Mark van Yetter at Bridget Donahue

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Limbo. The doubling erects a structure which to suspend it. Hangs its image over some chasm. Threshold space. Can't quite be consumed wholesale. Have that non-time about them, that Goodnight Moon / de Chirico quasi-space.  Not quite painting, nor drawing; not quite comic books nor scene painting nor ideation board but more narrative in the way of IKEA instructions for building a BILLY bookshelf dream. 

Christopher Knowles at Bridget Donahue

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If Knowles had gotten famous back then we could have entirely prevented Jonas Wood. Possibly several others. An artworld revolving around paint rather than ideas. 

Martine Syms at Bridget Donahue

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Thomas Hirschhorn also started as a graphic designer, also invested in tape construction, but Hirschhorn sold his fandom of philosophy as philosophy (a Gramsci t-shirt in the form of artwork) which was bogus if endearing. Syms' constructions are less the constructions of phallic monument broadcasting the big self than a collecting flotsam of identity, the graphic ring of scum clinging each our cup's rim. The debris of culture, a collective identity. This is our stuf. The undigested matter clogging our pipes and our consciousness. This is afterall the post-Harrison/Genzken aftermath. It's all a bit Unmonumental, which like Maggie Lee, an interest in the becoming stage, self-consciousness and construction. We become the diggers, forced investigators, of our own world. 

See too: Martine Syms at Human Resources, Maggie Lee, Thomas Hirschhorn 

Monique Mouton at Bridget Donahue

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The fragments, clouds, poems on papyrus to be reassembled. "[Fragments] are wounded, ominous, their meaning is fractured, in ways that can't be put back together. We place these objects to our foreheads and ask for their secrets, contemplate their use, rotate them in our minds. [Their use is] to be pressed to ears, interminably silent, and hear the ocean in your head." Attempts to cage a cloud, the pleasured exhalation of your last cigarette, leave one wondering at the limits of repair. You can identify a world by its fingerprints, but you can't recreate it from. Think Lutz Bacher xeroxing the cosmos to noise that they were always planning on returning to already. The palimpsest that can't be regained. Bathrooms wiped of their graffiti would be a waste two millennia later but two millennia of graffiti isn't much better. Poor Smithson. Sand through fingers, the columns of society finding themselves into finer and finer granules.  For society was a fine dust, and a dust is what it will return. I say, stubbing out a cigarette.

See too: Nazgol Ansarinia at Raffaella Cortese

Kim Jones at Bridget Donahue

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We, cargo cult, attempt to reassemble meaning in the wasteland, our culture. The artists become shamans, build totems, we look to them to create something that we could relate. Finding some lovely in the filth over here. Jones is proof that these inclinations are not recent trends, the muck has been around a long time, and the senselessness we attempt to coalesce otherwise in. Was going to say Jones is the missing link in lineage from Keinholz or Bruce Connor to the psychic mire of Rachel Harrison (the above was made somewhere between 1973-1999) - and then today's David Lieske and the Berlin ontologists - but you start to worry that artists are proleptic, that this is some time continuum goof, because while Jones is obviously working out some trauma of his time in Vietnam, unfortunately, trauma is intergenerational, actually encodes itself in DNA, at least in rodents, which Jones has a uncomfortable history with. So it tends to reappear. And you worry it will in the future. Heading towards mud.

Pieter Slagboom at Bridget Donahue

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Like, whereas outlines illustrate, designates (instructs), the contour line caresses, warms its figure with all its touch, not so much states its figure as rubs it. Probably why these look closer to surrealist frottage than drawing: the whole thing must be touched to make it appear. This is a metaphor. Humans aren't so much plumbing and cartoons as little haptic nubs that touch and feel and bone. "...your fingers developed small wounds from the pressure exerted on the pencil." "PS: I was disappointed because I could not feel the pencil anymore. The tenderness disappeared. [...]when I press down every day for a whole week.  Between the skin and the bone, finger padding begins to vanish, and the pencil makes contact with the bone, which is very very painful." You do not think the subject, but physical touch to manifest it. We get sick, a pandemic exists, and proximity feels like physical air, no meniscus, no barrier at all, everyone sharing each others heat. Spirituality seems to emerge as an any-alternative-to-this, escapes the restrictive cookie outline of "the normal" cartoon. And which, see here figuration too jettison the general cartoon delineation, drawing's outline becomes instead its Red Studio absentia, line its ghost.

See too: Miriam Cahn at Meyer Riegger

Olga Balema at Bridget Donahue

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Last time talking about the demands for artwork, like pornography, to photograph well; it must be able - in an age of everyone communicating through glass - to connote itself through image. Now, here a show that doesn't photograph well. Instead, like tires danced through by hulking men on tiptoes, your body staged in tripwires*. Connections others have made to the history of empty galleries seems to miss the fact that A, the gallery is full of things and B, empty galleries (even most full exhibitions) do not require such care where you step. (The read of "empty" seems, again, evidence of our perception now dominated by sight rather than haptic presence, proprioception, etc.) The press release even first sentence states: "100% sculpture." If anything the closest counterpart would be something like Dawn Kasper's forest of mic'd cymbals, tense to scream presence with misstep. This is another means of making the body appear, nervous, a perhaps long theme of Balema, but without resort to the "excess body", the biomorphic, lumpy, intestinal. I wonder if Kronz was thinking of Irigaray when writing the PR, writing about "absolute terms" or tautness, which sounds like history and its compartments (empty galleries), and the inability for artworlds like science to easily account for these less "rigid" categories, the "physical reality that continues to resist adequate symbolization" and "necessary to minimize certain of these features of nature, to envisage them, and it, only in light of an ideal status, so as to keep it/them from jamming the works of the theoretical machine." Irigaray.

*Perhaps the connection to minimalism is Michael Fried's objecthood "stage presence" made prickly.


See too: Dawn Kasper at David Lewis, Tony Conrad's Glass, "But so much humanity isn't iron."
Olga Balema at High Art (2), Olga Balema at High Art (1), Olga Balema at Croy Nielsen

Victor Burgin at Bridget Donahue

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As early internet's de-motivational posters were antidote to the faux-enrichment of the office's patronizingly motivational own, the very first digital memes spread viral in forums and message boards in the new quasi-underground of workers' stolen snippets of off-time web-surfing, a small revolt-solidarity-communicado for the proletoid forced to do so beleagueredly under those signs and not hard to see the viral spread of such comedy and its big business as desire to own one's dark expressions rather than cover it. The point being: with the democratization of image making software and the ability to easily disseminate it the worker - as early as 1998 - immediately creates funny images revolting against its dominant structure asking for false optimism. Memetics are an intensely powerful form of social construction.
Victor Burgin's images arrive from the same period that another Victor gave us the original famous motivational poster, the "Hang in there, Baby" cat. And while Baldwin's markedly expressed positivity and hope (despite dark threat of failure's toll). "Memetics is also notable for sidestepping the traditional concern with the truth of ideas and beliefs. Instead, it is interested in their success." Burgin's instead, with their elusive and meandering political sentiments that couldn't be more obviously intended to deny easy authority or expediency, seem to exist as a radical stop-gapping of message production and instead desiring suspension of the image/text consumption/construction of meaning (a more culturally/politically apropos Baldessari), the blurbs of authority and manufacturing ideology in which everything is related with succinct tautology of demagoguic ease that we find so alluring today.  In the same way de-motivationals were an ironic detachment rupturing the facade of their motivational counterparts, Burgin's exist oppositional to the consumptive force as anti-memes. Which of course has all sorts of relevance to today, Burgin's underground expressions of anti-ideology held hostage in a gallery.


See too:  John Baldessari at Marian Goodman, Henry Flynt at Audio Visual Arts, CAWD on Fetish,

Jessi Reaves at Bridget Donahue

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Like Rembrandt's Flayed Ox tinged with new meaning against the repetition of his auto-erotic visage, Reaves doubling-down on material entrails in the age of avatars could seem perversely obstinate memento mori; a reminder that, like all that stolen Ikea elegance whose eventual blown out corners reveal its making of all but compressed trash, underneath everything we desire to be is an intestinal makeup of sponge replacing its weight with rumors of dead-cells and dust-mites of a body threatening to turn fungal even while its pubescent biology meets identity, becoming gendered but threatening death makes them erotic like the ox meat.


See too: Miriam Cahn at Meyer Riegger, Dylan Spaysky at Clifton Benevento, Nancy Lupo at Swiss Institute, Chadwick Rantanen at Essex Street, Martín Soto Climent at Proyectos Monclova