Maggie Lee at 356 Mission

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Coolness is an affect and the point attempted to be made was that adopting these strictures to see the subject express through the grate of social coding was its pathos. Did everyone then just think they were cool then? The loss of self to the adoption of vernaculars. The objects here are the physical embodiment of the grate through which we express self at that moment of earliest self-expression in newfound self-awareness immediately confronted with the terror of self-consciousness. "Gigi is me in 2006." A teenage self-conciousness and the distance as adoption-of-another-subjectivity having a lot to do with art and its performativity.


See here: Maggie Lee at Real Fine Arts

Lutz Bacher at 356 Mission

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In "Entropy and the new Monuments" Smithson's term "hyper-prosaism" for Morris, Flavin, LeWitt, and Judd described his artistic cohorts' inadequacy in the grand scales of time and entropy, the culturally catatonic monuments in human "progression." The bracing absurdity and nihilism of cosmic scales entering the personal ones, which Bacher recurringly recalls with invocations of cosmos xeroxed into the noise of their granular flooring, synecdoches of stellar scales spilled across expanses like baseballs or sprawls of sand. Mountains dissolve in grains that resemble liquids in geologic time. This recurring theme. The biblical "for dust you are and to dust you will return" is, as far as we know of entropy, scientifically accurate. Bacher never as deeply ironic or hurt as Smithson seemed by the crushing juxtaposition, the monuments themselves invoke already this loss.





See too: Lutz Bacher at Statens Museum for Kunst, On Kawara at the Guggenheim, Lutz Bacher at Daniel Buchloz

Seth Price at 356 Mission

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Text saved Price's cutouts and vac-forms' vacancy by filling them with the aerosolized thought preceding it, dispersion to fill the empty packaging, naming the very thing Price's objects were at that moment doing. As the joke become boring Price again preceded the malaise attaching to it a novel with the critique already in hand explaining - in Price's elegantly mechanical prose - that Price had become a deterministic automaton in highly codified and symbolic trade-show of art where the good could be synthesized and produced like any other commodity as long as one understood the game that Price could all too knowingly lay out very well in the very-non-fiction auto-narrative look back on his then ripening career producing the good, highly collectible objects that looked just vacant enough to be salable all too clear to the viewers of this exhibition and those thoughts already thought for you, again the title to hang about you, Fuck Seth Price.

Rebecca Morris at 356 Mission

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Like Bernhardt, feel less composed than organized, here a patchwork quilting clarity, holds its parts in distinct textures and color, like swatches, or a sample catalog, display system proffering an endless variety available. Or a grid stucture from which to hang paint. Like showcases, each flaunting its scrapbook of moments.


See too : Katherine Bernhardt at Venus Over Manhattan , Laura Owens at Capitain Petzel

Jay Chung & Q Takeki Maeda at 356 Mission

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In the smoke of Matias Faldbakken's rocketship ascendancy the artworld was left blind scrambling to adhere a politic for it, to make a critical foundation for the artworld's hot new power iconography, unable to accept that how it looked, rather than any little content it contained, was its appeal.*

But so Maeda and Chung deliver today’s dealings with the legacy of conceptual art’s poetics, i.e. a look that connotes a critical intelligibility (meaning) at the same moment appearing elusive, a withholdingess prevails. It produces the look of an enigma, and with it the attendant lure, reading between the lines of evidence evinced. An imbuing of its images/objects with potentialized meaningfulness, making a dissonance that ramps up the aura of even rubber lain on a floor, of cheap bookshelves and its remnant objects, of a decade of art dealing reduced to its minutes, a text that like Warhol’s diary finds initial interest in the search for rumor and gossip but eventually finds humanity in the piecing together of human lives lived.


*(Who in that moment didn’t want have to their big fuck-all paintings and sell it too. The ironic self-awareness of Faldbakken’s sculpture, like Fontaine, made its recycling of an already co-opted language acceptable, the viewer being smarter than the sculpture a sales value added.)

See too : Nina Beier at David Roberts Art Foundation , Mathew Cerletty at Office Baroque

Jesse Fleming at 356 Mission



Whereas Paul Pfeiffer’s frozen basketball players represented the interior ecstasy of the players before the audience, Fleming’s film works outward into its receiving audience mirrored in its screens. And like Doug Aitken’s use of commercial-production’s affective means as the product itself, Fleming’s immaculate visual spectacle produces a seductive and blinding spell, absorbing its religious imagery into the enrapture of theater. The PR interview names this visual-trance by the psychology term “Flow” in which one is “fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity,” the activity here of its viewing. Yet the full involvement of the quad-channel jumbotron here does more to dislocate the viewer entirely from the it with the hypnosis of its virtual replacement, a dislocating amnesia, like 356 Mission’s other film spectacular, Sturtevant’s FINITE/INFINITE, in its grinding visual takeover of the viewer. But whereas Sturtevant’s film continually ejected the viewer every 11 seconds from its theatrical suspension, Fleming’s virtual supplanting of a continuous and unending “flow” might find its ultimate potential of enraptured viewership in the eponymous fictional film of Infinite Jest, a deadly and ultimate terror.