New Space Show at Layr & The Old Greyhound Bus Station at Bortolami

(Layr, Bortolami)

New Space day at CAD. An old bus station, a fresh digs. The exhibition space is the thing we're meant acknowledge but also not supposed to really acknowledge. (It would be too base to talk about the space in a true art review.) But yet it's there, the cosmic radiation to art.  I'm not even sure we have a language for its criticism, we only talk about it as a whole, as the common cube, to everyone. The implicit gold wreath. That now occasionally self-acknowledges? The exhibition's space is the watermark for the gallery's brand. the identity - so of course there is desire to puff its chest. 

Faith Wilding at Bortolami

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Wilding is precursor is this suggestive era, to our biomorphic and questionable lumps. The minimalist mantra no longer holds up. It is no longer "'what you see is what you see,' because what you see is sometimes sexually confusing, leather seats look like the lap of a tanned naked man." Think Nairy Baghramian, Lucy Bull, Ron Nagle, everyone using the word "bodily." The pareidolic. "a meaningful interpretation on a nebulous stimulus." You even start to see other artist in them."Surrealism works for today as art must be a fount eternal, and so the point today is to overlay as much as information as possible, until it blurs, slips, make inkblots"

Nairy Baghramian at Museo Tamayo, Lucy Bull at High Art

Paul Mpagi Sepuya at Bortolami

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You would think a harem would be sexier. Be fun. But the bodies look refrigerated. This isn't service to sex, to flesh, or fun, but to the camera to be bent around. That screaming art marker, composition. This is fallout of Picasso. Of art turned to manners. Turned to need for looking like art. A man waving his arms spinning a sign saying "COMPOSITION." To mark it as art. Market it as art. The camera is the merely the node for conceptual static. A photography exchanging the desires of people for demands of art. For color and composition as a bad ruler. "The studio" is a machine akin the office paper shredder, a function for limitless abstraction.

Mary Obering at Bortolami

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God minimalism looks good. You want to own a house to design it around these things. Egg tempera's matte provides a gentle clean sheet, cathartic to eyes in the digital. Aged just enough, the slightest patina of history. Like cute animals begging to be hung on walls, you gotta do it for them.

Deborah Remington at Bortolami

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A sci-fi abstract expressionism, an alternate universe. Not the thing one sees but a lush aluminum foil, accumulate reference like car accidents, tin that bleeds. Adamantium ribcages and space horizons. They are what J.G. Ballard was to modernism, an excess to an austerity, probably impossible not to read its wet heat as critique of then's plain steel composition. Which now we like. 

Anna Ostoya at Bortolami

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"Every painting today is a process painting." Painting becomes "generating-any-excuse-to-get-the-paint-on-canvas." You put the referent in the shredder to make a puzzle appear. Which looks like a painting. Gives the PR something to talk about. 

See too: Anna Ostoya at Silberkuppe

Caitlin Keogh at Bortolami

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Illustration is meant to bring clarity, to denote, delineate, resolve. So when it draws surrealism there's a tension in the elegant lines not necessarily clarifying.* But what is important is that we feel something is being told, explained. Like if John Wesley designed Tarot cards, pearls for pentacles or whatever. The Tarot illustration provides its own oracle, meaning. I guess the illusionary orbs also serve to retension the flatness, "the roughly two inches of depth" that had become its own trend, "the depth of iPad" "Its less the digitalization of painting than its conversion to iOS. Then made surreal." Said before.
Clarity and "recognition is a visual strategy used by the advertorial (logo) or systems (icons) that has reached saturation with touchscreens, GUIs, facebook forums. Our brains, wired for recognition, are berated with this, icons forcing recognition of themselves. [Clarity and recognition become their own force, violence.] Painters begin adopting this as their history, the Magrittean version of objects as linguistic symbols. These paintings delay the force of recognition as a palliative, lessening the slap of apprehension by averting it."

*A similar tension when its clarity must wrest with the delicate complexity of a rose. The conversion of complexity to something digitally clear.


See too: Anne Neukamp at Greta Meert, Emily Mae Smith at Rodolphe Janssen, Orion Martin at Bodega Ray Yoshida at David Nolan, Sascha Braunig at Kunsthall Stavanger, Alice Tippit at Night Club, Lui Shtini at Kate Werble, Sascha Braunig at Rodolphe Janssen, Mathew Cerletty at Office Baroque,

Lena Henke at Bortolami

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The pig got transformed into a literal low polygon mesh, a chainmail frozen ghost, as a print that misrecalls its form, like a misremembering of its german history (that the PR attempts reanimation of). Ambiguousness as the sort of vague myths that float through history, echoing as subliminal ghosts. Attach words to the things the PR says: "tray-sized vulvic rose petals"
Ambiguousness as a means for the simultaneity of surrealism. A tree sort of looks like a horse so we can put them together; a cloud can look like anything, much like a turd, some will see interest.


See too: Nina Beier at Metro Pictures, Ron Nagle at Modern Art,

Richard Aldrich at Adrian Rosenfeld

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"his ever-accumulating practice."  

Anyone spending any significant time in struggling art students' studios would recognize these experimental searchings, objects-as-attempts, considered less for what they are than the potential in an artistic career, (i.e. it's not contemporarily gleaming right now but it could be polished later if I chose this object-as-trajectory as my career,) the object as long term possibility. It was Aldrich's decision to accumulate rather than throw the fits, recognizing their stupid interest as potentials, each a tangential to the great whale of capital P Painting. Because there's an artist somewhere that does this full-time, which we were all trying to avoid such jobs.  Aldrich's attempts at personally expanding the field of painting attend their comedy-almost by feeling so part-time. Because surely there is actually a fool doing this full time.



See too: Richard Aldrich at Gladstone Gallery

Tom Burr at Bortolami

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This Holiday season pick up several copies of John Waters and Bruce Hainley's Art: A Sex Book as the perfect-for-pretty-much-anyone gift. Friends, family, even enemies will be delightfully displeased by the vulgarity, and any extras to be kept pre-wrapped in your office all year as impromptu gifts for occasions you forgot.  There's something for everyone inside including a lovely short conversation between the authors on Burr, and the latent uses of architectural forms, objects of ulterior services.

Until your copy arrives tide your yule with George Baker's "The Other Side of the Wall" a primary essay on Burr online here.

Excerpt:
"Besides objecting to the sculpture’s interference with the way the plaza functioned, Titled Arc’s detractors were prone to fantasizing about the life of Serra’s sculpture at night, about the graffiti and public urination that it seemed to attract, attributing larger social problems to its form [...] Upon its first exhibition in Germany, Deep Purple was positioned by Burr in such a way as to exacerbate the functions for which Tilted Arc was originally vilified. Sited in order to create a pocket of empty space between the museum and a hedgerow that serves as a border between the museum and an adjacent public park [...]

"What, one might ask, does Burr’s Camp vision of sculpture do to Minimalism? My list is partial (as this project cannot be said to be concluded, and has only gained strength in Burr’s most recent works): Camp fixates on the Minimalist object’s surface. It makes Minimalism purple. Or it makes it shiny. Or, if it keeps the black-and-white neutrality, or retains the naked industrial material, it makes Minimalism all butch and sexy, often by comparing it, via photo-works, to icons of excessive masculinity like Jim Morrison. Camp might then value Minimalist surfaces as “superficial,” but it also invests these surfaces in depth: Camp likes Minimalism’s fakeness, revels in its extreme challenge to nature. Camp turns Minimalism into theater, into so many duplicitous stage sets ripe for the enactment of “drama.” Camp takes a Minimalist form and makes a bar of it, throws an imaginary party around it. Camp makes Minimalism festive. Camp turns Minimalism into objects of decor, into furniture or things to be used. Camp here means smoking a cigarette and snubbing it out dramatically in the rakish ashtray placed on top of a Minimalist form. Camp sees Minimalist geometries and refuses their abstraction, linking them instead to fashion, say, or to glamour—as when Burr’s Deep Purple took Serra’s “arc” and shrunk it, exhibiting it first in an exhibition called Low Slung, as if the form evoked a plunging waistline, the curvaceous splendor of a pair of low-rise pants, some new form of sartorial Minimalism. Sontag again: “Camp is the attempt to do something extraordinary. But extraordinary in the sense, often, of being special, glamorous. (The curved line, the extravagant gesture)” (284). Camp values Minimalism and the avant-garde more generally for their extremism, their naiveté, their artificiality and failures. It pays special attention to the moments when the Minimalist object was torn down or censored, or to Minimalist artists who were rejected (by their critics, by their peers—i.e., Tony Smith) or who died young (Robert Smithson). [...] Camp focuses on the Minimalists who were macho, or sometimes phobic (Donald Judd), exposing And, above all else, Camp simply adores the fact that Minimalism, in perhaps one of its greatest failures, thought it could escape the condition of subjectivity altogether—Camp really thinks this is so cute (and so sad)—for Camp is nothing if not an extreme exacerbation of subjectivity, sensibility, taste..."

Daniel Buren at Bortolami

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The ascetic refusal Buren's game of course eventually gives expression to Heimo Zobernig. Buren's game aimed outward as critique of the walls, someone would eventually see the opening and drive it at the art itself. Zobernig wetting the sand beneath feet to prove it was quicksand all along. The mental fart of Zobernig reairs in seeing these, Buren, in trying to ascertain the difference of one but tone. It's the Baderian question of a difference between fire bricks on floor and shrimp on foosball. Of the complete dumbness of objects, their utter asinity. Of course Zobernig needs Buren as his hostage in order to remain in negotiations, and Buren's calm cool continuation despite it, still striping away, is sort of endearing if not insane. The gallery, the institution, looks on with a smile.


see too: Darren Bader at Kölnischer Kunstverein,  Heimo Zobernig at Indipendenza, Heimo Zobernig at Kunsthaus Bregenz, Heimo Zobernig at Simon Lee

Ann Veronica Janssens at Bortolami

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Magenta doesn't exist in the natural spectrum. It is an extra-perceptual color, an artifact resulting from our eye's biological structure of rods and cones attempting to interpret a mixtures of reds and blues. Part of a subsection of non-spectral colors, along with imaginary, chimerical, and impossible colors all having no material basis. It isn't difficult to warp with human perception, our bodies create the world we perceive and many physiological rifts in its construction that create whole subgenres of "optical illusions" exploiting these glitches. But the simpler the construction of the exploit - the more minimal its resource to mine such faults - the more distrustful we become of our basic grip on reality, real trippy.

Morgan Fisher at Bortolami

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That no matter how controlled, contrived, explained, circumferenced, delineated and accounted an object is, there is still some form of fissure, a gap, between the experience of those objects from the overwhelming conceptual conscripture that ostensibly defines it. Conceptual art sought to control a world by being able to manipulate it by definition. 

Will Benedict at Bortolami

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The best thing you can say about Benedict's is that they are scary, misleading objects, projecting a symptomatic spread of virus like conditions of these things all over the block. These look the way having a cold feels. Unremediable institutionalization. If Krebber performed everyone fears of social market with a guileless smile, Bendict is that fear, unsmiling.  The apostate entrepreneur. Not preferring not too, but mass producing it.

See too: Group Show at Greene Naftali , Tom Humphreys at What Pipeline , Karl Holmqvist and Ei Arakawa at Overduin & Co. , Will Benedict at Bergen Kunsthall , Fredrik Vaerslev at Centre d’Art Contemporain Passerelle ,

Jutta Koether at Bortolami

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Certain art memes burn so quickly that in their aftermath a wasteland, the theoretical ground so well cleared that its almost like starting over, we have to look elsewhere from "Painting Beside Itself"s turf, or risk losing an artist to its rubric. I've got nothin.
But how striking it is now Koether's obvious forebear to the likes of Jana Euler and other’s loaded representation. Representation was always sort of beside itself, at least pointing elsewhere, but whereas for today’s puzzle painting exists as a kind of confounding delay of symbol's comprehension, Koether's over-saturation never seems a puzzle, but a hyperlink version, rerouting what we bring to it.

Jana Euler at Kunsthalle Zürich + Bonner Kunstverein,  Jesse Benson at Michael Benevento, Mathew Cerletty at Office Baroque

“The Radiants” at Bortolami

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"The Radiants."

See too : Karl Holmqvist and Ei Arakawa at Overduin & Co. , Stefan Tcherepnin at Freedman Fitzpatrick

Ben Schumacher at Bortolami

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An exhibition as a proposal for an architecture, an exhibition preparatory, preliminary in its sketch, everything here is a “performance,” an inference for projection, the techno-materialism of Schumacher’s practice spun to threads, to the lines of schematics, doodles on photographs reneging the objects that once adorned his exhibitions in favor of the documentary plans, a conceptualism you assemble yourself like IKEA, components stretched thin to dissolution in the dilation of time as speeds approach ludicrous. Look at this documentation, without a thing to be seen anywhere. Schumacher no longer the contractor but the architect, setting up a chains of command as entrepreneur, the only way to increase speed is to oversee those who have been sourced, soon to be Schumacher the CEO.
Techo acceleration useful in limits fraying, swelling with hot-air, to loft itself out of exhibitionary containers and coursed to see itself in skyscrapers, fueled on the fumes of gaseous networks of friend-ibitions, accumulative and outsourced models of growth. If it can get off the ground.

Ben Schumacher at Musee d'art Contemporain de Lyon , David Douard at Johan Berggren , Simon Denny at Portikus

Eric Wesley at Bortolami

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The schedule like the modernist grid thematizes the paint. Paint as laughably hopeful-stand-in for thought, the aura of having thought, without containing it. Eroticising the noodling, doodles, messes, detritus, as the work itself, symbols of work, desperately, “drolly,” coming with nothing but itself in hand, the seed spilled.
Rorschachs as production schedules, enabling projection. A luring decipherability: telling us nothing, appearing as if they could. The paint/doodling is desire, hypothetical, schematics projecting into time, suspending the painting into delay, a pre. The touch, marks of a lifetime, on canvas, blown up. Noodling in time, marking it, as only spilling on a schedule could.

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.