Hanna Hur, Dorothea Rockburne at Ulrik & Nick Oberthaler at Layr

(Ulrik, Layr)

Geometry day down at CAD. Art demands religion be turned secular, into math, "art" which allows belief in higher powers without the pesky god. Angels to origami, optics. Oberthaler too deletes the gods of abstraction, transmutes their capital to symbols, coinage, packaged as Campbell's soup cans. Art is good at performing these transubstantiations, making blood into wine, into something we can taste, connoisseur, if not necessarily need believe. 

Lin May Saeed at Sapieha Palace & Veit Laurent Kurz at What Pipeline

(Sapieha Palace, What Pipeline)

Alter-ecology day down at CAD. (What's with these theme days?) Artists trying to "renounce an anthropocentric relationship with non-human life" says one PR, or "remember what it meant to be animal" says the other. Can a depiction ever recenter anything, prefiguring you as it does as the center of the world, the viewer and its depiction as your object? Doesn't art always trophy its subject/object. The depiction inherently distancing. Kurz at least imagines this, art's lascivious approach to object, allegorized as a bee drooling over a flower that his dry humping will propagate. Us, art, rhizome. Buying the depiction of the deer-flower reproduces an image of art as caring in its wake, possibly important. 

see too: "Making art that expresses care for animals by carving it out of material that if left uncared for would quickly degrade and release poisons to harm those animals is sort like selling pulled-pin grenades in a puppy shelter, "here, would you mind holding this?" ... expressing the suicide games pretty much everyone believes we're playing now in the anthropocene's foot-to-the-pedal towards brick walls type of time period. Why not take a grenade home, why not bring back some of this asbestos to protect the earth if not your home, these animals need you."

"Then it made sense that at some point sci-fi and Apple commercials began setting their products in lush green forests, envisioning the technology so advanced it appeared natural, magic, indistinguishable; today: Artisanal baguettes and iPhones.

Chris Johanson at The Modern Institute & Nancy Shaver at Derek Eller Gallery

(Modern Institute, Derek Eller)

Arbitrary color day down at CAD. A pleasure. One sinuous nature, the other city grid. Both a means to accumulate their flower, the excellent non-point of it all. 

Nancy Lupo at Michael Benevento Gallery

(link)

At a certain point profusion became the too-much that would kill us. All of it implicitly understood, the ever multiplying stuf as asphyxiant. A curse on humanity, to find our abundance become poison. To our atmosphere, biosphere, markets, all being choked by bubbles of plenty. The sorcerer's apprentice, we can't stop the inflation, the machine of capital, production, its terrible prosperity, a merry wealth to be our death. 

see too: The Burger King wears the crown given to him freely, but the crown in mass disperses responsibility amongst the birthday party and someone must pay for all that cardboard scenery. We all do. The wastebasket is technology for making true that stuf is opposite of art's monument. 

Kiki Smith at Krakow Witkin Gallery

(link)

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

(link)

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)

(link)

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.