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 tradtionalism 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"

Minami Kobayashi at Bel Ami

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Bonnard, Vuillard, Rodin, Gaugin, complaining that we keep repeating this is like complaining that bouquets still contain lilies. Adrenalized paint, like flowers, never goes out of style. Who would complain about another bouquet, about playing the hit a second time? A Dining Room in the Country returns in a second hand store. Now vintage. Stretch that song to thirty minutes at the Fillmore. Replay it a hundred years. Revamp the band with younger painters. Think how much those dead heads stole from the east. It okays the return eternal to playing it again but livelier. 

Ulla von Brandenburg at Barakat Contemporary

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The vacancy that pervades, it's more understandable when the artist comes from scenography. They're supposed to lack subject. That emptiness you feel, that's art.

There was the briefest micro-genre of "theater art" - Otto-Knapp, Lutz-Kinoy, Okiishi, Mauss - for whom art leveraged its ostensible excuse/raison as painting-as-backdrop to make totally gentle paintings. Which went wayside when people just started making paintings again, no excuse needed. But the original "real-fake doors/paintings" may be Heimo Zobernig (also coming out of theater scenography)  - who made a stupider and therefore more menacing version, a truly fake art that by getting mixed into the real stuff presented a pretty scary question, until we decided it didn't matter, the art party needed its backdrop.

See too: "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."

Greg Parma Smith at Museum im Bellpark

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The icon (the symbol, the chart, tarot) is inherently pointed. It is a sign. But a sign where signifier does not require a signified. The point is signification, not significance. This is the task of painting. To appear meaningful. To jewel hieroglyphs and pretend a rosetta stone. Parma Smith makes the jeweling obvious, arbitrary, faceting our semio-gemstones, painting, they are shells, empty, and yet it works. 


See too: "These are the painterly wreaths that halo meaning. Bestow objects a blessing. 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, point at. They are the MacGuffin. The monolith only as meaningful as the plot/painting can ascribe it. The actual meaning is in this means to distribute meaning."

Chou Yu-Chenga at Kiang Malingue

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Embryonic seed inside the maternal gourd/womb, painted in Pantone color-of-the-year stained glass. Made for a baby's room. Or a designer Maternity Ward. Someone has to design the paintings for hospitals where surrogates roam. High end. Something a little more designer than glassed prints of yellow foliage and seaside homes. Something more hospitable. No need to be afraid of being nice.

See too: We find this wanton sensitivity almost unnerving in art, we fear the institutionalization of its form, the hospitalization of "sentiment." ; Pantone color of the year painting.

Sophie von Hellermann at Space K

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We don't give Laura Owens enough credit for accrediting candy as painting. For being the candy that painting is. No one is interested in the narratives, they're interested in paint. History is the framework that excuses its cotton candy rendition. Like a World War 2 movie whose entire purpose is to let Brad Pit kill nazis. We want to see cartoonish evil be triumphed. We want big juicy painting winning. We want cartoons, juicy. 

see too: "The painterly requires an object for the brush to caress." "We want the painterly because this is painting's bright jewel - the more painterly it is the more undeniably painting it is, tautologically as symbol. In times of crisis we seek comfort in the familiar - put our money in what's safe. Is this why impressionism is coming back?"

Rachel Harrison at Greene Naftali

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Always thought the Harrison crust blobs were symbolic shorthand for "sculpture." Their lumps confused authentic and a stand-in for it, like a movie prop modernism. And collected detritus like a provisional gum. They were too stupid to be real, too caveman to be serious. But eventually the movie prop becomes real, or tries to, and we're left considering it. Which may be the eventual resurgence of interest in Harrison, when we stand to think all the fake art we are being forced to consider. 

see too: The hipster too was a semio-naut; whose careful balance of fashion’s signs were an additive and appropriative construction of appearance and identity, a careful facade of references, and so the concurrent rise of Rachel Harrison [with the hipster] makes symptomatic sense

Matt Browning at Galerie Buchholz

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Modernism with a human touch. Hand whittled. But modernism is already dirtied. For all their high idealism the Mondrians are dirty, their line shakes slighty. Judds have fingerprints, blemishes. The stuff you're not supposed to notice. The stains that arrive from the artist's studio, that the archivist knows not what to do with. The "hands" of artist. Sometimes we want hands and sometimes we don't. The spills and the drips authorize the sugar sweet thing we call the authentic. Distill this authentic down and you get sludge. That might be too much hand, too much dirt, that might be craft. 

Hana Miletić at Magenta Plains

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Repairs recast in stitches. Labor of the working class remade with symbolic capital. Valorization of labor. A surplus value is generated. Interest of representation.

See too: This separation of our social relations we've so completely assimilated that labor itself returns as a literal fetishism

N. Dash at Mister Fahrenheit

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A turd. We're so removed from nature that dirt appears as aura, spread it becomes painting. Materials: earth. "Go touch grass." Buy a painting to look at the earth. Souvenirs of a world we used to touch. Eating dirt becomes auratic experience. I've seen Waterworld. In the post-apocalypse dirt becomes money. The point we're living in it.

See too: "the anthropological remains of our dissolving physical world, distributed like catalogs of our once sensual pleasure over digital networks, ... these are about the loss of that, mourning it, our desire to once again touch things again, like all those salvaged wood paneled Brooklyn bars..."

Anne Imhof at Galerie Buchholz

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This is the merch stand that subsidizes the concert. Like baseball cards having little to do with their stars hitting power, the people collect them anyway. A squiggle, the author's scrawl on paper, a gesticulation in architecture. This is abstract expressionism. Drip of the author. 

Nick Mauss at Emanuela Campoli

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The original frizz of architectural decor in its becoming-painting has seemed to have just become painting. But it's a mirror! Okay. A different substrate, a little looser. Like the wildfire aha of painted televisions, a new substrate ostensibly is new ground. Not really. But the reversal is comedy. Painters today don't start with a blank canvas, they start with collector-abstraction and work backwards. The gesture is obligated, the choice is what can hold it.

Lee Kit at Fridericianum

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But that's not a sunset, no, so much more, sentiment.

See too: Nostalgia suspends, in formaldehyde's rose tinted veil, our memories. Memories like fetal pigs. New research shows that nostalgia is the brain's way of combating negative feelings and nihilism, the brain self-administering drugs...

Oliver Osborne at Francis Irv

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Osborne doubling down on his matte representation, its dry scumbled until dusty. Yellow paint like grandma's, you need a Claritin for it. "[Richard] Prince's real joke is that the paintings keep telling the same joke for years and years stupidly." Our most famous sans-comedy. Repetition, run into the ground begets something else. A non. A fading. Dry humor to dust. Reboots? Maybe just lovely dust. A new nostalgia.

See too: "Artisanal Old-timey rendering, wrapping its cold surface in warm wool."

Nina Porter at Theta

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The mad scientist is driven to the fringes to invent something "against god." A monster. To surreptitiously photograph girls by the pool Tichý built a camera out of matchbooks and thread spools. An isolationist spy for his own perversion. A mad scientist's sympathetic intentions, desire, even if their methods are not. You can't take people's parts without asking. The doctor would have required permission from the health department for all that exhumation. That's why you need to build a suspicious backpack. To have a reason for all that gadgetry. Build a peephole into the lab. The voyeured corpse stolen from Étant donnés.

Kobby Adi at FELIX GAUDLITZ

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Conceptual art mutated into three genres, 1, zombie abstraction; 2, art legalese, say Cameron Rowland or Daren Bader/Martin Creed; and 3, myth attractors. The myth attractors best illustrated by Trisha Donnelly for whom stories circulate as much as image. But a definition might be provided by this description of Adi: "an idea extending beyond any material work, disseminated by hitching rides on the memories of those who have seen it, on the words of those who talk about it, or within the images and accounts that document, or merely suggest, its existence. Still, the label is not the artwork. Wherever there’s water, All splashing and pouring can appear—that’s the point." While Donnelly has gone on to arguably more formal work, the setup remains, this air of suggestibility, the ominous object whose explanatory reference points are cut at some specific level, until reference begin pointing everywhere, until the air becomes perfumed with it. The gap is the mystery, is its interpretability. These are instruments made of gut string inside heat resistant tubing, which, like the internal temperature of animals, you can hear the music already. It exists in the suspicion for it. Reminiscent of Michael E. Smith's clarinets inside PVC tubes - documentation of which seems vaporized along with Susan Hillbery's gallery and website. It's just myth now. But they sounded great.

See too: We feel comfort with the artwork identified and labeled, packaged by the camera or work list, catalogue raisonnéd. We appreciate butterflies pinned spread behind glass. Explained. Removed from the packaging artworks and butterflies disperse, cling everywhere, etherealize into suspicion for them.

David Douard at Galerie Chantal Crousel

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in comparison to the raw sewage spilling onto gallery floors today ( see: aspirated trash ), this seems from a moment ago, when we would arabesque our garbage, assemblage a baroque. Our Ornaments of trash. Douard's look like Matisse at this point. Maybe the water we swim is so full of waste that's its just water at this point. Simply the material we sculpt with now. Valerie Keane, Robert Bittenbender, but really it's all Genzken's fault. 

See too: Valerie Keane

Kayode Ojo at Maureen Paley

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2006? Carol Bove, Martin Boyce, Patrick Hill, Michaela Meise, et al. VVork-core. "All the chatter about a 'new formalism' going on." It was our "Fuck the Bauhaus" moment. They're all in Artforum several times. Everyone was repackaging, recompositionalizing, a minimalist modernism. Presenting tableaus of a wonkified high culture past, like bent Ikea showrooms of minimalism. Now it is a micro-era, quickly forgotten. But the procedures remain fun, merchant stands for selling something back to ourselves.

See too: Every 10 years assemblage reinvigorates itself as the dumpsters picked through are modernized to the current castoffs and appear new, the waste that evolves along culture until finally an artist is able to rummage up enough LEDs, acrylic panels and Arte Povera catalogs to accumulate the update to our Rauschenberg cardboard clogging the pipes of our forward progress.

Leonor Antunes at Taka Ishii Gallery

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We don't need word pastiche or appropriation anymore because we invented the word "research" which allows influence to become a value-added in PR fodder. Recycled material is now green-washed as "investigation" and we purchase a brown product because of it. Begin to prefer the brown recycled product as nostalgia, as the fan-service and reference-bait of reboots which provide franchise fans with back-patting. The products' comfortization toward viewers becomes congratulatory prize: "I understood that reference." Our nostalgia becomes legitimated. The candy of easter eggs thus becomes a packaged and sold as the whole meal. In art this recycling gets reframed as connoisseurship, knowledge, a one-sided forcible "collaboration" with the past. With "overlooked" histories. The recycling machine is the same. In the cargo-cult era, the detritus of the world is a shopping mall, hang these references like jewelry around your neck. And these are good sculptures. 

See too: The benediction of sign systems. The highest order these relics can obtain is that they get put on Beyonce, as a Christmas tree of our sign systems, collective wreckage, past. The highest order of totems, shown back to us like a lighthouse reorganizing meaning.

SoiL Thornton at Galerie Neu

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Letting the world into the gallery. Sand or baseballs or pompoms. There is no meaning here. There is only the world, which is a shopping mall, which allows purchase of identity. This is good. This is the whatever of perfection: just a world. You can construct your own. The biblical "for dust you are and to dust you will return" is, as far as we know of entropy, scientifically accurate. A sand grain falls for each day in your hourglass. You can go into the world and order pompoms instead. This is the perfection of whatever: your dust. 

Jameson Green at Derek Eller Gallery

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"Pastiche" used to be the incantation to make reuse palatable. (Alongside appropriation and buggery.) Condo, for instance, made his unoriginality acceptable under the guise of ostensible mockery (implying critique, implying meaning). This was a cake-and-eat-it-too situation if there ever was one. Because eventually everyone stops saying the word pastiche and just says Condo- and this is the moment that the art self-justifies, magically, and Condo becomes sui-generis almost tautologically, as if it didn't need Picasso. It no longer looks like a stupid Picasso, it looks like a Condo. It looks like "expensive painting." And so in this way the world has rid itself of the magic incantation pastiche because its the aerosol we now breathe. 

Patricia Treib at Bureau

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It was the briefest of micro genre, "gentle abstraction," it existed in the cusp of the 2010s between "indexical contingent beside-itself painting," and the "process-based zombie pollockstraction." Artists were sponging soft colors. Treib was their masthead. Then the world changed and we needed figures to stand in for progress. But this was thought to be the future then. Rearming painting as a non-objective babyroom warmth. 

Allison Katz at dépendance

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Painterly "style" is the sediment of an individual's subjectivity accumulating in the granules of their decisions eventually garnering a pile: identity. Look through the glass of another's eyes to see their world through them. We - despite all - trust art to tell us something about its subject. But growing a diaspora of signifiers accumulates a puzzle, a representation adverse to coalescing identity.  Delays coherence in its subject, and creates an anxiety in our trust for the text to tell us something. The actual meaning is in this means to distribute meaning. Fails to deliver on its promise of arriving a destination. To make it feel like there may be some. Content is the red herring. Questions are Frankensteinian death-in-life of art. The game of Clue that never ends.

Megan Plunkett at Dracula's Revenge

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Because its deputizes us detectives, which gives hope.

"A mystery! A mystery! Where can I lay meaning?"

 

"[Art] is a cultural structure such that its prize is "what it is about." ...  there is something to be unlocked, understood. There is something to be won. This is the belief. ... Painting begins to be prized not for painting but for this mystery. And a mystery, should it not spoil itself, cannot tell you its answer. A mystery instead must load its objects with intent, clues, an ambrosia of noir, an affect of meaning."

Art's interpretability is its highest duty. The crime scene and art are both given this role. The movie detective, the painting, both allow mystery's possibility of answers, thus light the candle that there is an answer.  Provide the possibility to believe in interpretation, giving a truth-potential without having to actualize answers. Interpretation, made as interminable as possible, already provides the same comfort as answers because it enacts the genre, creates art, which assumes meaning. So you must create the fissure, enable the mystery. You enact the murder, censor a part of the sign. Snip the semantic loop. This fissure is the poetic, is its interpretability. It deputizes us detectives, which gives hope, "lights the candle that there is an answer." Leaves the TV on at dusk, a nightlight in darkness. The real mystery is who made it dark.

 

See all: Megan Plunkett

Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt at Buzzer Reeves

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Writers spend pagespace wondering why Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt hasn't gotten his due. A golden bio, a lovely art, and galleries allot the tentative groupshow, museums retrospectives at secondary locations. Everyone sees success but no one can quite realize it. Is it because we need it to be outsider? Does jankiness only appear polished when found in the rough, feels discovered, rare? Perhaps the inability for Lanigan-Schmidt to find mainstream success is that diamonds in the rough are only valuable for the potential gains. But what if the diamond gains are to remain unrealized, do we still want the stone? Does making outsider art inside kill it?

Faisal Habibi, Dusadee Huntrakul at Roh Projects

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On occasion photographers aren't capturing the art or the gallery or the installation view; they're capturing the air. Some other spectral presence. The photography feels like a horror film. Kubrick. A secret third thing. Right there in front of you and unseeable. Someone call Trisha Donnelly. 

Aspirated Trash

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The stuf expelled from cultural bowels onto streets and corners. Hook it to the intellect, , its virtual cubes, its broadcast mechanism, its hermetic boxes, placing the ass into the head, proffering it, holding it in hands up, saying, "look at this shit." In old Germania the toilets were backwards and you would poop onto a shelf, it served some diagnostic purpose, to look at what you had done, face your fear. To know what you had expelled, reading tea leaves in shallow pools, to determine how our cultural digestion was going.

And so if the landfill is hell and the museum is hermetically sealed heaven, an eternal life (with benevolent steward), art is a practice of purgatorial attempts to suspend its object from the trash, 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.

Like the drug lord, smuggling these objects into blessed afterlife requires you shape an object into what will pass inspection, get through of the security gates of better opportunity, disguise your wares to get there. But whereas the drug lord cares not the for Virgin Marys he casts his product into, Art must believe in desire for its object. Composition is the artist's magic benediction for sending the objects into the "heavenly" afterlife, a means of delivering them to the majority white institutions to get them to care for them in perpetuity. A sort of extended compassion for the derelict neglected of culture, a sympathy moving to material itself, that a world simply would like to rid itself of.  Hooking the hose from the expelling parts of our cultural body to the part that feeds, getting it to eat its underwear.

For Jane Bennett the pathologic hoarder expresses a heightened sensitivity to the world of objects
(and not some vestigial evolutionary trait gone haywire post-scarcity.)  For Bennett's hoarder the world is a little like Toy Story 3. The cheap and mass produced must be saved from the incinerator, the injection molded plastic eyes must identified with, kept indefinitely, inert experienced with connection. (And perhaps the mass production doll replacing the handmade one coincides with a turn from paganist expression to materialist hoarding expression.) Anyway, Art, who feels something towards garbage, attempts smuggling their components out of the trash. The "warm" items of refuse attempt their own repackaging, a reincarnation, second life in the only way objects know how: camouflaging themselves as fresh commodities. Art recasts the trash as flimsy endearing objects that we are made to love, for fear the prying eyes of men who seek to ruin them.

In the real world, this is now a waste management issue called "aspirational recycling" in which "people set aside items for recycling because they believe or hope they are recyclable, even when they aren't." It's a real problem with systemic effects. No longer just trash flooding our excretory paths but hopes clogging our recycling. We don't want plastic in our blood. And these headaches as evidence of anxiety at the hands of trash.

Our aspirations finally lets them levitate, holding them off the ground where they would become trash. Which they, temporarily, suspend from.
Art performs this same relief in seeing the objects cared for, not amassed in landfill graves but given the second life in our carousels.


See too: Yellowing Conceptual Art, Yuji Agematsu, Dozie Kanu, Jessi Reaves, Darren Bader, Gedi Sibony, Laurie Parsons at Museum Abteiberg, Dylan Spaysky, Ser Serpas, B. Wurtz at Richard Telles & ICA LA, Marianne Berenhaut at Island, stuf stuf everywhere,

Alex Olson at Altman Siegel

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The squiggle is the icon of inconsequence, faff, become the middle finger that Laura Owens made her career on. Lily van der Stokker's pink punk. Hanne Darboven just passing the time. But its important to sediment time, stitch yourself to it, say, "I was here."  And Art is a means to attach whatever is in your head to forever, aggrandize thought with color and composition's altar piece. Here, the squiggle. The graffiti cast into time. 

See too: Lily van der Stokker at Koenig & Clinton

Covey Gong, Hong Kong & Robert Zhao Renhui, Singapore & Richard Hawkins, Hong Kong & Wael Shawky, Seoul

The last four shows in Asia. Not sure what to do with this information. (The fifth show was also architecture but in a slightly less dim room.) The question is which outlet is responsible for the creation/trend/trope pipeline. Not that this is. 

Group show at suns.works

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The fireworks punchline of "locally hated" serves as allegory: all verb, no noun. A cymbals crash without setup. There is no punchline, it distends into a question. Who, or what, to be stamped on any of these objects. The lack of place. A metaphor for art, all question, no x. Do you ever feel like you're looking out at an ever receding beach?

Hardy Hill at Fanta-MLN

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Artists' threat on the body is implicit. After centuries of Picasso tearing scalps, Matisse's pipe bent people, Yuskavage's overripe ovoids, Nguyen's surgical cosmetics - we feel the artistic blackmail. It's why Hill's always feel like forensic files to the corpse mangled offscreen. There's something too precious, too sentimental to Hill's eye, to the body that we treat like artistic meat, the grotesque arabesque violence outside.

See too: stress positions of beauty, Tala Madani, Violence Against Faces

Richard Hawkins at Empty Gallery

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Philosophy buggered its forebears, and Hawkins's art history is a defiled corpse. A past that rots lovely, flesh as sustenance for fish or eyes. The way Hawkins looks at an eternally young Matt Dillon is the way serial killers shampoo their dead victim's hair. Alive to the bearer in its mausoleum, art. Preservation and worm mulch, and maybe no difference between the two for your bride. I wish Hawkins would release books of the collages, the forensic files of his/our art corpse love. Hawkins, let us write the essay.

Zin Taylor at Susan Hobbs Gallery

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These feel legible. Information is a hardwired forever. A primitive or futuristic ipad tablet, hard to tell which. The Jetsons could meet the Flinstones, their fantasy was the same, "the present" under different aesthetic conditions. The future looks primeval, the iPhone wants to be Kubrick's monolith. Us monkies dancing around its black mirror. High design starts to look like desaturated baby toys. The future will be so simplified, you bang two rocks together and create ️‍🔥, the interface.

see too: Antek Walczak at Jenny’s

Fred Lonidier at Michael Benevento Gallery

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The hornball photographer was baked into its spread. And Lonidier brings the receipts. Every new pictorial technology comes implicit with promise for men to manifest their dreams, spray their desire into a real, but photography was a gun of mass proportions. Advertising had made capturing women seem photography's very purpose. The sad comedy of this show, the hard sale to men, a tool for their desire, it was never more explicit. Look at the contact prints, Luncheon on the Grass became a documentary, became the norm, became a DIY kit packaged and sold for the everyman. 

(There's enough ideas here for four shows, maybe four careers at this point. Artists today are so afraid of explicit meaning, we've given in to so much "anonymous material" but Lonidier is proof that explicitness doesn't close meaning. The walls pinned with straightforward questions are surely redundant to the anonymous material of art's white walls glowing the same question, but the hamfisted redundancy is far more interesting, alienating, fun even, than the "mystery" of any noodly object on the floor. There's stakes and they're real. )

Djordje Ozbolt at Herald St

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Painting is a basic technology for images. But you can imagine anything and you can paint it. Leave it right there for the viewer. Every new technology promises the printing of our dreams. AI will render you anything! We get a lot of what already existed, boobied fantasy women. A bird smoking. But they already do that in the real world, I saw it on instagram. Somehow the painting of three birds standing on each other comes off as far stranger. 

See too: Bird Day, Ann Craven at KARMA & Léopold Rabus at Wilde

Magnus Andersen at Kunsthalle Rønnebæksholm

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It is aversive. The look of a children's book you wouldn't buy for your children. Claymation figures with marfan syndrome, frosted fruit flavors, excess 80's patterning, the coyly simplistic composition.  It's all so mildly repulsive. Like a rug covered toilet. So mild. A cartoon pleasantry does beckon creepiness. And the predator pike finally snatching a duckling comes as relief. There is blood in these walls. The smiling creatures can be killed with an axe. Relief.

See too: Magnus Andersen, Magnus Andersen at Neue Alte Brücke(2), Magnus Andersen at Neue Alte Brücke & Dorothy Iannone at Air de Paris

Group Show at Croy Nielsen

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Against yesterday's joy, today's lethargy. Drear. Anhedonia. The color drains. The puddles accumulate. A swamp. A stage, it all becomes a theater of sad. It feels apt.

Wayne Koestenbaum at Gattopardo

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It's really a great press release. Acknowledging the art is for Instagram. Still contain life. A late-career career. Fun is generally pestilence to art. (A confusion/fear of being the quasi-art of Meow Wolf, Museum of Ice Cream, all those museum courtyard carnivals.) Halpern makes the case for the shape a giggle makes. So nice to not be jaded. Or, more, believe it possible. "Henri Matisse painted pretty pictures during one of history’s ugliest eras." Early on I was haunted by a Kostenbaum paragraph about Warhol's nose sanding. A flippant aside of his, personal, visual struggles. Years later haunted by a piano jingle casually performed about cubed meats. Koestenbaum can haunt. Its in the ability to perhaps cast aside, continue on, in the face of it. 

Gordon Matta-Clark: NYC Graffiti Archive at White Columns

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An artist's archive collecting an aesthetic, a moment, one that is disappearing, unsanctioned, unprotected. There is so much preservation today. Embalmed in your screen. Documentation as Matrix-like life-in-death existence, serving the robots overlords. Graffiti is tears in the rain, a voiceless nameless people irrupting onto a city, only to be washed away by oceans of solvent, grey paint. ACER's bomb on the New Museum one of the greatest works of institutional critique of this century, encapsulated by a meme: "everyone wants graffiti until it's time to do graffiti shit." The museum, ostensible archive, could not delete its message fast enough. Graffiti must arrive in the safe digestion of another. Distanced and morbid. But it is the bathroom walls we must protect. Like CAWD. 

Tara Walters at Nina Johnson

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Sympathy at their wimpiness, like neoteny in humans, a neoteny in painting, the painting looks up at you with wide glassy eyes, pleading love. Babies are by definition, pathetic, we care for their inadequacy, pin their drawings to our wall, give them a gold star, knowing full well "we could totally do that." But that's not why we love them. Their innocence, that you could crush them. The Eden of innocence we cannot get back to, but every modernist inhaling enough rags to make them light headed enough to try. 

Simon Denny at Bill's PC

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Museum's tweens are now armed with point-and-shoot cameras. They dangle from wrist straps like oversized jewelry, flashing, the aughts are so back. Turning the aesthetic into a tradeshow display for itself - the kids would love this. Objects out of time. Seduction out of time. All candy. Denny's are from 2010. Now in 2025 in western Australia. Surfaces simply gliding along. Aesthetics move the same as objects. You wear them around wrist like jewelry. Isn't that what Denny does?

see too: Simon Denny at MoMA PS1

Philipp Timischl at Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade

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"the rearranged parts of the cultural casino, cut from and placed into its altars, deranged artifacts. "

Our world's sign systems are chaos. And, artistically, we're still in our post-Harrison supernova fallout: artists picking up the world's detritus and assembling it on art's altars for your consideration: "culture, what could it mean?" Culture, meanwhile, doesn't give a fuck about coherence, meaning. (Incoherence instills lack, creates desires, instigates sales.) The most successful artists of recent simply give in to this surface, incoherence and irony, and turn it into big stupid jewels/carnivals of it, say Jordan Wolfson or Anne Imhof. Maybe Koons. But putting a lovely frame around it works just as well. Go out into the world with your scissors and excise what is interesting. Print it on our cave walls. We travel to the caves to see this ritual performed. 

See too: Philipp Timischl at Neue Alte Brücke, Philipp Timischl at LAYR Coburgbastei, “A Love Letter to a Nightmare” at Petzel

Jeremy Glogan at Jenny's

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Overhearing a child in a museum point at a Renoir and yell "it has special effects!" Often attempts to manufacture effects in painting beget a deployment of niche technique abused systematically to stand in for magic. Not always, it's just sometimes hard to tell which.