Anicka Yi at Kunsthalle Basel

(link)

Yi’s various means of display are frames. The frames, generally a referent in themselves, come preloaded with the expectation of what should be contained. Dryer portholes, aquariums with grow-color lights, positive-pressure bubbles, cooking pots, the Prada hallway, each is a self-contained system of expectations for the sculpture. That these expectations are met with bodily concoctions that actively undermine the expectation is their surrealism.  Like the surrealist classic, lobster telephones, supplanting bio-waste mystery for what should be held as the “clean” idea. Spooky bodily excrement in the pure objects of culture.

See too:  Anicka Yi at Cleveland Museum of Art

Anicka Yi at Cleveland Museum of Art, Transformer Station

(Anicka Yi at Cleveland Museum of Art, Transformer Station)

Surrealism at best estranged the world in a way that its signs were able to express something latent within it, at worst it was an attempt to make art more interesting than the world by disregarding its rules and positing the makers own. “The surrealist claims his dream world as more interesting than your dull nasty everyday one...”as Reinhardt theorized it. It was a debate between Adorno and Benjamin, whether the juxtaposition of contradictions could actually reveal something about them, or further obfuscate a world already slipping under fog.  Marx’s ironic use of the fantastic, vampires and werewolves, mocked the superstitions of capital’s veil. Ranciere, “On the other hand,” thought, “the work which builds understanding and dissolves appearances kills, by so doing, the strangeness of the resistant appearance that attests to the non-necessary or intolerable character of a world.”
And today we have weights shining behind tempura-fried flowers and a press release stating that it’s “analyiz[ing] the acceptance of what it means to be human,” the acceptance seeming finally having stopped, given up, to smell roses, push up daisies, an exhibition called Death.

See too: "Flat Neighbors" at Rachel Uffner , Group Show at Bortolami

Group Show at Bortolami and Galerie Neu at Gladstone Gallery
Ian Cheng, Melanie Gilligan, Carissa Rodriguez, Anicka Yi
John Knight, Manfred Pernice, Tom Burr, Klara Liden, Kitty Kraus, Gedi Sibony, Reena Spaulings, Sergej Jensen





Bortlomi
You go see these shows only to be confronted again with its screen representation. Why do you even get out of bed, its representation, historical sediment, becomes the real version in catalogs. Arendt's we're all images to others. All this stuff is on monitors anyway save for Anicka Yi’s art-fetish-displays, or maybe Melanie Gilligan’s lenticulars, primeval .gifs for the real world, the most basic version of affirmed presence, good job you got a bed sort. And eventually with Ian Cheng’s Oculus Rift experiments, not shown here, it’ll all be here. Remember when an artist made Katamari Damacy- that was a sculpture. Carissa Rodriguez’s prints at least suggest a complicit defeat in attempting critique of the new digital supremacy, everyone else seems left-behind in the uncommitment to digital acceleration’s disposibility.

Neu
Which makes Reena Spauling’s poor portraits all the digitally-smarter for their commitment to disposable ideation. Spauling’s whole project premised on every whatever-is-beyond-insipid self-reflexive “art idea” executed with jest, and smart, social cred made to be liquidated and poured through the network of pipes, brilliant. And then you’ve got John Knight actually still dragging real objects across the world, displacing them with antiquated labor-power, and just really the most needless idea of reflexive context art that he’s known for, reminiscent of the sisyphean Heizer’s levitating the mass of his rocks to get his jollies off, and so in the context of all that it makes sense why so much of the other art is limp in these shows, barely able to erect itself in bed in the morning, and because its not hard to get really hard to get up in bed when you’ve got some form of super-cool steroids like all these people seem to have.