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.