Aaron Garber-Maikovska at High Art

(link)

An alchemical blend of "dance, tai chi, sign language, and obsessive compulsive disorder" would seem a question the PR tries to answer of why they look just like "Cy Twombly, Joan Mitchell, and Brice Marden" a look that could be said to "situate his work within recognizable trajectories of abstraction," but that "it is not necessarily about borrowed legitimacy" - having now amassed the most common criticisms (besides markets we don't speak of) that many have stockpiled as problems against these- but then offering the solution: that these suggest that "for all the codification that takes place in culture, the essential lies in and just beyond our finger tips, in and beyond language, in the incommunicable." It's an interesting challenge to attempt their defense.

Aaron Garber-Maikovska at Clearing

(link)

It's nice to see a PR admit an artists animist beliefs others attempt camouflaging with the rhetoric of conceptual art or vague reference to philosophic trends. The trend for dancing in front of paintings - of many Ei Arakawa, Otto Knapp, Lutz-Kinoy, et. al. - achieves a clarity here in totemizing and activating the brand beneath simply by its proximal highlighting, ostensibly Lowe's. But animism is a pube hair distinct from some post-Baudrillard product fetishism, see: Merlin Carpenter at MD72, and this exhibitions stark lack of paintings can't help but feel in reaction to the artist's unfortunate market darlingship (a google search page full of auction results and artrank's most collectible artist sub 100k - things only taken seriously by those who take them seriously) and statements in market reports like: "“His work is something to live with and not worry about because the quality is so apparent,” says Schachter who bought one of Garber-Maikovska’s works from a friend and promptly put it in storage." So the performance continues for those paintings unseen, an incantation to conjure critical reception and not market reports, a "language in a state of emergence" to quote Tumlir.



See too: Merlin Carpenter at MD 72