In the inky pool of the forest we have a press release seeing Heidegger, Hell, Nazis, Jews, home, Grandmothers, Rabbis, Orthodoxy. This is the power of the inkblot:
In dark forests we imagine predators, in trees see intelligence. In confusion we excel at inventing gods, or meaning.
Dressing up painting in bondage femme, kinda fun, like when my cousins dressed their younger brother up in a big pink dress to be paraded around the family gathering, photographed, and be mocked for years - there's something essentialist about the fun, a criticism leveled at Judy Chicago who also used the car as a phallus to be semantically tortured - there's fun in dress up, the critique will go on for decades, "Hey painting remember when we dressed you up as a girl?"
Horror is implication, suggestion, threat. Which makes it perfect foil for art, which must perpetuate endless affect. Horror must eventually reveal its monster, but art can go on interminably delaying its reveal. Because art only need be a throbbing box, a tell tale heart for our guilt beneath the floorboards.
See too: James Bantone at Centre d'Art Contemporain, Pope.L; “Beyond the Black Atlantic” at Kunstverein Hannover (Sandra Mujinga),
Stecklow takes signs and basically subjects them to any permutation that can be reasoned (though aren't necessarily reasonable.) It's generative, endless seeming. "Long associative chains." Content pulled from the air. Which was corn. Which lead to ears. You can read about it. There is a logic but it might as well be meaningless. It is merely the means to free associate another thing. Isn't that a metaphor for all art today? Conjure from air not an artwork, but a process that can endlessly generate artwork? Stecklow makes it more fun because at least the machine is transparent. Willfully arbitrary. Rhoadsian. Maybe Darren Bader. Qs of how is meaning generated?
See too: Jesse Stecklow at Chicken Coop Contemporary & Adrian Piper at Hamburger Bahnhof
Everyone knows eating a whole turd isn't bad. But finding poop in your hamburger is terrible. This is the small distinction of Mayer's from say, Shimizu, Smith, Oehlen - Mayer occasionally lets himself get it right. Which is an unnerving feeling. Most just force you to swallow the whole log, but when the garnish is brought to temp the whole order falls apart. We had been keeping plates separate. But then here's a well rendered face amidst the brown. Uncertainty we find difficult.
Unintentionally, our preservation of artist's lives come to resemble Thek's meat boxes. Most moving: tragedy as the post-mortem of life cut up and pieced out into sterile containers, a dead butterflies, we marvel at creation only god could create. Now separate from. Who do we pay alms to here? Science cannot adequately describe the natural world as it is lived, there is a disjunction between life and its evidence, autopsy.
"It wasn’t that group of late Rembrandt self-portraits. It was their unrestored frames. Dull and dusty and cracked in the corners, they were the materialization of the age and poverty worn on the represented faces, of the humanity reflected in the represented eyes. The frames provided those poor, passive pictures with a haven from the inhuman grandeur of the museum’s imperial architecture, held them in their own history—not a history of masterpieces but the history of lived life. They enacted a kind of resistance that the paintings themselves couldn’t mount, being as they were so contained by that architecture and all it represented. The waitress in the café on the museum’s second floor, where I took refuge behind a massive marble column, sobbing, had obviously seen this before. She sat me down and administered Vienna’s other famous cure: a cup of hot chocolate and a piece of Sacher torte. She wouldn’t let me pay."
Or: The yellow preventative against conceptualism.
At first an odd duo. But time deironizes, dissolves the difference between stupid and reason to a painting leaden before you. Though Förg may be lineage in the neanderthal abstraction to Joe Bradley or Josh Smith avant-nappies, in the end Feehily's seemingly less industrial more underdog engine may be no differently dead.
See too: Fergus Feehily at Misako & Rosen, Günther Förg at Barbel Graesslin
"What kind of aesthetic experience can be admitted by a hardcore, uncompromising, materialist, sociologically informed “institutional critic” like myself?
"We are all here members of cultural fields. We carry, each of us, our institutions inside ourselves. There’s a museum in here, inside of me, with the Corinthian columns, the grand staircase, and the mezzanine. There’s a system of organization: the way I see things. There are objects and images, and there are texts, and there are voices explaining. There’s an archive that also contains my memories. And there’s a basement where I keep the things I don’t want to show."
Andrea Fraser - Why Does Fred Sandback's Work Make Me Cry?
One of the great essays on art, attempting to mend two halves, a contradiction, art.
"If you believe art to be some abstracted form of sexual plumage it would make sense that all art is a form of "love," shimmering objects like peacock's tail. It is perhaps why Chuck Close could assault by mistaking an interest in his object as an interest in him, the conflation of art with its sexual extension. We don't speak of art as love - Gonzalez-Torres had to all but force the issue - because we fear this sublimated form of desire bubbling back up its primordial grease. Art is an extension of us, our selves, our home, sometimes as an innuendo at the end of a rod."
Recently received, a lovely email (yet responded, apologies), which among else broached a question of cheesiness, which long thought short: there exists an allergy to work that isn't actively in some way rejecting the viewer. Cheese cloys. And we're antagonists. Afflict the comforted and all that. At the same time, Art has an abusive history with commodifying pain and dispossession as late-stage heroism (generally after the halo reward is blocked by several feet of dirt.) So a hard time reconciling an embrace of Wong's body-ill-at-ease on one hand, with personal jade over de Nieves celebratory excess. And no flies on fruit ever prevented the consumption of a little dutch vanity. Jewels past their expiration date are in fact are historically ripe for most riche taste.
see too: Kathleen Ryan at Ghebaly Gallery
"like bodily stones complicating the minimalist mantra that what you see is what you see, because what you see is sometimes sexually confusing..."
A lot of art brandish, monumentalize, these fears into nervous objects: In the ongoing surge of the bodily-lump these find some territory for the fear that asks for understanding, an abstract press release that is good, spells it out, these shrines to our apophenia."We all fear for lumps inside us, unchecked growth, a malignancy, 'matter out of place,' 'the contaminated diversities that proliferate in the dump.' Fear of toxins, poisons, heavy metal build-up, of heavy concentrations of micro-plastics in the great Pacific beverage, in parts per million, in tumors, cysts, in bisphenol A, BPA's estrogenic symptoms to counteract the now "natural" amounts of viagra in rivers, our vessels leaded with a new Rome, our castrati and fears dispersed, everywhere and nowhere. These things are bioaccumulative, they add up in sediments in your blood, fat, balls..."
