Hanna Hur, Dorothea Rockburne at Ulrik & Nick Oberthaler at Layr

(Ulrik, Layr)

Geometry day down at CAD. Art demands religion be turned secular, into math, "art" which allows belief in higher powers without the pesky god. Angels to origami, optics. Oberthaler too deletes the gods of abstraction, transmutes their capital to symbols, coinage, packaged as Campbell's soup cans. Art is good at performing these transubstantiations, making blood into wine, into something we can taste, connoisseur, if not necessarily need believe. 

Lin May Saeed at Sapieha Palace & Veit Laurent Kurz at What Pipeline

(Sapieha Palace, What Pipeline)

Alter-ecology day down at CAD. (What's with these theme days?) Artists trying to "renounce an anthropocentric relationship with non-human life" says one PR, or "remember what it meant to be animal" says the other. Can a depiction ever recenter anything, prefiguring you as it does as the center of the world, the viewer and its depiction as your object? Doesn't art always trophy its subject/object. The depiction inherently distancing. Kurz at least imagines this, art's lascivious approach to object, allegorized as a bee drooling over a flower that his dry humping will propagate. Us, art, rhizome. Buying the depiction of the deer-flower reproduces an image of art as caring in its wake, possibly important. 

see too: "Making art that expresses care for animals by carving it out of material that if left uncared for would quickly degrade and release poisons to harm those animals is sort like selling pulled-pin grenades in a puppy shelter, "here, would you mind holding this?" ... expressing the suicide games pretty much everyone believes we're playing now in the anthropocene's foot-to-the-pedal towards brick walls type of time period. Why not take a grenade home, why not bring back some of this asbestos to protect the earth if not your home, these animals need you."

"Then it made sense that at some point sci-fi and Apple commercials began setting their products in lush green forests, envisioning the technology so advanced it appeared natural, magic, indistinguishable; today: Artisanal baguettes and iPhones.

Chris Johanson at The Modern Institute & Nancy Shaver at Derek Eller Gallery

(Modern Institute, Derek Eller)

Arbitrary color day down at CAD. A pleasure. One sinuous nature, the other city grid. Both a means to accumulate their flower, the excellent non-point of it all. 

Nancy Lupo at Michael Benevento Gallery

(link)

At a certain point profusion became the too-much that would kill us. All of it implicitly understood, the ever multiplying stuf as asphyxiant. A curse on humanity, to find our abundance become poison. To our atmosphere, biosphere, markets, all being choked by bubbles of plenty. The sorcerer's apprentice, we can't stop the inflation, the machine of capital, production, its terrible prosperity, a merry wealth to be our death. 

see too: The Burger King wears the crown given to him freely, but the crown in mass disperses responsibility amongst the birthday party and someone must pay for all that cardboard scenery. We all do. The wastebasket is technology for making true that stuf is opposite of art's monument. 

Kiki Smith at Krakow Witkin Gallery

(link)

Kiki Smith used to be an oddball. Her figurative allegorical fit askew into a more cerebral artworld. Like a wolf girl in high society. (As evidence of her outsider, for a career spanning decades this is only her 3rd exhibition featured on CAD.) That was then. This is now good measure to how far we've come. Smith looks like art today, the edge is removed. Would the Gilmore Girls scene work as well now witchiness is basic and wolf girls are welcomed with litter boxes. Mycelium network memes spread onto t-shirts. Being birthed by a woodland furry isn't unheard of. The suburbs are full of allegory.

Luigi Zuccheri at Etablissement d’en face

(link)

Like Gertrude Abercrombie, Morandi, Forest Bess, a scratching attempt to unlock some symbolic object, these weird closet painters. Not asked to believe in symbols but in paintings power to consecrate them. A fish is just a fish and in the words of Nauman we should leave the fish alone but these fish are deviously painted enough to make me believe in something else.


See too: "The last 500 years of western painting had been dedicated to championing meaning from god given gilt. We, finding god dead, erased from painting, find ourselves symbolically bereft, attempting to arranging the secular remains into something telling. ... Isolate and excise the background noise, find our empty environs, still trying to assemble objects that we could say matter."

"These are the painterly wreaths that halo meaning... In a video game the object would hover and spin. In a novel the detective would pull them from earth for a magnified look. The monolith us monkeys dance around ...They are the MacGuffin. The monolith only as meaningful as the plot/painting can ascribe it. The actual meaning is in [art's] means to distribute meaning[significance]."

Machteld Rullens at Andrew Kreps & PAGE (NYC)

(link)

Cardboard is the flesh the monster uses to distribute its egg. Through the tunnels of a mechanized network the paper greases transit, a soft sheath. The flesh sloughs and becomes waste. Waste is our problem. Too much, barely recycled. Waste becomes anxious substance. We need to "deal with." The artist does what the artist does. Transform anxiety by stapling it to wall. Adhering it to our landscape. Outside the streets glut with substance, a baleful amazon. So we deleted the windows in place of virtual white, stood in for with an artists rendition of old winter. A soft parasite.

Miranda Fengyuan Zhang at Capsule Shanghai

(link)

Glenn Gould, The Little Mermaid, bubbles, hands, fish tails, feet - painting as an interface, a series of icons hyperlinking content. Stitching a resemblance to primitive graphic user interface. Hover the hand, click the link to access the text. The Byzantine icon is a terminal to god, a shaman's press release. Painting today.

Seth Price at Galerie Gisela Capitain

(link)

Technologies alter reality is truism so true it becomes unthinkable. Price: "Meaning is a technology invented by writing." Ripple effects and, Us, a fish who cannot see water. The map invents territory. Meaning invents shamans, invents art. Painting invents heavens, perspective, invented the afterlife of your image. Painting invented the first user interface. Google Images invents Dispersion. Is this why Price is always noodling in new image tech? Searching for the printing/painting method that will finally rearrange painting if not us. It would seem futile if 100 years ago inventing flatness hadn't rearranged art totally, my god. The painting interface had invented an anti-skeuomorphism. Now Price maybe inventing some Sci-fi style floating keyboard. But visions for the future comically misalign with the banality of what takes place. Looking out into the heavens of virtual reality is impotent to our necks craned down to a stupid black mirror in hand. UI is more powerful than storytelling, than meaning, than art. Like our demise at a climate crisis, it will be less flashy, rearranging our maps will be banal. In the meantime painting will be great fantasy of meaning's user experience.  

See too: "...Has Price gone 'painting'? In hindsight despite all the technologic and cultural baggage, Price's containers were always forcing that enigma of painting into the vessels... Price's continuous plastering optical illusions on. ,,,Which here Price's fascination with images: the point being any sufficiently advanced imaging technology might be indistinguishable from painting's magic."

"... His long term subject and maybe Price's longterm point is proving that this is actually an axiom of art, left clutching ink resembling but not quite actualizing a human."

Group Show at Derosia

(link)

Large time is measured in amounts of crust. The sedimentary layers of geologic time, the half-inches of coral bones measuring years. Everything being buried, so slowly it's concealed. The dust accumulating day-to-day unnoticeably until a high-shelf's gray suddenly disgusted, its slow burial in ash. We speed the process by our anthropogenic layering, the landfills ticked in eras of Christmas trends, a furby layer, the urban stratigraphy of asphalt to roman roads. Dust Breeding. Moyra Davey, Walead Beshty, artists accumulating patina. A slower landfill, a glitter of entropy: divorce. Everything accumulates a dark, the dust to which we will return. This is the promise, more crud, marked by our artists' endless sunsetting.

LaKela Brown at 105 Henry

(link)

Treating our cultural symbols as fossils is a refreshingly honest take. This is what art does today. Imports culture to play anthropology. You sediment facts, say the "amount of money that would have averted a 12 year old's death," as a skeletal relic, a specimen, into painting. So art can play forensic insight. This is how the artworld "deals" with the world, how it allows the world into the museum, the world it wants to talk about but can't without the permission slip of painting. If there's critique here it's in the artist being forced to perform "a harvest" of themselves for the altar of art, being made willing and complicit to do so, for the blue haired vampires demanding cultural sacrifice in totems, dystopian trophies for the wall.

See too:  "...inventories of our blossoming desires ... bleaching like coral reefs whose left white skeletons trace a once thriving culture... a ghost of taxonomic fossils remaining, held for the assessment of all the dreams of a life embedded."

As part of our fall fundraising campaign, we’re delighted to announce a collaboration between CAWD and a t-shirt printing service with proceeds donated to Contemporary Art Writing Daily. Please support us by ordering your shirts right now.

Matthew Lutz-Kinoy at Capitain Petzel

(link)

Certain CAD darlings that just not interest. Repeated, the work is blinkered by a too-bright question, why again? Long ago we were force fed Krebber, now this. Is it foppish noodles there is a taste for? Other artists appear and then, chasm, never again. Others, expected, never arrive. Wrote a Bittenbender review long ago under the expectation, but... no. Instead these backdrops again, again, like the desert of road runner cartoon, duplicated over and over to create the illusion of movement. There isn't movement, only the awaiting of sweet chasm.

Cooper Jacoby at N/A

(link)

Jacoby leaning into the art-as-props-for-sci-fi lets the objects get weirder, their ominousness more camp fun. Less didactic moralism toward a slasher film moralism - doom becomes burlesque, giddy, far more affective, effective. The plot is in the press release/text, the means to spin the ghost story. A movie called Ed 2, Keinholz returns.

 

see too: What the PR doesn't answer is why this doomsday is so fucking sexy - there's even a bench to tell you how hot your ass is. But hadn't we just realized global cataclysm was actually pretty fucking banal, refrigerated semis full of corpses just another byline in the inexorable spread of stupidity. This is like the hotrod version, the hollywood version. Lesson:  There is money in making the interior of our doom fun. 

Our world's end, celebrate it with a commemorative lamp, luxury mirroring your wealth's participation in it.

Yui Yaegashi at Gallery of The Porto Arts Club

(link)

These too are the pleasure of a bar of soap but carved with an x-acto blade, more surgery than nostalgia. More ikea than film. There's a zen in watching organization, seeing construction. You follow the traces of the rake in the sand garden, allow the mind a meander. The painting equivalent of inventing new forms of that.


see too:  There's value in expunging. Calm, an app that "monetized doing nothing" recently valued at 2 billion dollars. Or Marie Kondo selling products to help you get rid of yours. But more, there's value in making something noble, moral. Vices turned into connoisseurship: it's not alcoholism it's an appreciation for wine, now "natural" wines. And these sell temperance, withholding, from the big jouissance of painting. There's an analogy to certain kinks. Where painting out provides the pleasure. 

The efficiency and craft of them promises if not to organize your home to organize your thoughts... Like the now international Muji, or ikea before it, objects which through their own clever construction promise you their better efficiency. An object that promises to lend you its perfection.

 Please support Contemporary Art Writing Daily this year! You can donate here or if you’re an artist or art space, you can help the Library grow by donating for past writing, which is also here.

Luz Carabaño at Hoffman Donahue

(link)

You know how the gentle but complex shapes in worn pastels of used bars of soap are kind of always beautiful? Well imagine those shapes on your porcelain white, you looking down into them, and there a kind of seeing pool, a bar of soap screening faded and out-of-focus vintage film reels. Things you remember and fuzzy. Yeah kinda like that. Your ability to believe in this will mark your reception to. They are but soap, and that's important. 

Jiang Cheng at Tara Downs

(link)

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. We're inordinately cruel to ourselves.

You can paint a face like a sunset. It will let you. Rearrange eyes, nose, mouth - a surgeon from hell, Picasso. Tyrannically bend people for aesthetics. These seem somehow more tender. Maybe its the close cropping, which take serious the surface, flesh, rather than rearranging a Mr. Potato Head. (Deleuze famously remarking that Bacon didn't paint faces but heads, meat.) Maybe it's this painting a face, painting it like a Monet, a low-irony too-serious painting for today, implying a minimum of self care. Artists finally part of the beauty industry, these look like it. Who doesn't want to look like a water lily?