Hadi Fallahpisheh at Efremidis

(Andrew Kreps, Efremidis)

There was nothing really "new" in Wade Guyton's rocket launch career. The "new" was a false-promise of a new technology for realizing old dreams, a printer for our unconscious. New tech, means, provides a look of promise, of advancement. And Fallahpisheh's more like Tala Madani's, better for its ancient and dumb themes in drawing dark projection screens. This is what drawing is. Old.

See too: Tala Madani at 303 Gallery, Wade Guyton at Academie Conti & Le Consortium, Tala Madani at David Kordansky

João Maria Gusmão and Pedro Paiva at Andrew Kreps

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As if the several images of projectors illuminating gallery walls wasn't enough, we brandish the literal celluloid here to state "this is a physical object," a spell to ward off the anonymizing ether of digital networks that would, god forbid, force competition with every other image. Instead we wreath it, frames architecture filmstock perforations. Objects seem to almost fear their dispersion, fear their image against Instagram mass. Kreps website doesn't actually have the photos without their frames, that's a CAD exclusive perhaps ready for its close up. And the celluloid is labelled like a movie, time and all. Walls for protection. It's important to keep you distinct and the gallery in its resplendent pasture, separate from the polloi.

Darren Bader at Andrew Kreps

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There was a small comedy in finding the glitches in new products, on the internet you would see mugs printed with masses of inane image as algorithms auto-designed them, dredging everything available on the internet and place it onto a mug. Walmart's website selling an iPhone case with a man wearing diapers. Everything onto everything. Exponentially increase to the products available without oversight, quantity above all. A tornado of reference and attachment, and the audience attempting to see in the whirl anything to relieve the anxiety of so much garbage, vertigo in feeling one's toes sense the full ocean of production.


See too: Darren Bader at Sadie Coles, Darren Bader at Radio Athènes, Darren Bader at Kölnischer Kunstverein, Darren Bader at Andrew Kreps

Hito Steyerl at Andrew Kreps



Calling the didactic thing didactic doesn't make its didacticism any less abrasive or irritating, and this “didactic educational .mov” is hard in its petulance. Like watching a precocious child play Mozart on the piano, they've mastered it without loving it, dead in life. You feel like less than a zombie watching it. And it berates you for it Steyerl's hypertrophied ability to play the meta-game of art would be fun, if it wasn't so heavily trying to impress just how much fun. This film is the artworld's Garden State, quirky, lovable, pressing all the right buttons, string of pop notes. An aggregate of everything, aggravating the uncomfort of precocious youth.
Entirely meta-knowing: "Look how good I am at harnessing the tropes and meaningful methods of the art world. Watch me be good, but let me also let you know that I know I am good, and let me let you know that there is nothing here for you to know, and that I know there is nothing here for you you should be enjoying for let me let you know that I know that I know this is spectacle and that I am self-consciously self-aware of this fact and let me let you know this whole thing is a meta-game of triple-agenting of he knows that she knows that he knows she knows quagmire of Irony to nth degree that was already summated a decade ago in the Simpsons when a teen at a Smashing Pumpkins show (that's how old this is) is asked if he's being serious and he responds that he doesn't even know anymore, whether he's being serious, and that's the point we've reached, where it doesn’t even matter anymore. Whether we're serious or not or whether we mean it or not, it just does not matter."

Darren Bader at Andrew Kreps



If Darren Bader is experiencing some mania or hesitancy over images/object as least he’s doing it in an interesting way - or the least interesting way - or the least artful, maybe most arty, way. There’s no need to band-aid beauty to anything, and, like M. Creed a sort of categorical impulse over the objects themselves lets them express enough. Each object to its own, because Objects are crazy, and how is it possible to move past this. It’s minimalism on a meta-level, where if we can experience academic hysteria over boxes, stones, and neon in a room, then surely a mere arrangement of some of the world’s products would rub up an equal static charge.
Sure its like “The Busy World of Richard Scary” for adults, but at least you don’t have to look at a room full of paintings again. It would be more interesting to talk about most of these objects sitting on the floor than it would most paintings in galleries today. Some of these objects are miraculous, a lot of the world is; who needs a painting, or worse, art.