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.