Allan McCollum at Mary Boone

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McCollum's brute force attack on "creativity," ironizing uniqueness with its interminable variation, like try and stand out in this crowd kid, pulling out the cornerstones of value with machine made uniqueness, the scary "algorithm," and handcrafted replaced with stand-ins, surrogates, and stage props. Making uniqueness bland. How cruel. Showing on the doll where the creativity hurt him. It all ends in death. Did you think your bones were unique. etc.


See too: Rob Pruitt at MOCAD

Andrea Fraser at Museum der Moderne

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Fraser's kingdom to the firmly theorized ground of Institutional Critique is a problem. Though deservedly royalty of this particular genre, her bannership of - what has always appeared to be a very philosophically neat game - is the whitewashing of her messy, and messed, relationship to it. Fraser hasn't really been a good catholic in the halls of theory, despite her endless use of it. For all the calculated and brilliant and clear work and writing the artist has done, the more irreducible and psychological aspects of her practice is often left off in service to a sort of tidy moralizing theory that has become IC's legacy and leaving off the weird latent part of Fraser's wager of oneself as an institution and reflect, and this hall of mirrors has always left Fraser in tears, or naked.  The coldness of the tears isn't so much a gaming of representation performed, but hysteric postion from a dumb expected of course come true, a real catch-22 resultant attempts to reconcile competing desires incompatible. "Why Does Fred Sandback's Work Make Me Cry?" almost explicitly iterates this dissonance with two competing halves, an essay great because the tension between the two aren't reconciled, and leaves a giant gaping hole for IC's neat exterior, and contains no tidy moralizing, however moral a character. Fraser's work is more like a mental tentacle distributing its distress.