Matthew Lutz-Kinoy at Capitain Petzel

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Certain CAD darlings that just not interest. Repeated, the work is blinkered by a too-bright question, why again? Long ago we were force fed Krebber, now this. Is it foppish noodles there is a taste for? Other artists appear and then, chasm, never again. Others, expected, never arrive. Wrote a Bittenbender review long ago under the expectation, but... no. Instead these backdrops again, again, like the desert of road runner cartoon, duplicated over and over to create the illusion of movement. There isn't movement, only the awaiting of sweet chasm.

Matti Braun at BQ

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What you thought were some lovely glass is instead a cruel deployment of cultural signifiers. Report to the text for your education. The big reveal, the pleasance is actually "meaning."  

 

Dan Walsh at Galerie Thomas Schulte

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We already have flowers in the world, so it's important for artists to invent new ones. The pleasure of Walsh's is seeing the system that grew them. We like organized arrangements. A lawful hand to sort god's variance. Pleasure in the programming of color, light, form, our own little garden not nature's.

Marc Kokopeli at Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi

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From diapers to schoolroom PSAs to adolescent television, Kokopeli's body is pubescing. The forms more attractive, sleeker bodied, and the content, still puerile. It is nostalgia cheese - "playsets for oversized children" - but Kokopeli is always wrapping one more seductive form around another poopier one. (Maybe this one is just prolapsing its seduction.) And as always, Freud-bait: a cigar that isn't a diaper-cigar, a mother's sexual assault content, and us wishing the pyschoanalyst was around for South Park's expulsive toilet humor, so anally expressive. The infantilizing transgression: I express my individuality, my independence, by acting as juvenile as possible, Disney Adults. "With disturbing nonchalance, Marc Kokopeli’s exhibition packs uncomfortable material into zany shapes." It's all so much trojan horsing. And TV was the ultimate device for Empire's smuggling of social indoctrination - the thing we brought into our homes to let someone else program, our choice of monoculture. No matter how toilet the napkin. The point being, what if the artist could get you to identify with the Funko pop, the culturally abject, the diaper?

Julian Irlinger at Galerie Thomas Schulte

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If we're in the moment of returns-to, it is important choosing a corpse that feels fresh. And while midcentury modern design would be the past a sell-by date, its animation techniques the least picked over carcass we have (despite Jordan Wolfson and some others dabbling in the 2010s.) Animation nostalgia still has a bit of bite. And a narrative lure. It's made to tell stories, be legible. So the hook is set. The Trojan horse armed for delivery. Every window is an animation cel, part of a larger story. It just needs you to do the illuminating projection. 

Ross Bleckner at Capitain Petzel

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Always appreciated Bleckner for this pathos: they failed to be pretty. Always obstinate in their vague ugly. Which as intended pretties made them sad. But there is something about this show that fails at that failing. They look like failed paintings, like they were never intended to be a sucked pretty. 

Christelle Oyiri at Galerie Buchholz

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Pitchfork just released "The 100 Best Rap Albums of All Time." There's all sort of ways to recast memory as historical monument. To upcycle your fandom. Memory concrete. "cultural signifiers bedazzled. For reconsumption. An artistic filter that serves as admission ticket for its cultural content into the halls of art." How else would "movements that developed outside the dominant models manage to preserve their history?” This is a little more personal, idiosyncratic, than Pitchfork.  It's true, no one needed a Jonathan Taylor Thomas painting to nostalgia the 90s. Appreciate that this artification isn't in the umpteenth rehash of modernism, or painting, mild abstraction. It's just cast as monument, clearly. With some little skull earrings. Perfect for the museum we're rearranging. 

see too: "But maybe his continual painting of hamsters, or making hamsters of his subjects, that cloying adorbz of the neotenic focus-group-tested rodent/celebrity, is what drives the want to wring the necks of those oh so vulnerable and useless. Everyone so cute, loved, like the adored really needed a court painter."

Carolyn Lazard at Trautwein Herleth

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Cargo cult archaeologists pretending our white walls auto-study the cultural wreckage placed into it. Cady Noland one of the first of these artist-archeologists. All the invisible crud of culture, handcuffed to its highest showroom. It was mean, and sad, because it was so impotent. This pre-inscribed failure is also when Lazard's own cultural scissoring is best. When the object fails. When a sky illuminates with only replacement sunshine. (Note, art could also be described as replacement sunshine.) When there is tension in the large distinction between hospitality and a hospital - between care and its functionalization - between a band-aid and a mother's compress. This failure is sympathetic because it's the same failure as art to provide any real illumination, only the comfort of its facsimile. 

Ei Arakawa-Nash at Galerie Max Mayer

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The Sam McKinniss means of cultural signifiers bedazzled. For reconsumption. An artistic filter that serves as admission ticket for its cultural content into the halls of art. This allow the relief of speaking about the world, history, instead of art. For McKinniss the format is painting, here blinkered abstraction. An Artification. Upcycle your fandom. Drop it onto art's island where it will perform its cargo cult duties. We appreciate how earnest and plain this performance is. No sugar coating the sugar coating. This is life, in the stamp of art. With softness and affection. Maybe like yesterday the only way out is through, simply set it plain and pre-fossilized for our living archeology. 

See too: "... at some point, desire itself became "critical." Your teenage bedroom becomes a "site," a "presupposition" of "critical vanity"... Putting cultural touchstones on display you obviously vampire their cultural relation if not their capital, forming a portrait of culture through its blood. Consumption becomes a form of value."

Robert Colescott at Galerie Buchholz

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Galleries sure seem to have a magic power in finding and exhibiting "rediscovered" artists' safest work. Maybe it's the simply the work left in the estate for private sale; maybe its may be leaning toward further evidence of a politically charged artist being accepted "so long as your language is abstracted into wallpaper." This work from his Cairo days is interesting, but cynical parts run high these days. And Colescott was a master of cynicism. The eighties paintings have sarcasm in their surface, it's in the brushwork, their cold cartoon. They dripped with cynicism. So admittedly it is interesting to see this earlier more probing "earnest" painting. Colescott is important, not only as forebear to today's "modernism colorized" but also in an escape from it, in participating but not necessarily letting the master's tools be the only ones you allow yourself. 

 

see too: "It has nothing to do with the painter and everything to do with institutions who helm our ship's navigation relentlessly toward this inkblot goal. Mladen Stilinovic: 'an artist you cannot speak english is no artist.' But he had it wrong. The point is not to speak. The point is to make yourself abstract enough it doesn't matter."

Louis Fratino at Galerie Neu

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No one in a Fratino painting ever smiles. The highest emote is a cattle calm. Even the explicitly coital figures could also be sleeping. It's like the Wes Anderson school of emotion. Everyone is trapped behind style, artifice, and middle class ennui. Combine it with the painterly trend for lounging. Figures like cats in sunbeams, the same anatomy, tired. Canvases read like the word "languid" in all caps.  All the more if its in the nostalgic melange of modernism. Real comfortable genre. So it is surprising to find it works better in sculpture. That languid calm men in sculpture, after centuries of being women's role, is mildly refreshing. A simple genre switch, a key change, maybe it's easier to hear the Kouros. Maybe it is as simple as that it's rare to see a sculpture of man calmly holding a baby. Because everyone eats ass these days. Simply a somewhat new image, even vaguely.

See too: "The asinine quantity of pictures of bodies today, instagram influencers, lotion advertising, pornography. The vast amount of flesh smeared on everything, our stores full of them, our faces spread at 10 meter heights. Everywhere; a hall of mirrors. As if Bernd and Hilla Becher had foretold of a, this, complete surveillance, ... And our bodies become so extracted, mined, and repackaged, that we start to feel like we don't have bodies at all. Just things, mocked as meat space, something stupid or without sense, or heat, or passion, or sensitivity, but whitened teeth smiles mined. And but then here a photo of a body still surprising, that can endear us to it, these weird incongruous things not yet fully extracted."

Anne Imhof at Galerie Buchholz

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This is the merch stand that subsidizes the concert. Like baseball cards having little to do with their stars hitting power, the people collect them anyway. A squiggle, the author's scrawl on paper, a gesticulation in architecture. This is abstract expressionism. Drip of the author. 

SoiL Thornton at Galerie Neu

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Letting the world into the gallery. Sand or baseballs or pompoms. There is no meaning here. There is only the world, which is a shopping mall, which allows purchase of identity. This is good. This is the whatever of perfection: just a world. You can construct your own. The biblical "for dust you are and to dust you will return" is, as far as we know of entropy, scientifically accurate. A sand grain falls for each day in your hourglass. You can go into the world and order pompoms instead. This is the perfection of whatever: your dust. 

Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt at Buzzer Reeves

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Writers spend pagespace wondering why Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt hasn't gotten his due. A golden bio, a lovely art, and galleries allot the tentative groupshow, museums retrospectives at secondary locations. Everyone sees success but no one can quite realize it. Is it because we need it to be outsider? Does jankiness only appear polished when found in the rough, feels discovered, rare? Perhaps the inability for Lanigan-Schmidt to find mainstream success is that diamonds in the rough are only valuable for the potential gains. But what if the diamond gains are to remain unrealized, do we still want the stone? Does making outsider art inside kill it?

Christine Tien Wang & Ken Lum at Galerie Nagel Draxler

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At root both artist's text/image relation is a vibe ambivalent, cynical(?) The reproduced memes, the ironic signage. The story in the PR is telling. A European artist at dinner casts designation: "oriental." Surely one can understand an apathy with words, surely empathize a distrust to identification, "organization."  In relation to words a vibe that might be described of white knuckling, teeth gritted, smiling, polite laughter. The detachment in relation to words might be one of self survival. Of cool rage. We ask for violence to be turned to comedy to make it palatable. For trauma turned to NPR bites, the "asian" section of grocery store. For both its served cold and you get to turn it over on your palate and question whether learning to like it makes you a better liberal. It is fun for the chef. I like it. 

see too: Christine Wang at Nagel Draxler Kabinett, Ken Lum at Wattis

Amelie von Wulffen at Barbara Weiss

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The mud monster is real, is painting, boogeyman of the artworld, hiding on everyone's mind - it is the imago haunting art. "Painting is filled with horror, the calls coming from inside the house." Von Wulffen is drawing in the mud our repressed object. The diamond of painting remains in the rough. The best painters today, Euler, Eisenman, Churchman, von Wulffen, are cartoonists are heart. They are not in service to the church of painting. It's means to draw the world. In our mud of mirage. Painting is a stupid ghost to be haunted by, facet diamonds of. 

See too: Nicole Eisenman at Astrup Fearnley Museet, All Amelie von Wulffen

Petra Cortright at Société

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Cortright of the internet. Of the self in the matrix, trying to express through the grate of industrial filters. It was all too ahead of its time. It is simply now the world we live. "The Naumanian axiom of, as an artist whatever I do in the studio is art [is] updated as: whatever an internet artist does on the internet must be art. The difference is that, today, everyone has this studio, and privileging the play of those who call themselves artists as somehow more self-aware or capable is a crumbling distinction."

So a return to painting, to flowers, to the categorically undeniable marker of art. In the action movie, the matrix conjures guns, lots of them. In art, we conjure our own tropes. In genre, the delivering of expectation doesn't kill satisfaction. No, in fact getting what is expected is what people pay money to see. Guns and flowers. You just want more of it. Because then shooting can begin. You line the henchman with squibs, oh god it will be good, so much plate glass, but here they never go off. We just get flowers, memento without mori. Painting's goon, praying to be released from his hell, his existence, trope.

See too: "Post-internet art" as become the Kinko's avant garde - Petra Cortright at Team Gallery, Inc, Petra Cortright at Société

Tina Braegger at Société

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Is the cultural totem a "critical" experiment, an artifact for the semiologic theology of art? Or is the cultural totem merely the container that smuggles painting through the door, under an assumed Visa stamp of criticality? A MacGuffin driving the plot of Press Release? Are these merely formalist exercises posing as some grand statement about the content? i.e. just paintings? These are all questions that the PR is happy to lead up to asking, but which of course, does no answers. No, as always, these answers are left for you to parse dear viewer. (Art writing's "questions" is the death-in-life life support of art afterall - this art's true meaning, providing the ritual of questions.) All I can think of is George Condo and how pastiche excuses a painting strikingly associable to Picasso pricing. Pastiche permits mediocrity to pass, as "critical," until eventually it normalizes as "greatness" as "painting" or at least prices that denote it.

Yaerim Ryu at Peres Projects

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Advertising so robbed the corpus of idealization from the hands of artists that now artistic representation is doomed to forever paint us as lumbering buffoons. As canon fodder, to painting's demands. "A state of painting that has sunk so far into endless permutable bent-figuration - that someone actually tending to the body feels like free healthcare." A desire for the tender of wounds. 

See too: Karen Fan, Caroline Zhang at Gern en Regalia, Erwin Wurm at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, “Automatic Door” at Park View / Paul Soto

Nora Turato at Sprüth Magers

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What Nauman did for neon, Turato does for motivational posters, bus adverts. The contemporary illuminate manuscript to nonsensical ... sadness? - that empty pang after finding yourself having read the billboard before even knowing you were reading the billboard. Your brain wants to "make sense" of its surroundings, and you read it for clues, end up reading the billboard that has commandeered your evolutionary wiring to sell you a half naked woman in socks. It's not your fault you read it, not your fault it barely makes sense. You were not intended for spaces like these. Nothing is rational in art or advertising, for both there is only that same distending space that creates a void, a meaning that must be filled, consumerist or otherwise. 

Perhaps this is part of our Modern Gothic.


See too: Matt Keegan, Kay Rosen at Grazer Kunstverein, Hanne Lippard & Nora Turato at Metro Pictures, Gene Beery at Shoot the Lobster, Karl Holmqvist at Sant’Andrea de Scaphis, John Giorno at Almine Rech, Nora Turato at LA MAISON DE RENDEZ-VOUS, Nora Turato at Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein