Adam Martin at Galerie Buchholz

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Think of the promotional image and its parallel to art documentation. And then around 2011 they became the same. Where documentation had generally lagged behind the object/exhibition, the image now preceded the object. Then replaced the object. And this was useful to art's promenade - the Matthew Barney effect. 

"[Cremaster was a] Levi's ad campaign of artistic hubris. Cremaster succeeded, regardless any filmic merit, on its ability to manifest excitement and intrigue as a promotional vehicle, a cultural mythos that mirrored the mythos within. At the time you could almost talk about Cremaster without having seen any of it, the image was so omnipresent. Seeing was of less import than having being able to have an opinion, know of it. Having gained traction ever since, this form of promotional vehicle cannot be understated in importance post CAD/insta etc. when pipes and what they can funnel is tantamount."

The image allowed an opinion, allowed the chatter, fostered the spread. At the same time the promotional image mirrored the structure of art - it refused resolution, instead creates a hole, a lack, that need to be filled. A gap mirroring art's life-support of eternalized "questions." Consumable without destruction, depletion. What is salesmanship in advertising, is the poetic in art.

Which is all to say (in the current vogue for promotional stills of people wearing 3D head sets staring off like Galileo into space) Martin's very lofi promo documentation is somehow alluring and perfectly opaque.

They come three, four, at a time. Zebra hard to chase not because the stripes provide camouflage but because the predator cannot single a specific focus, i.e. with overabundant choice the selector's (predators) cognition malfunctions; in nature videos you see lions, surrounded by cheeseburgers, acquiesce, lay down, stupefied by movement, flow, numbers which disrupt the ability for sense, sensation ruins, the surface effect which short circuits our ability for recognition, to choose, to see individuality for a moving surface of pattern and stripe across a broad plain of thing. Eventually the lions that do not starve in the face of such are selected for reproduction.

originally published November 15, 2017.

REDCAT at Contemporary Art Daily

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Like fish bumping into glass, attempt to seek the limits of our experience, our aquarium of fantasy.

"...the ubiquity of installation views today (over the very obsolete taste for images of the paintings cropped of which here there are presented none) merely today's fashion, or is it a use of its authority. ..the empty whiteness surrounding paintings today replacing yesteryear gilt. ... the symbolic wealth of hundreds of dollars per square foot of galleries, or museums. Gold leaf is redundant to white walls..."

"sited documentation seems to be on the rise, and emphasized to dramatic effect, highlighting the gallery’s architectural ticks, absurdly so. That Berlin’s Tanya Leighton gallery, of which Sanchez highlights, despite performing the neutral painted grey floors and glowing white walls, is one of the more architecturally memorable galleries. ... the installation shot generally outnumber if not replace entirely the image of the object, even to the detriment of understanding the object. The site as the producer of the art object’s “aura” was established in different way by Boris Groys take on Benjaminian aura in “Art in the Age of Biopolitics” in referring to documentations (in terms of artifacts of conceptual art) need for the site."

"art itself is the realm that allows for this, our fantasy mmorpg; and it is the gallery that is the true virtual space, both everywhere and nowhere, excess in its ascetics. The gallery provides the fantasy of fantasy, that this is all somehow new, or even progress, that we're actually inventing something, simply because it exists."

"the white cube and its Matrix-like virtual space will perhaps become redundant to this physical de-locale, a fear of vertigo of a white space sent into hyperspace the gallery-space will need to self-locate, architecture will appear as a watermark to keep one foot on the ground avoiding the spins tumbling through non-space."

Read full: Brian Calvin at Le Consortium, Sophie Nys at Crac Alsace, Zoe Nelson at JDJ, CAD, Jacolby Satterwhite at Mitchell-Innes & Nash

“No Joke” at Milieu

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Groups shows look like if you blew up the mall and then cleaned up pretty well.

New Red Order at Artists Space

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Important for performance to begin to swallowing its own promotional material. The relevant info being self-contained is part of good documentation. Everything there, apparent. Punctured back in, the reason we're here, promotion. The website being pretty good.

Group Show at Group Show at Group Show at

Group exhibitions as a series of incomplete images. A false diaspora. The exhibition's arrangement promises to, if not resolve, at least route, provide semblance, movement, trajectory. But they begin more and more to feel like remnants, like rubble or partial artifacts. They're like flotsam of our wreckage, objects d'contemplation of our ruins, hung in altars. Our windows in have gotten so small. And we're asked to project worlds onto them.


see too: Group Show at Group Show at Group Show

Group Show at Group Show at Group Show

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Group exhibitions have become like scrolling a feed of a feed, exhausting. Whereas before the smorgasbord provided little nouveau bites of artistic palates, now the particalizing of everything into little squares, fractured sent and scrolled has become the little bites we accumulate as dinner, gorging on snacks. The group show ostensibly provides more orchestrated snacking, but it is snacking nonetheless. Does anyone feel satisfied after of a buffet of bites? No, you feel sick. That's what group exhibitions feel like, hors d'oeuvres to a meal that is, contemporarily, not coming. The world no longer has meals it is a feed. A continuous heterogeneous bin. We want a reprieve, a moment of contemplation, any kind of slowness, relief, I don't want to open my eyes and see 50 artists anymore.

Contributors!

The question of how could CAD expand yet retain the power of its single panoptic window, its Borgesian aleph.

The question is, does adding more towers, more bastions to the territory further legitimate the eyes. Ostensibly the reflection should be more complete. But somehow this ruptures the myth: CAD sees all things through the panopticon's prisoners, us, remaining uncertain whether/when they are being viewed, manifesting a permanent suspicion for the surveillance, artists seen, manifesting sympathy to the system, its code, aesthetics, a guilt under omniscient god. This is, humbly, CAD, a stand in for the system itself. The funny fabrication is that there weren't contributors before. But now the eyes in the Forrest will bear names, and while they always did, we've entered this distinct land labeled "curation."

CAD harbored power through the - however distant - implication of providing a true full survey. While this was not the case, CAD was closest thing to, providing a, however warbled, singular reflection for everyone to latch like curmudgeonly barnacles upon. (I can think of no other image blog placed on CVs as "press.") And so too the warbles and hotspots in CADs mirror became charming if glaring. (I know of at least one collector whose entire collection is itself a representation of this CAD mirror.) A large and uncanny mirror was something we had deep down hoped for, to see ourselves reflected back in. A large glaring mirror that was ultimately unfortunately usurped by the atomization of mirrors into our hands and instagram as the new form of glass, etc. a new glass further catalyzing capital's individuation and fracturing the social mythos and accelerating postmodernity's collapsing of grand narrative, that CAD, for a brief minute, relit, CAD, arguably even unconsciously lit itself on this desire for this myth of narrative, progress, of even just keeping record. It was the biggest, shiniest glass.

This now transformation into a tentacled curatorial being exchanges its myth of linearity for curations construction of individualized "voice." No longer attempting consolidation of an "artworld" (however arrogant) but instead giving curators a chance to attempt their opposite, build their names "voices" for their vision. Again however flawed or doomed a singularized vision is, it stands out amongst the massive fractalization of pretty much everything else. CAD was reliably two shows daily, Sunday only one. 8 years ago that had felt like drowning. Now it is a welcome relief against further orgiastic image hydrants, put your lips toward. And it is noteworthy that these new curatorial names come with CV attached, "Tenzing Barshee is an..." "Erin Christovale is the..." Interesting because CAD arosen without credential, for whatever reason we gave attention.



Questions for your bookclub:
1.While Clement Greenberg ushered and reigned in an era dominated by chauvinist white language, could CAD be said to herald an era where no language exists, is instead negated by the sheer multiplicity of image, "given over to the visibility apparatus itself"?

2. Are Curators generally attempting to survey the field, or they are instead creating their own individualized territory or "voice"?

3. Is CAWD always a bit of a spoof of that clean white subjectivity-less authority?

4. Does CAD risk fracturing? After how many spigots? In the deluge, can more ever be a solution?

5. Would then the ultimate solution be a map as large as the territory is big?

6. Does CAWD place an inordinate amount of capital and importance in CAD? Is this a symptom of Stockholm Syndrome?

7. Since those with pedigree and institutional accreditation are the only players with power to legitimize and make visible, shouldn't we be paying attention to this pedigree, to those with this coronation anyway? Wasn't that CAD's great insight?

8. Why could CAD becoming over 10 years the major holding of artworld documentation and de facto bearer of the mirror without any previous pedigree be an important distinction?

Contemporary Art Quarterly: Richard Aldrich

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"...At the artist’s request, this archive differs in format from the others we’ve published—it includes only installation views."
What is the gallery but the wreath, the coronation, lighting bestowing your anointment like a halo. No gold frames required because white real estate provides the gilt. Installation views that attempt to distance “painting” from the hegemony of its image - to ostensibly preserve it from the porn trading cards they’ve become - seems naive at best. Privatizing it simply finalizes the gallery as the accreditor, art a fiat currency.

see too: Richard Aldrich at Adrian Rosenfeld, Richard Aldrich at Gladstone Gallery, Richard Aldrich at Misako & Rosen, Brian Calvin at Le Consortium, Sophie Nys at Crac Alsace

“Concertissimo Annullato” at Thalys

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There used to be myth now replaced with defintion panapitcon of all these screen's two-way glass. In the future everything will be an exhibition. All the metaphors of transfer and speed.

Perhaps the worst of art is paying attention to artists circulating on, I guess, someone's dollar as an update to the bohemian-chic lifestyle we've been culturally fed as the artist's way now updated with easy first class tickets and diaspora of art centers all needing to be curated and shown the same art, the same names and everyone playing along at home from their TV screens which broadcasts the fantasies of their bohemia back at them.


See too: Ian Rosen at The Finley, Ian Rosen at Kristina Kite, 186f Kepler at Contemporary Art Daily
"Clifton Palace," “Pho Viet Huong” "Vzszhhzz," "Astro 5," and "Tes Yeux" at 186f Kepler

Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven at M HKA

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CAD a disservice to artists whose exhibitions come to look like amassed icons floating in the etherous white of networks we scroll through, aggravating the cognitive fatigue of diaspora, ending in images as hyperlinks we cannot click or know. En abyme we fall into the fatigue of image consumption, the documentation illustrating the pages we scroll through.  If much of 2010s art succeeded on its ability to alleviate symptoms of screen fatigue by presenting walls of neutrality's palliative, or meme-like jewels for spread, see Sanchez et al., then the big exhibition's ostensible generosity and vanity becomes its disadvantage.

exhibitionary largess

No contention these exhibitions don't hold up well in documentation, often barely in person, a sprawling fest whose largess is also a request, like serving a 47 course meal everyone wondering how many is required for politeness to be transacted, the paper soaked swells and breaks apart, oversaturated, the books behind glass, presenting the covers you can not judge the book by but cannot open either, lectures sedimented as image, a catalog for anarchist reading, an effort of "slow programming" is pressed into a egg of publicity, which we are given to swallow whole here, a list of events that have already past. 

“Stories of Almost Everyone” at Hammer Museum

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The hammer opening a box. You likely have seen the video of Ferrell and his windblown partner comedically "not getting art." Sanctioned by the Hammer, Ferrell and everyone involved operating pro bono, Ferrell’s wife on the Board, an advertisement that was embraced and spread, and perhaps something to do with its appearance on CAD now.

In it the Ferrell mocks the art which he of course sees - at least a little - as mocking him. The comedy alleviates the tension of and fear of conceptual art - fear whose expression runs the spectrum from “just not getting it” or incanting “the emperor's new clothes” against it. The film does little in the way of traditional education even when glaringly obvious: Ferrell's explication of the pillow slept on by acrobats is exactly the point, to create a story like a dream inside your own pilloried head. This goes unremarked. Instead the advert supplants traditional education for an implicit training: how to feel okay in museums by arming potential visitors with a weapon against artworks: irreverence, jadedness, mockery, that interminable arms race of cool we all learned in grade school by proving who could care least. The Hammer’s spectacle almost begging people to feel okay mocking art. That we now feel the need to educate people in artistic insouciance is a symptom of how badly the artworld had arranged itself toward the opposite: decades guiding the public toward veneration and supplication toward it. Now needing to explain to people you can make fun of art, condoning it. That art and more specifically contemporary art museums have become synonymous with entertainment, younger people finding themselves gravitating to MoMA rather than the Met, the Hammer has made a decision to consciously align itself with this new audiential target, the young who are interested in art but have little or no education in it, and goes out of its way to cater to this audience by claiming a stance against the education priorly requisite. This makes sense. Even the Met is opening contemporary wings. The outreach seems sensible. Ah to be mocked by a famous comedian! what success, to be patronized by a movie star playing the everyman. “Stories of Almost Everyone”

“Mechanisms” at Wattis

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CAD is turning 10 this year and we'd like to nominate this photo, in its absolute blankness, as the icon of all we've been through, a symbol for the "neutral" that has come to feel a trauma, the mass grays aggressively empty, the foam of installation insulation: averaging a couple hundred CAD images produces a warm grey (#b0aaa7 C:33 M:29 Y:30 K:0) the color of eye stuff, a warm enduring color and a paint sold only in select stores, refined images from the refinery of art. And in the distant background amongst all the framing and vitreous substances we look through to an artist's warped mirroring of all of it, us.

“The Photographic I – Other Pictures” at S.M.A.K.

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We scroll images of images. Our capacities for dealing, for dealing with, making sense, of them erodes as the sheer quantity of information we are met with on the eponymous daily. They flow against whatever wishes for a control to the spigot, they'll be more tomorrow. We begin to triage our incoming information; our form of relation moves from a relation of understanding to one of recognition, able to name something, our conversations formed around the little opinions we've manifested as stopgap standing in for control, CAWD.

CAD'S NADA BASEL MIAMI

(NADA, Basel)

CAD posted over a thousand images today. While today was a special one, for the second year in a row no longer selecting the choice bits but publishing the full-nude of NADA and Basel, it presents CAD's crossroad in deciding between art documentation's curatorial highlighter or mass storage locker. Should CAD collect them all or just the right stuff. Miami has its limits, the full thing can be consumed, perhaps even be sorted through to find yourself, or us, but should our feed enlarge, put us at the limits of our stomachs produce the indigestion of our fracturing guts at just so much: taste superseded by amount, the tastemaker chef no longer matters in a trough, and we'd have to remove our lips glued to their hose and start our own sampling systems at the deluge. What is more profitable, feeding with the mass or attempting selection for high-end. Eventually the curator can't also represent the panopticon.


Correction: CAD didn't actually post the entirety of every booth, it appears some booths were selectively documented, for instance What Pipeline's booth (which doesn't have a link oddly) only had Quintessa Matranga work documented.


See too: CAD

“Portikus XXX” at various locations

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A plucky young venture-idealist somewhere online collecting the mass sum of the artworld's published photographs of people giving readings, an art genre unto its own: a great instagram feed awaits.

CAD 2008-2017

Remember Flash? Remember splash pages? For a brief moment the internet had rid ourselves of the clogged glitz of pageantry, webpages moved to chaste legibility, a now eclipsing era when pretty much every gallery - blue chip to apartment - resembled each other democratically: washed of blitzing design, 2008: Facebook's rising militant pages nailing the coffin on the lurid heap of Myspace, the iPhone exiling Flash, and the year CAD launched its own suprematist site. Difficult to discern whether CAD started the trend for desaturated austerity or simply sensed what was in the air with Wade Guyton and subjectivityless painters, stripping the individuated gallery hands for a digital white cube. Hard to remember how difficult finding documentation had been, how gallery's websites were a diaspora of middling horror, how the feed hadn't yet become the dominant digital intake, before Instagram and Facebook ascended as the apex of artistic social conviviality, before all content had designed bingeablilty, in iPhone bereft darkness, the digital campfire of Contemporary Art Daily. Galleries took note, it seemed every gallery adopted the basic black and white that any html lackey could emulate. Cleanliness, order. Now, today, Splash Pages return (they never really went away for LA for whatever reason) and HTML 5 replaces flash, iPhone compatible. In 2008 it was a point of pride that anyone could make the paintings you were making and the websites showcasing them along with it, in 2017 paintings are colorful expressionistic, technical; paintings today look like the Myspace pages we had entombed, and our websites bloat along with them to prove they can. Top separate themselves from the imitations. It is not enough that the 10mb images load, we place an icon, a gesture to show we know they are loading, an ornament.


See too: Sophie Nys at Crac Alsace, Brian Calvin at Le Consortium, CAD

“Sputterances” at Metro Pictures

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No myth that curators are beholden to a "conversation," one that manifests by reinscribing and working around the general pool of artists we see commonly. Curators show certain art/artists to prove (and thus renew) their access to the structure that legitimates them. Reciprocal legitimization by no single curatorial/artist node but instead the conversational majority, arranging consensus by those delegates already given authority, e.g. curators, institutions. Access starts to look like legitimacy. This insight why CAD took off. Read Sanchez's "Contemporary Art, Daily."  This why we see artists/exhibitions in triplicate, the same ones proffered around the globe. You proffer 3 givens, and one unknown.  And so maybe artists make more enjoyable curators because they're freed from the profession's need to prove the contemporaneousness of the vision, you get something a bit more idiosyncratic, interesting.