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."

This exhibition includes 47 artists City Galerie Wien, Vienna Layr, Vienna

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It sucks that drawing has to have a reason. That art requires an explanation. Both a reason to be, and a reason to be explained. The myth of art as meaningful. We've transmuted Manet's asparagus into a cultural behemoth we were then forced to symbolically fund. With more language, consecration, text, framing, walls, institution. Eventually too big to fail. How would we pay for all this gilt? So the artworld invented ghosts, a higher plane, myth. Genius. Dividends of interest paid, $30 to get into MoMA. We weren't producing goods like painting anymore, we were producing meaning, text, numbers, the symbolic financialization of art, invertedly, a use-value for it. Art was meaningful, could be explained, could provide value. It was vital, necessary. My god what had we done. Making art necessary.

So maybe the only way out is through. Explain the art. Kill it. Something dead will finally be unnecessary again. 

Marlie Mul at Kunsthaus Glarus

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Mul's sort of "proliferation of meaning" surrealism had previously been formed into recognizable shapes: puddles, sperm, turds. Its cartoon symbolics didn't mitigate the seepage of content. The sperm wore wigs, the turds had alibi as clubs. Its cartoon built an innocence that seepage was willing to rescind. The funny puddle-in-the-gallery also floated a condom. Now the form is art, geometric abstraction, weaving, with suggestive material, Eva Hesse but less contingent, more mechanized. 

"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."

[What I] project from the two elegant bones still in contact with the substrate of the real is not the same as the one in your head. This unknown destabilizing of our ability to conceptualize the objects in equitable terms to exchange with another ... is its sinister quality.

Group show at FELIX GAUDLITZ

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Is Björn Dahlem pretentious or cringe? Both? Cringe because it's so begging for approval; amassing enough of its whatever to eventually self-monumentalize, undeniably there. Pretentious because it backpads its mass with talk of astronomy or whatever "science." Maybe that's the cringe. Either way. This looks like shitty Björn Dahlem. Which would be a compliment, it's got neither the sniveling people-pleasing, nor seemingly any reason to exist at all. Which again, is a compliment, I'm not sure why its coming across as an insult. Maybe that's your fault. Why do we like when an artwork makes no attempt at pleasure, all those monochromes steadfast refusal? Do we have some type of aesthetic kink? 

See too: "[The internet says] there is a spectrum between "based" and "cringe." And also that binaries are insipid. That there is a third option, the only true "baseness" is through "cringe." A zoomer divide analogous to GenX's authentic/corporate divide (grunge fully Hegelianated into hyperpop, Pop 2.) But so, point: interest comes from synthesis."

"These kinks sound a lot like a voluntary anhedonia, defined as an inability to feel pleasure, a distinct symptom of depression. But while search volume for “depression (syndrome)” as well as “depression treatment” are actually falling, searches for “Anhedonia” are rising perhaps as people search useful diagnostic terms. While these aforementioned and trending kinks enact this distance-from-pleasure themselves. The theory here, is that people wish to “own” their pain"

Robert Colescott at Galerie Buchholz

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Galleries sure seem to have a magic power in finding and exhibiting "rediscovered" artists' safest work. Maybe it's the simply the work left in the estate for private sale; maybe its may be leaning toward further evidence of a politically charged artist being accepted "so long as your language is abstracted into wallpaper." This work from his Cairo days is interesting, but cynical parts run high these days. And Colescott was a master of cynicism. The eighties paintings have sarcasm in their surface, it's in the brushwork, their cold cartoon. They dripped with cynicism. So admittedly it is interesting to see this earlier more probing "earnest" painting. Colescott is important, not only as forebear to today's "modernism colorized" but also in an escape from it, in participating but not necessarily letting the master's tools be the only ones you allow yourself. 

 

see too: "It has nothing to do with the painter and everything to do with institutions who helm our ship's navigation relentlessly toward this inkblot goal. Mladen Stilinovic: 'an artist you cannot speak english is no artist.' But he had it wrong. The point is not to speak. The point is to make yourself abstract enough it doesn't matter."

Louis Fratino at Galerie Neu

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No one in a Fratino painting ever smiles. The highest emote is a cattle calm. Even the explicitly coital figures could also be sleeping. It's like the Wes Anderson school of emotion. Everyone is trapped behind style, artifice, and middle class ennui. Combine it with the painterly trend for lounging. Figures like cats in sunbeams, the same anatomy, tired. Canvases read like the word "languid" in all caps.  All the more if its in the nostalgic melange of modernism. Real comfortable genre. So it is surprising to find it works better in sculpture. That languid calm men in sculpture, after centuries of being women's role, is mildly refreshing. A simple genre switch, a key change, maybe it's easier to hear the Kouros. Maybe it is as simple as that it's rare to see a sculpture of man calmly holding a baby. Because everyone eats ass these days. Simply a somewhat new image, even vaguely.

See too: "The asinine quantity of pictures of bodies today, instagram influencers, lotion advertising, pornography. The vast amount of flesh smeared on everything, our stores full of them, our faces spread at 10 meter heights. Everywhere; a hall of mirrors. As if Bernd and Hilla Becher had foretold of a, this, complete surveillance, ... And our bodies become so extracted, mined, and repackaged, that we start to feel like we don't have bodies at all. Just things, mocked as meat space, something stupid or without sense, or heat, or passion, or sensitivity, but whitened teeth smiles mined. And but then here a photo of a body still surprising, that can endear us to it, these weird incongruous things not yet fully extracted."

Ebecho Muslimova at Kunsthall Stavanger

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I always liked when Bart got an X-Ray. Or that time when Homer went 3-D, that he was nervous about it. Homer adrift in the abyss of the matrix. Horror over his body. What were these things, ontologically? Did they have meat, air, blood, breath? The show went meta in an existential way.  But I never enjoyed Fatebe's similar transmogrification to painting. Her being a different substance than the world felt like a brand logo placed into the expensivizer device, painting. Homer: "This place looks expensive." That her environment was messy with 3D SFX was maybe a in-joke on this more jeweled painted world. But it never felt as magic as Fatebe in drawing getting a whole piano inside her. That was the thrill of her natural world, it was consistent. Which is all to say, this above painting is the first that I've enjoyed. Fatebe cut open to reveal she is of the same world, she bleeds, she has steaks, stakes. 

"... When the [Fatebe] cartoon now does its Who Framed Roger Rabbit thing, the duck finally becomes a cartoon duck, the visual promiscuity is lost, his flesh is now not of the the surrounding world...  Fatebe becomes no longer a natural feature of her reality but a style cut and pasted into. And her world becomes simply a grab bag of digital effects to encounter."

Mike Bouchet at Galerie Parisa Kind

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Your past sculpture mulched into consumer friendly bricks, into painting. Reminiscent of Mike Kelley's Memory Wares. Or the US current obsession with protein bars. Everything is consumable in bar form. Even sawdust. A literalizing of painting becoming cultural flypaper: you take the world and grind it up and apply it as painting, you get surrealism. Works pretty well actually. We need larger grinders.

See too: "any medium, in quantities vast enough, begins plotting points of the cultural unconscious. If you amass enough hand made images you begin so see dreams emerge. Painting, a virtual box that you fill with what you desire, but the desire is, if not caged, steered around themes that can be inferred by the collection circling around them. You can't see the pier but you can see the fish circling around them: the nude, Jesus, the phallus, pink things, us. Shaw's collection is like Wade Guyton's ostensible promise of printing our dreams, the conveyer of painting collecting like flypaper a civilization's subconscious."

Deondre Davis at CASTLE

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As far as animism in art goes, gluing eyelashes to your fetish is funny. Literally attaching human traits onto an object. A functional anthropomorphization. To yassify your copper pipes. Bat their lashes to plead for the mercy of your sympathy. Don't laugh. Marx would warn us against not recognizing the social relationship of objects, not seeing another human at the end. Objects become subjects, subjects objects.   The drawings did sorta cast a spell on me though. 

See too: "...And so if the landfill is hell and the museum is hermetically sealed heaven, art is a practice of purgatorial suspension, hoping to place them onto the helmed cultural ships that navigate time, rather than fall to the abject slaw of whatever-mud at the bottom of the bin."

Sylvie Fleury at A MAIOR

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Sylvie Fleury in a store sort of closes the loop, no? Returned to its home. Wasn't displacement its content? Now its just the language of shopping.. in a shopping mall. It short circuits by not short circuiting. It just .. is.

Eloise Hess at Chapter NY

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How to objectify photography. Encase the elusive "moment" into something more ... preservative. Not the fetal pigs' brine but a wax. The rise of endless photography filters eventually irrupt an ultra-sepia, casting it in mud, the nostalgia of stone. The contradiction of etching our fleeting into earth.

See too: 

"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, can't be blown away as dust, which we mistake for being eternal."

"..a gloss of preemptive nostalgia. Like instagram filters made to affect 70’s grain on 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 and embody nostalgia, to pre-placing that touch on the photographs.."

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

Seamus Heidenreich at LAILA

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Trend for a pastoral return. Our agrarian retro. A new Blue collar chic. Distinct from "Stonehengification" - which loaned its cred from the eternality of rocks. This is labor as aura. We're so detached from work that it returns as a tahitian exoticism. "At least sticks are still in vogue as symbols of the foraging, our original human toil, production."

Here labor is venerated... The look of craft, of labor, of farming. Concepts so alienated to us that they return as aura, as art. Nostalgia for a time that never existed. Now labor is a fun haycation. A thing for people who don't, to experience as a novel other. 

...it was a concealment: the aluminum clamshell of your laptop being seen as economic product of capitalist innovation itself, rather than the sweat of laborers distanced beneath gloves. A price tag for a face. Almost nothing in this world is actually automated - everything you touch is hand-made by workers. This separation of our social relations we've so completely assimilated that labor itself returns as a literal fetishism, ... look compelling, can be brought out onto white walls, as aura, as artwork. Every cheap object is an equal tapestry. The stitches in time are smoother, hidden. Hold up your child's plastic toy and feel another at its end...

As the world feels closer and closer to destabilization, autocratic leaders, isolationism, far-right tolerance, moves closer towards its end we find solace looking towards the primitive technologies we might find as our future, and the deities we will worship in the trees we once had.

 Is this prep for our medieval future or nostalgia for a fantasy past. 

*a nod to the PR for the lucid essay. One would channel Bourdieu. "The Field of Cultural Production, or: Economic World Reversed": "The cultural producers, who occupy the economically dominated and symbolically dominant position within the field of cultural production, tend to feel solidarity with the occupants of the economically and culturally dominated positions within the field of class relations. Such alliances, based on homologies of position combined with profound differences in condition, are not exempt from misunderstandings and even bad faith."

See too: Stitching Labor, Stonehengification, Hana Miletić at Basement Roma, Daniel Dewar and Grégory Gicquel at Portikus, Daniel Dewar and Grégory Gicquel at Micheline Szwajcer, Magnus Andersen

Tina Girouard at Museo Tamayo

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Icons hyperlink, signs point elsewhere. Lead to a history of New York's creative mythos. Symbolic capital as collateral backing its symbols. It is part of a consecrated history. So can't be a loss. Must have value. To say nothing of the paintings.

Sherrie Levine at Aspen Art Museum

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There's something suburbanite sexy about theft, libidinal about owning. Converting another's artwork to a commodity. To yours. Like a coworker showing pictures of someone else's children as their own. An act of lost desire. And Levine presented a philosophic question of paternity that Prince later converted to a legal one. The contrast makes Levine's in hindsight feel less political and so much more about intimacy in this deranged adoption. You let the coworker "have" the children because it's in the realm of fantasy's safety, meaning art. The coworker's devotion is real.

Shaun Motsi at KIN

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Chocolate was what the artworld wanted then. Color on your walls. "Chocolate bars" rife for inference, wordplay, poetical inkblots for the viewer to see what they wanted. Suggestive and blank. A Rorschach lure, and trap. Now here they becomes a silver mirror. Now here we've got holes cut out for white "spectacles," peeping for a history of scientific racism, for our gawking and calling it erudition. Which is another apt metaphor for recent turns in art. Never seeing the white for the walls. Turn around, look inward, calls coming from inside the house, etc.

See too: "The Rorschach inkblot is the ultimate symbol of art."

"In gaming, "the meta" is the strategy created by players using knowledge of the inner workings of the game mechanics."

"in the style of ancient plated mirrors, an object of vanity for the rich, giving them back exactly what was loved most, their surroundings, their homes, their empire and visage. To prove the point the more well silvered even reached higher prices."

Robert Grosvenor at Fridericianum

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A mass-production car must be designed for the broadest appeal, but the magic of art is in engineering a desire to an end where it meets no consumer need. This is the only magic of art. (Though its failure at this is routine.) This is the magic of Grosvenor, for whom objects seem bent to some ultraspecifc whim. You can work backwards from the object toward its desire, its impetus. This is how you see a subject. You make out reason in Grosvenor's over and under engineered oddities, aerodynamic goofiness, his minor surprises. They come out of left field. For all their design, they magically end up artless. It's nearly outsider art. Full of polish for the id. Full of concepts that are never capitalized.  They feel in-process, provisional. It makes them feel like drawings, actual ideas. 

See too: Richard Rezac at The Renaissance Society, Richard Rezac at Isabella Bortolozzi, Naoki Sutter-Shudo at Bodega

Than Hussein Clark at Corvi-Mora

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Sculpture had already become a theater, a stage concerned so much with mis-en-scene, vibes. How much art looked like wanna be sci-fi sets or interior design. So it's welcome to finally press the button we've all been waiting for, "play."


"like a beautifully feathered bird you are required to know nothing about, a Tahitian landscape unencumbered by syphilitic artists, or a tie-dyed Heimo Zobernig. Like Sci-fi as excuse to CGI a lot of shiny things, theater to reimagine some neo-Memphis-group for Petra von Kant. ... their vacancy becomes strength"

Bagus Pandega at Kunsthalle Basel

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Youtube is full of mushrooms making music. Electrode strapped fungi pulsing midi machines. One mushroom plays the keyboard. If only the forest floor could speak. Remember when you could buy CDs of whale sounds? The new age reverberates. Here deforested wood planks are let to scream their political messaging. We don't know what they actually say, and that's important to art, which has been absolved the responsibility. The highest order of art is gesticulation. A charade. A game played by two teams, where one member acts out a word, phrase, or title in pantomime (without speaking) for their own team to guess.

Beatrice Bonino at Radio Athènes

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It's nice to seal things. To preserve to pretend that there is permanence, however performative. Ward off the bed bugs at night with prayer. The small comfortizing litany of petition. Grandma putting plastic over the sofa to pretend that is there something worth saving. Sentiment, and praying it's not erased. How much plastic would we need to preserve the world forever. To not leave a mark. Make sure the lipstick touching penis is acid free, archival.

"We coat chairs in plastic to think they're worth preserving. " Susan Cianciolo at Modern Art, Steve Bishop at Kunstverein Braunschweig

Luchita Hurtado at Hauser & Wirth

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The blue chip gallery unearthed a resurgent dead artists' pleasant and inoffensive abstraction? The trope is a cliche beyond. And the metaphor here is overpowering. You can say "I am" so long as it is in the vernacular of the institutions in power, so long as your language is abstracted into wallpaper, into gentle background, affirmative noise for the collector. Hurtado might be a great painter and this is made moot by gallery. It has nothing to do with the painter and everything to do with institutions who helm our ship's navigation relentlessly toward this inkblot goal. Mladen Stilinovic: "an artist you cannot speak english is no artist." But he had it wrong. The point is not to speak. The point is to make yourself abstract enough it doesn't matter.

Trevor Shimizu at art hall

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It kinda sucks that Shimizu got better at painting. "Heartbreaking: The Worst Person You Know Just Made a Great Point." More accurately, "Heartbreaking: The Worst Artist You Know Just Made a Decent Painting." More more accurately, The bad-boy artist had gentrified his painting enough to make something pleasant, marketable. Tale as old as time. The wink-wink attitude of the early work which will eventually dissolve in time, leaving us with this gentle landscape abstraction. Pleasantry, from an artist with a "fart" series. This might be one of the farts. They might all be. The artist as orifice emitting Pantone colors of the year. Worst, it is better than most. 

Lutz Bacher at Galerie Buchholz

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Every Bacher work is its tombstone, a final gesture, a remnant for someone to remember. In this exhibition monuments to a fiction: sci-fi explorers of galaxies that Bacher, in other works, would xerox into dust. These are the fictional navigators of that dust — cosmic in scope, absurd in premise."The absurdity and nihilism of cosmic scales entering the personal ones" is taken up by sci-fi as a sublime, the bold explorer who will never see even a portion of it all, but into the night boldy goes. This is Bacher's oft-premise of the doomed gesture of trying to contain, label, some part of humanity as it makes it way towards expected apocalypse, the cusp of obliteration. All the information in Bacher's work already contain the threat of their loss. Like a museum to a fiction - it is already gone. A Science categorizing dust to which we shall return. But their universe, being, exists in its telling, and so these monuments, in keeping the story alive, keep their being alive. Of course it's a fiction so it's already dead. Just like you. It's both optimistic and absurd, haunting and comedic, stupid and sincere, making it lifelike, and fictional, perfectly Bacher.

 

see too: ten years of writing about Lutz Bacher.

Elliott Jamal Robbins at Kai Matsumiya

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Not quite drawing, nor painting, nor animation. Not quite Kentridge or Madani or Churchman's Painting Treatments. More Guston's heads. But messier. More nebulous. A tough position when we demand art be "about something;" want the museum jewel of didacticism - or the troll of question's eyerollingly forever. But these happily float in goo and blood and guts. It's more Pope.L writing jokes without punchlines, the unease in letting an audience hang. Be with themselves over this mess. Sketches without objects, just sketches, which are real ideas. "A drawing does what so much art must artificially prevent - its exhaustion. A drawing is only an idea, a scratch pad for the realized candy. The drawing is instructions for a creation inside your head. What SFX and kunsthalle budgets can concretize will never match the monster hiding in the closet of your mind."

See too: "If laughter was the earthquake alleviating the tension of the joke, then Pope.L's don't really relief its valve. A refusal that turns humor into a weapon where misunderstanding the joke might have risks. "White Peo abstr ation." Pointed fingers. What are the stakes of misunderstanding? The generalized artworld fear of misinterpretation becomes conflated with the generalized fear of Blackness, of one's foot in one's mouth, of white spaces suddenly filled with an innuendo that doesn't confine itself to safe quotational space of art..."

Stephen Pace at Altman Siegel

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Hard to hate on something so breezy, so made for summer. Breezier than Katz. And compared to today's faux neanderthal naiveté of say Nava, Bradley, Smith or Craven - these retained vintage palettes and foot in traditionalism makes them just nicer to be around. None of their teenage middle fingers that have come to associate "rule breaking ugly" with genius, or more so, interest. Less authority, just pleasant paint.

Robert Lostutter at Derek Eller Gallery

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The blockbuster Chicago Imagist retrospective we need is overdue, might be ten years too late at this point. The movements today which took so much from it, the "Millenial Real," are pretty much over.  Replaced with a more Corporate Memphis figuration. It's been all so assimilated, these look like yesterday but they were 50 years ago. It's a failure of an artworld to collectively remember. CAWD, ten years ago: "the kids grown on cartoons have arrived and their childhoods have coincidentally, absurdly, become the accurate depictions of the way the world has begun to feel, and will soon become generic, but at least we'll get to stop repeating ourselves." Still repeating ourselves.

Wisrah C. V. da R. Celestino at‬ Kunstraum Leuphana

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Conceptual art's legalese sets a premise:"keys to a building," displayed but unused; or:"ceiling color chosen by mom," a premise without theory - thought is cut before completion. You are left to imply the rest. It's poetic. Signification without significance. You make it up yourself. Art infers meaning without providing meaning. This is how art becomes meaningful. This is how conceptual art become's Prisoner's Cinema. 

See too: Ghosts: "Writing about blank art you are confronted with the theater of your skull.  Devoid of stimuli the brain seeks recognition, applies logic to nothing to make sure the world retains solvency, coherence as defense against the face of meaningless abyss. Eyes phosphene in darkness, in vacuity your mind alights. This is how god exists. This is how Peter Halley's paintings exist. It's called Prisoner's Cinema.  Blankness rewards the already full mind. Blankness hands the viewer back to themselves, allowing all the self-satisfied self-congratulations the viewer can self-muster. It's called projection. Art abhors vacuum. You cannot kill content if you tried. Because art is baggage, preloaded with a cultural et al. 

"[Because] not knowing is unacceptable, and rejection of the object would prove viewer's impotence, thus created an environment where artists are able to produce further and further extremes of blankness filled by those refusals to not-know, whose sensory deprivation creates phantasms, see the abyss looking back because we are doing the projecting.

"The wider the distance between signs/images the greater the space to be filled, the grander the concept, the impossible gap, generally seceded to the viewer. This is our conceptual moment. Objects have meaning, we cannot pass that off, and the distance between them, grand like the canyon, vacant and large. ...the only thing left to do is to produce greater and greater gulfs of meaning.

"The tension: whether this beacon actually broadcasts idea. Or simply clears space for fill, me, this, now.

"In dark forests we imagine predators, in trees see intelligence. In confusion we excel at inventing gods, or meaning."

See too: "Conceptual art mutated into three genres, 1, zombie abstraction; 2, art legalese, say Cameron Rowland or Daren Bader/Martin Creed; and 3, myth attractors. "

Richard Prince at Sant'Andrea de Scaphis

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Is this a Kaufman reality bending skit? Or is Richard Prince really so self-grandiose to bloviate this hard under questioning? Or, after the lightbulb moment of greg.org publishing his first deposition, did Prince see the metaphorical soapbox awaiting his spotlight to bloviate. It would be appropriate. And Kaufmanesque. Weirdly the more "authentic" Prince gets, the more Fischer Price the whole deposition feels. Prince's and the artworld's high-speech feels chintzy against the procedural of legal questioning. No one reacts at all to Prince's deludes, except to worry about Prince's own time here. One of the zaniest things about the testimony is how inflated Prince's opinion is of his work. And how he keeps trying to reframe questions into grand timescales of art history and rapid firing dead European painters. It all feels Kaufmanesque. But repeating the joke is what Prince is good at. 


See too: "Art, in all its critical hooha, attempts to both access the real as politics while at the same time asserting its critical distance as a sovereign land of pure ideation or whatever. The friction (and paradox) of these two positions is never more apparent than when the artworld sends one it’s s creative sovereign citizens into the courtroom where inevitably our kingdom's Prince loses his legal battle and the artworld collectively wrings its hands and decries a legal system not quite understanding the rub. We, artworld, are bodies collectively absolved of debt. Or so it were."

"A joke can only be told so many time. "A joke is spent and exhausted. So an artwork - with its requisite implicit promise of eternalness - can't really make a joke without implying that it too will one day be depleted. [Richard] Prince's real joke is that the paintings keep telling the same joke for years and years stupidly." 

Mona Filleul at Air de Paris

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During painting's 2020 surrealist phase there was a subgenre of turbo David Salle. Painting as "cultural flypaper" collecting reference stuck to its support, a miasma of cartoons/image/internet/whatever. The idea isn't bad. Painting, after all, is a tray to collect image/culture. The painter gives it a little swirl and voila, art. But bathrooms walls collect better. Graffiti sediments the unconscious at night. The irruption on the walls of a bedroom is seminal. Just stuff, often more interesting than art.

See too: Subgenres of surrealism, "the kids grown on cartoons have arrived and their childhoods have coincidentally, absurdly, become the accurate depictions of the way the world has begun to feel"