Kiki Smith at Krakow Witkin Gallery

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

Luigi Zuccheri at Etablissement d’en face

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


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

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

Machteld Rullens at Andrew Kreps & PAGE (NYC)

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

Miranda Fengyuan Zhang at Capsule Shanghai

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

Seth Price at Galerie Gisela Capitain

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

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

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

Group Show at Derosia

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

LaKela Brown at 105 Henry

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

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

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Matthew Lutz-Kinoy at Capitain Petzel

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

Cooper Jacoby at N/A

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

 

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

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

Yui Yaegashi at Gallery of The Porto Arts Club

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


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

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

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Luz Carabaño at Hoffman Donahue

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

Jiang Cheng at Tara Downs

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The 19th century's joke was painting faces positioned next to flowers and 20th century's joke was painting a face like it was flowers. Now what? A face is just the putty we rearrange in hopes of arranging something like meaning. An endless mine to profit from, our faces. Something we can pump. We're inordinately cruel to ourselves.

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

Marie Angeletti at Ishikawa House

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Nauman's own nighttime video mapping of the studio (Fat Chance John Cage) became, against all odds, enjoyable. (How the stupidest idea in the world actualized as zen fun the most Nauman thing in the world.) Live-streaming a studio across continents/timezones sets up a similar potentiality - it's live! -but not knowing it will. An artwork with potential energy, all edging, audience set to wait for any small climax. No guarantees. In the meantime it's a studio displaced, potential artworks transmitted virtually to potential ends, metaphors for our modern age write themselves, a machine set to run, gesticulate, no guarantees for reward, just finding hope in darkness, Prisoner's Cinema, Nauman, it writes itself.

See too: ...because the work does feel like the internet, forced with lips glued to feed, like we all are. You can assemble the parts to de-crimescene what's on display here, or wait for the another writer to mutate to docent, to explain, but that'd be beside the point to be at a loss shuffling through image that Angeletti seems determined to maintain in limbo, contextless. The breadth of Angeletti's work looks like a google image search for a long string of arbitrary numbers, irrational, an array of the world's arranged by a search term we cannot see, which, in an era of almost total fuck-all of contextless images...

Meredith James at Marinaro

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We've professed our love for Cletus Johnson, for the illuminated entrance, a threshold all facade. So yes, of course, these. Film screen projection, places for mental exit.  Like Masaccio's The Holy Trinity, pictorial painting was a virtual place you could enter. We forget this, so we build models now to remind us what was so obvious then. You can enter painting.

See too: So the couch becomes the projection screen for us, the surveillance into us, like looking back asking the question: "Before our we uploaded to the cloud what were we?" back through the screen to see reality - or its cave - through the remains.

Bagus Pandega at Swiss Institute

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Is there a history of the myth of mad scientist? How it led from Frankenstein to Flux Capacitors to Elon Musk's share price? We buy into big air quotes "science" somehow, eternally, this belief in the lab, in eccentrics tinkering. Think: computer chips we don't understand powering black boxes we can't get inside underpinning markets' growth we can't predict. But it is growing, against all speculation, growth. So hook a plant to wires, make the mushroom sing. It doesn't even need to get results, the art is getting believe to believe in your company, believe in something more, art, Elon. This is where tech-bros, art, and the new age coincide, gesticulation of tropes conjuring a higher plane?


See too: 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.

We are delighted. For we knew we were the light.

In terms of image, we live after the flood. Photography's success in the digital era reproduced its own extinction: overpopulation in digital shoeboxes, useless. Post deluge, visibility is no longer determined by the image but by apparatus that can concentrate attention - make visible. In the sense that algorithms and the attention economy are able to package its visibility into a frame, they are doing their own picture-making. Photography is superseded, the new apparatus of picture-making is an algorithm of attention. Engagement rate drives the shutter on a moment. 

Go look at how primitive our images used to look, Jessica Stockholder at Jay Gorney Modern Art; it's is practically Stonehenge. This is all to say, we need more pictures of the past, and maybe this is the way to take them. Perhaps the 90s will have taken place again.

See too: We scroll images of images. Our capacities for dealing, for dealing with, making sense, of them erodes as the sheer quantity of information we are met with on the eponymous daily. They flow against whatever wishes for a control to the spigot, they'll be more tomorrow. We begin to triage our incoming information; our form of relation moves from a relation of understanding to one of recognition, able to name something, our conversations formed around the little opinions we've manifested as stopgap standing in for control, CAWD.

In the beginning, there was darkness, formless and empty over the surface of the deep, hovering over the waters, and Forrest said let there be Contemporary Art Daily and there was. And Forrest saw that Contemporary Art Daily was good, and separated those exhibitions from the limelight and the darkness. And Contemporary Art Daily called its light "of contemporary relevance" and the darkness "not worthy of publication."

Christopher Williams at The Perimeter

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You say shampoo 100 times until it feels foreign in your mouth - lost for the signal, gone numb, meaning. This is an analogy to this 47th showing of Williams' Hand Painted Signs, Photographs, Printed Matter, now with Long Play Vinyl, Audiophile Bar - the list itself is a redundant mouthful. A semantic satiation, an amnesia, like holding your breath as a pharmakological experiment. Lost all connection to what this is or was. Just back to a list of images circulating. Is there difference. The audiophile bar is lost. I am lost. At a loss. Why again? CAD?

see too: ... Because we don't want opacity anymore, we want clearly established intent. This probably makes Williams a medicinal flavor. But the en abyme of institutional/self reflection requires an outside party to discern the navel's tea leaves. Otherwise it's just tying up the institution in your ornate slick personal knots to look at your button. just kink. 

Isn't this all starting to sound like a brand package of institutional critique from the Pictures Generation? Blankness becomes its own commodity, its own bowtie...

...it’s a nice gesture but hard to see the decades’ work or installation subtlety amongst the brambles of families asking themselves aloud, literally “When do we get to see Matisse?”

Precious Okoyomon at Mendes Wood DM

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The cultural weaponization of neoteny, cuteness, kawaii on innocent populations of children should be studied. It could be thought a capitalist mass psychologic operation were it not oft excused as a natural selection, evolution. i.e. Children cute to their parents/societies are at an advantage. Dolls cute to children incite demand, create growth. Their eyes grow ever larger like Disney rodents, their butts ever more Venusian, a natural selection of commodities. But the cartoon bear is a genetically modified organism. More like your dog. Bent by artists as caricatures of your desire. And our culture's animated fauna seem purpose built. Pikachu, Care Bears, Labubu et al. are the new gargoyles, arranged on our churches to steer children toward its higher power, sugary cereals, cartoon commercials, gacha casinos. Gargoyles were the stick of hell, hyper cuddly bears the desirous carrot to capital. Grimm's fairy tales moralism became too grim, but a pleading-eyes GMO mass manipulation, equally moralistic, we condone. This is what Paul McCarthy's pillaging those Disney Princesses seemed after, an inverse subliminal moralization, all Grimm mythos on our plastic babies. Same here.

see too: We identify with cuteness, with the interminable wet-eyed critters of Disney, Pokemon, whatever latest commodified and neotenic rodent. Cuteness' pressure causing Pugs' eyes to bulge and esophagus to choke. (The stunted bone structure of Pikachu leaves him in constant pain.) And Landers' plaid animals, sad clowns, and now a pinocchio "plankboy" are the means of a lesser sort of identification. Landers' characters are not focus-group perfected. 

Cuteness is a gargoyle, the policing gremlins of Gothic architecture dispersed into media, into Pikachu, politically kneading your desire into acceptable dough. Cuteness creates artificial identification, forces sysmpathy, care, for an object its church. You become sympathetic to their cause, the militarized demons of the holy police state, Pikachu. 

"Konrad Lorenz argued in 1949 that [cuteness] triggered nurturing responses in adults and that this was an evolutionary adaptation which helped ensure that adults cared for their children, ultimately securing the survival of the species. Some later scientific studies have provided further evidence for Lorenz's theory."

...and Rantanen has made them to overwork themselves, speed demise, intentionally crafting kawaii critters to abuse their labor-force in the circuits of his machinery. The gestures seem less absurd than frustrated, Rantanen's exacerbation of late-stage-capital's more aggressively abject objects.

Babies are, by definition, pathetic

Nuri Koerfer at Neuer Essener Kunstverein

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Bruce Nauman's One Hundred Fish Fountain, contained 97 fish. He made fountains throughout his career, surely interested in the nihilistic absurdity of the fountain as ubiquitous cultural motif(?). What is a fountain? Not quite art, nor quite architecture, no longer quite infrastructure. It is a peacock of public object. Uselessly functioning. Nothing more Naumanian than a public fountain, particularly a 100 fish fountain with 97 fish. The lure of pointing out the error of a 100 fish fountain containing 97 fish is trap of expecting rationality in the absurdity of fountains, hosing the air. Questions of why fall apart. It's simply nice to see air get wet, a bookshelf get fish, this is how the world used to be, decorative, useless.

Eric Wesley at Pio Pico

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The unexpected next step is the Wesley game - artworks, identity, like endless non-sequitur, digression, absurdity. Instead a "philosophical bait" - go play Freud with these clams and missiles - this is the game of art, our MMORPG, the artist creates a puzzle and you solve it for him. Yes, this. 

See too: Because [art] deputizes us detectives, which gives hope. "A mystery! A mystery! Where can I lay 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.

Scott Benzel at Phase Gallery

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A show named after the ancient ways of mirror gazing. As a means to communicate with spirits. What do you see reflected in a black mirror? A perfect analogy for art. Our apophenia on overdrive. What do you see in the void? How does your brain make sense in noise? From meaninglessness? We make art, see a face in toast, a spirit in rock. All of art is laboratory of it. Prisoner's cinema.

See too: "On Kawara's One Million Years versus here's dice roll over a Million Random Digits. ... art becomes the casino of picking digits, making meaning, manufacturing rarity."

Shinpei Kusanagi at Altman Siegel

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How far these painting seems. It enhances their fog, an increase in atmosphere between you and subject like rain. Yes, it's the same photographic distance as say Stephen Pace at Altman Siegel, but these recede even further, the fabrics imbibe their melting ice cream, slurping them into the canvas an impenetrable window away.

David Benjamin Sherry at Nicelle Beauchene Gallery

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From the success af Klint on shopping bags to the dredging styles of the Santa Fe transcendentalists - there's something in the air wanting spirit. But you can't mention god in a press release. (The word spirituality was only recently allowed back in the gates.) So the landscape is a neutral country, a naturalism speaking to god with alibi of the secular. But we want belief in more. A common side effect of nervous time. We want the landscape rendered as spectral presence, to see safety in the sharp corners of the world commanded hazard-yellow by higher powers. Now beg for the higher powers Polke once provided.  

Emma Reyes at Crèvecoeur

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The point is, give your inkblot a shape. Let the shape sweat out something to be seen. Not to interminably serialize a single spilled question mark. There is something to be seen here. In the sweating flesh of a tomato jacuzzi. We don't know what it is but it is to be seen.

See too: inkblot

Dean Sameshima at Good or Trash

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"Anonymous" spinning a literary riff on the signifier/signified. The homosexual is undepicted, they are of course anonymous. The label points to but not at any particular one. But the anonymous label moves us away from the description and toward its potential depicted as a question already presupposed. Who is the homosexual? What happened on Kawara's date? Who is CAWD? This rupture in the signifier/-fied is the imaginative potential. This is the poetic, the nostalgia. A promised object in losing, already lost. The double stamp on the homosexual as "anonymous" dooms them - you will not receive them back, they are lost to time.

Matti Braun at BQ

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What you thought were some lovely glass is instead a cruel deployment of cultural signifiers. Report to the text for your education. The big reveal, the pleasance is actually "meaning."  

 

Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork at Empty Gallery

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Art is the airline hanger where we assess the fallen debris of culture - let the objects, set to dance by artists, "speak." We initiates perform the ancient practice of meaning. Divine from cultural tea leaves a wall text, a press release, a content. The use-value of art, meaning, the world is not arbitrary, there are things in the dark trees, we cannot see them but assume them, look until your eyes produce them.

See too: Airline Wreckage

Matthieu Palud at Les Bains-Douches

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Paintings intentionally underwhelmed. Just whelmed. Which you can be in Europe. It's hard to be this artless. Which Palud - stylistically a Cheshire cat - has been playing at a while. Against the neon stylings of today - dull light is relief. Apple and water for your hangover. Even the doorways of Hammershøi and churchlight of Zurbaran are too much. 

Adam Alessi at Hoffman Donahue

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There's a threshold where horror and style cross into something.. else. Tim Burton perhaps, where an arabesque cutesery becomes its own grotesque. A clam corpse flaired like a theater-kid. A fedora perhaps. Resident Evil's victorian mommy. Hard to pinpoint what is so off putting about Tim Burton, but so blockbuster to some. If painters are going to treat the body as some compositional putty to dislocate hips for painterly whims.. at least admitting the horror to the manipulation seems earnest - if manneristly unnecessary. 

Dan Walsh at Galerie Thomas Schulte

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We already have flowers in the world, so it's important for artists to invent new ones. The pleasure of Walsh's is seeing the system that grew them. We like organized arrangements. A lawful hand to sort god's variance. Pleasure in the programming of color, light, form, our own little garden not nature's.

Bettina at Ulrik

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Most artists today produce "series" - their commodification of a single artistic thought. For many art itself has become a form for inventing processes to serialize, commodify, i.e. "the production method is the product." Developing a "viewpoint", "signature" or "conceptual framework" - pick your ballyhoo'd sales tactic. A historic development likely due to the demands of both filling an exhibition schedule, and the fact that "the exhibition" had superseded the object as art's measurable unit of thought. Perhaps one stemming from the other. Bettina was an artist who, without any exhibition schedule or inventory space at all, mass invented means for artistic mass production, and then followed through on that production beyond the point of rational good thought - eventually filling her apartment so full she slept in the hallway on a lawn chair (or so the myth goes.) It's like an artistic Sorcerer's Apprentice, one conceptual Library of Babel spell is invented and the things begin to spawn, producing and reproducing until you live outside in a different world, unable to invent the spell to shut the brooms off. 

Josh Smith at David Zwirner

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

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

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

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

Fredrik Værslev at Stormen kunst/dájdda

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

 

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

LVDS at GVG, EMK at GFV

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

Group Show at OKEY DOKEY KONRAD FISCHER

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

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

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

Hans Kupelwieser, Rudolf Polanszky at Galerie Mezzanin

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

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

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

Em Rooney, Eric Veit at XYZ collective

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


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

Marc Kokopeli at Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi

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

Julian Irlinger at Galerie Thomas Schulte

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

Thomas Eggerer, Jochen Klein at CICCIO

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

Poppy Jones at Overduin & Co.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vittorio Brodmann at Gregor Staiger

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

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

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

Elizabeth Englander at From the Desk of Lucy Bull & Theta

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

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

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

Ross Bleckner at Capitain Petzel

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

Andy Meerow at Derosia

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

See too: Max Brand, Vittorio Brodmann

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

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

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

Hana Miletić at A MAIOR

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

Robert Longo at Pace Gallery

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

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



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