Shinpei Kusanagi at Altman Siegel

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This is our most nostalgic era. Our "great again" era, a rehash era. Our reboots. Remakes. The artworld nostalgia that pervades like Marvel universes. The broad brushstrokes are already all there, the script merely updated. Or not. All things must pass. Unless you just endlessly perpetuate them. 

Group Show at Altman Siegel (Wade Guyton)

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Because history is more interesting than painting. Because culture more surreal than surrealism. Because the unconscious of society already printed for you. Now it's a plaque-as-painting for a museum to own. To allow them to put the didactic next to. In a museum you need a painting to mark it. That's just how museums, dumbly, work. 

See too: Wade Guyton at Academie Conti & Le Consortium, Wade Guyton at Friedrich Petzel

Koak at Altman Siegel

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People bent like pipes for their decorative purposing. The painter demands composition, extraction, humans repurposed for painting's ends, how modern. Arabesque motifs get harsher until the ballet seem inhuman doll-like, Picasso rips apart models and we find this intoxicating. Our runway models and their own body's El Grecoing. Etiolated for the consumption. There is discrepancy between what things represent and what they are: beautiful.


see too: Julien Nguyen at Modern Art, Lisa Yuskavage at Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, Louisa Gagliardi at Open Forum

Shannon Ebner at Altman Siegel

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There's too much information on the text - depictedly wet letters on photographically dewy walls - that don't function as fonts in maximizing readability, instead letters in competition with statement. Which this short-circuiting of language - renege on its duty to communicate cleanly - could create some weird warping as reading becomes an act of will against text, no longer communication super highways but entering the bushwhacked terrain of Christoper Wool say, or diverse cultural fauna of Jack Pierson. The desire to sediment text as object terrain is a long time one. A love for text to self-expose. Typography nerds rejoice. Brecht's distancing effect and a self-reflexive indexing in quotes about photography. Finding interest in one's belly button again, how much can you mirror your navel, type of deal.

K.r.m. Mooney at Altman Siegel

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Cady Noland's handcuffs were jewelry for metallized wrists, about how we attach people to a world. A pearl sets off the clavicle. SFchronicle called them "spiritless" after getting it correct that"their relationship to the body is part of the art." And the gallery wears them, their wreckage as jewels. Lack the imagination to see the institution as the digestive body that it is. The engraving block shown here is intended to anchor small fine things to the earth. So they can be manipulated into delicate forms. Here - without its rubber base - untethered, a listless buoy weighted. In the other room copper bite plates allow you an orthodontics to ground yourself in the case of electrical storm as well as wear the institutions like bling: the white walled architecture clenched to your teeth like a grill. Some of Paul Wall's grills cost $30,000 but these walls cost more.

See too: Lucy Skaer at MRAC, K.r.m. Mooney at Pied-á-terre