takes up arms because people have phone. Tools of capital welcomed inside your home. 

Poppy Jones at Overduin & Co.

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At this point we can start talking about the nostalgia industry complex. For mass culture it's returning childhoods to silver screen. For art it's inventing sepia filters on technology for the silver haired. 

"art often feels like a process, technology, for imprinting nostalgia. Casting banality in bronze, silver, with a halo of rose. Elegy as an Instagram filter."

"... filters made to affect 70’s grain on our crystalline microlenses - implanting an artificial comfort into the cold of its technologic clarity - Davey went from photographing the dust and stains that mark human touch to pre-placing that touch on the photographs.. .a gloss of preemptive nostalgia. "

"The rise of endless photography filters eventually irrupt an ultra-sepia, casting it in mud, the nostalgia of stone."

"Nostalgia is how we laminate our heads to appear like there's more precious substances inside."

"Art is intended as preservation. Art is already rosed glass fetal pigs, embalmed for interminable annual dissection. You need not smear the rose pig in dirt to feign archaeology. Though.. that would be kinda fun science project. Actually okay lets bury some fetal pigs, see what science brings us. "

"Richter drained the blood from the body and Stingel the mortician meticulously copying the deceased face's crimson lips atop its sullen corpse: the mortician painter repaints the embalmed dead as motionless life for an audience that wishes for brief illusory glimpse of that thing's memory, totally cold."

These are mummies. Dry dusty desiccated. Gaunt and hollow. 

Vittorio Brodmann at Gregor Staiger

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For a brief moment Brodmann almost went tasteful-  but, looking at these one would assume we are back to having fun. They are irreverent, cartoon, colorful. And yet ...  they're about as fun as farts, or watching someone paint one. Which pretty sure this is. A fart. Last time a butthole was implanted into someone's forehead. Today, disgusting green gas. 

See too: "Everyone loves the smell of their own brand, and the miasmia of this 'immersive installation' wafts in with a laugh of its aesthetic impropriety.  Like a fart joke. ...  Even the more tasteful tinged yellow by Armelder's power bomb of a painting. It's a gas. Paintings which look the way 'oopsie' sounds. Whether or not anyone else loves is it in relation to how deeply trapped they are with it. Fart aesthetics in the high speech."

"evolution doesn't always lead to advancement, occasionally a butthole develops on a forehead, leaves a whole family tree in ruin ..."

Elizabeth Englander at From the Desk of Lucy Bull & Theta

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Modernism, freed from the weight of so much bronze ego, returned to a provisional idea. Even again stealing from the east. A maquette for. Admit its vaguely refreshing, with our current moment's endless barfed modernist returns, to see a [s]crappy version. Removing the weight, coronation, though keeping its look, ghost, spirit. Always trying to reincarnate, the eternal.

See too: At one end you have the trash reassembling to totem and at the other end the figure shredded into composition. They meet at the same point, our expectations of art, an object as cultural phantasm...

"Art is symptom of death's fear, and men erecting their 'monuments,' tumescence, to outlast them, the fear. Thus most art is cast iron, unwilling impermanence or loss. But so much humanity isn't iron, instead it is kept in acidic cardboard, gnawed at by the affection rifling through it.."

Ross Bleckner at Capitain Petzel

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Always appreciated Bleckner for this pathos: they failed to be pretty. Always obstinate in their vague ugly. Which as intended pretties made them sad. But there is something about this show that fails at that failing. They look like failed paintings, like they were never intended to be a sucked pretty. 

Andy Meerow at Derosia

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Probably the best thing you can say about Meerow's work is that it doesn't really fit anywhere. Which in that sense it's abject. A sort of non-thing. The image equivalent of goo that collects in the sink mesh. The only throughfare is the non-identity of it all. There's no signature Meerow work. It all denies each other, stylistically or production-wise or anywise. Why they feel accumulatory. The endless sense of having seen it before, but not in this way, the sieve collects hair, wilted spinach, feta, bits of wrapper, a boy's face, almost already digested. This is not the wanton soup of Brodmann or Brand (or the Picasso by Guston trend). This is real postmodern soup and disgusting. Look that one's leaking. 

See too: Max Brand, Vittorio Brodmann

Over My Head: Encounters with Conceptual Art in a Flyover City

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Art has become utter suburbia - you can find the same food, the same artists all over world over. The museums all over the world generally show the same stuff, same narrative. Not only that every town has a Starbucks and every museum a Picasso but even young artists make their global rounds to every kunsthalle and gallery looking to place the new artist under its name - to show the forefront of contemporary art. This is as "to be part of the conversation." Which delocalizes the museum to the broader scope of cultural franchises. This is corporate culture. We are shown it.

This exhibition in turn tries to relocalize in the system of art by remembering exactly what it was shown. A strategy to try and really remember what has been broadcast to you. What you have been asked to look up to? Especially true for the "provincial" locale always asked to clean the tray of New York's mass platter. Or its local stars, locally so bright. What was that thing that happened to us? A question rarely asked.

Hana Miletić at A MAIOR

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For an artist so focused on totemizing labor, it is the [comedy? "critical disjunction"? poetics? it is the "art"] here to perform no work at all. The open gaping yawn you feel? That is the void, where thought is intended to gather.

Robert Longo at Pace Gallery

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Years after achieving the feat of making himself a copy machine, Longo finds the contrast button. Exactly what everyone was asking for, hotter flames, more incendiary images. A further polemicized black and white. It's all so fucking stupid. Militarized images. What the right winger sees as awesome in a big black assault weapon, the liberal sees in these murdered out politics: hyperbole of power's simulacra. "Such exaggeration feels perverse." If this is in fact politics, why are we stylizing it? Enter Benjamin.

This would all be ignorable as so much blue-chip hoo-ha. But the fear here is that a museum is going to buy these so they can hang history, not art, in their museum, an artwork that is really just an exclamation mark for the wall didactic next to it, barely art at all, just a drawing in the shape of a really pointy arrow. Just show the photograph, the history, you actually want.



See too: "Throbbing and stupid. Images of 'power' drawn as massive black portenders. ... they extrapolate out, reuse, clad their look in the same black garb of SWAT, to make you feel small. Mutate their humanitarian subjects into a threat with the Darth Vader aesthetic they purport to critique, Longo's assault drawings, men and their big scary black"

Jasmine Gregory at Soft Opening

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The current thing online is a dunkathon on Dan Colen's painting "Holy Shit", specifically its auction downfall. A 96% precent loss. Spurned by Artnet's headline (the article is only headline) ending in a dry sardonic "Why? - a question which seems to treat us as so stupid that one might believe that there is something else afoot. But maybe there isn't. Maybe we are this stupid. Maybe we need the system explained to us over and over again. But comically the question is never answered. The why is only headline bait. Because the system is predicated on being able to cast the same line into the sea where everyone buys it hook line and sinker again and again and again. Holy shit it will return again and again and again.

Ulrich Wulff at Alfonso Artiaco

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In the past Wulff has painted some of the ugliest paintings known. Comprised entirely of arabesque frills and clowns, it was a jesteral abstraction whose decorative whims unlimited its movement into wild aesthetic territory. Now here there are organizing principles, which, possibly through restraining the expressive frill, seem docile. Painting is made obedient. Painter management systems. The gesture is contained. Brushtroke and painter, kept in cage, an almost pleasant law and order. The painter should only be allowed so much.

Megan Marrin at Francis Irv

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You can tell this is conceptual painting because there's a question mark over everyone's head. Which possibly makes it representational painting, at least symbolic. But it is another of the artist's re-presentations of a bygone era's aspirational objects looking more like something out of Spirit Halloween. 

Christelle Oyiri at Galerie Buchholz

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Pitchfork just released "The 100 Best Rap Albums of All Time." There's all sort of ways to recast memory as historical monument. To upcycle your fandom. Memory concrete. "cultural signifiers bedazzled. For reconsumption. An artistic filter that serves as admission ticket for its cultural content into the halls of art." How else would "movements that developed outside the dominant models manage to preserve their history?” This is a little more personal, idiosyncratic, than Pitchfork.  It's true, no one needed a Jonathan Taylor Thomas painting to nostalgia the 90s. Appreciate that this artification isn't in the umpteenth rehash of modernism, or painting, mild abstraction. It's just cast as monument, clearly. With some little skull earrings. Perfect for the museum we're rearranging. 

see too: "But maybe his continual painting of hamsters, or making hamsters of his subjects, that cloying adorbz of the neotenic focus-group-tested rodent/celebrity, is what drives the want to wring the necks of those oh so vulnerable and useless. Everyone so cute, loved, like the adored really needed a court painter."

Carolyn Lazard at Trautwein Herleth

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Cargo cult archaeologists pretending our white walls auto-study the cultural wreckage placed into it. Cady Noland one of the first of these artist-archeologists. All the invisible crud of culture, handcuffed to its highest showroom. It was mean, and sad, because it was so impotent. This pre-inscribed failure is also when Lazard's own cultural scissoring is best. When the object fails. When a sky illuminates with only replacement sunshine. (Note, art could also be described as replacement sunshine.) When there is tension in the large distinction between hospitality and a hospital - between care and its functionalization - between a band-aid and a mother's compress. This failure is sympathetic because it's the same failure as art to provide any real illumination, only the comfort of its facsimile. 

Ei Arakawa-Nash at Galerie Max Mayer

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The Sam McKinniss means of cultural signifiers bedazzled. For reconsumption. An artistic filter that serves as admission ticket for its cultural content into the halls of art. This allow the relief of speaking about the world, history, instead of art. For McKinniss the format is painting, here blinkered abstraction. An Artification. Upcycle your fandom. Drop it onto art's island where it will perform its cargo cult duties. We appreciate how earnest and plain this performance is. No sugar coating the sugar coating. This is life, in the stamp of art. With softness and affection. Maybe like yesterday the only way out is through, simply set it plain and pre-fossilized for our living archeology. 

See too: "... at some point, desire itself became "critical." Your teenage bedroom becomes a "site," a "presupposition" of "critical vanity"... Putting cultural touchstones on display you obviously vampire their cultural relation if not their capital, forming a portrait of culture through its blood. Consumption becomes a form of value."