Monika Baer Am Rhein Kunsthalle Bern

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The small shock of a joke, just enough, a surprise to the viewer befuddled. A balancing act: not too much be rejected as random, but just enough to be comedy. Painting was long ago converted to interface, an conscious interaction between painter viewer. Painter has the mic. The surprise is fun, funny, played for laughs in the deadpan space of art. 

See too: Monika Baer at Neuer Berliner Kunstverein

Ryan Gander at Kunsthalle Bern

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There is a parallel between conceptual art and murder scenes. Not in the interpretation of clues, but of detective and conceptual artist turning a messy world into object, language, into document. Turn a world's blood and guts into evidence, into levers for the legal, testaments and a shared concern for documentation, certainty in measurement. Both the detective and the conceptual artist turn the world into a story, relying on aesthetic or truth, it's attempting one that you can get an audience to swallow, convince.

Michael Krebber at Kunsthalle Bern

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Remember when this was fresh? was fun?  Krebber's "preferring not to" the herald of his artistic progeny, fantasizing that maybe they wouldn't have to either. And so artistry's lack became a claim of radical "protest," artist's claiming "strike" on the walls of the institutions that would have them, taking sumptuous bites of the hand that had become feed.  Promising the academic artist a taste of social cool, and the socially posturing a pen of legitimacy. All very radical then, yes. Then we saw video of cops killing people. It's clever writing trope to then ask if a world where these are still interesting is better or worse.

Shirana Shahbazi at Kunsthalle Bern



Do something to it, then do something more. Like many “young” photographers today Shahbazi works at estrangement of the mass commons of archetypal/cliche cultural images. Shahabazis format and frames shift both between and within exhibitions, here the “roadtrip,” which having something done, and then something a little more, shift in their continual detachment from the real, until rendered neuter, until we feel them not at all, becoming something so overly familiar as to become foreign, crumbling its content to be mocked by the clownish aggro of intensely hued walls’ overbearing presence, a means vacillating between a self-flagellation for the photos sentimental printed nostalgia and an ironic overlay of cheer, laughter for the slaughter of content. That as the PR mentions these could be anyone’s instagram photos, the new banal spectacular, the dissolution of experience within the grand illusion of the individual for the cloud, a generic humanism.

See too: Annette Kelm at Gio Marconi

Vern Blosum at Kunsthalle Bern



Did you know the Boltonia Asteroides is rhizomatous.

The Baldessari anti-jokes may be more kin Lutz Bacher’s desolate informationals, or Zobernig’s gallows, or even Josh Smith not-non-paintings (stop signs to boot) but Vern Blosum’s fake artistry might be just the most relevant today, possibly blanker than Codax’s market strategies (who seemed to forget that Warhol was blankest of all.) To attempt a further hollowing of pop art, now that’s what I call abysmal. These are just fake paintings. And pretty dismal fake paintings, though only slightly worse than Baldessari’s endlessly celebrated hoodwinks. Who cares who did it first; these are fakes for the ages, if only because they exist, dryly, in front of us in a museum. I mean "planned anticipation", who could ask for a better fake painting than that.