Marguerite Humeau at Clearing

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An excess of reference. B I O M O R P H I C. Biologic inkblots. 2010's Surrealism has metastasized into camp, into theatrics. Once clocks melted, now whales do, stretched, ballooned, dragged in the virtual and dropped in the physical, cast in medical looking material (which is its own trend). Ten years ago we all thought Matthew Barney was too much, now look at us. We've literally reinvented him over and over.


See too: “Being Thing” at Centre International d’Arte et du Paysage & Treignac Projet,

“Ungestalt” at Kunsthalle Basel

Huma Bhabha at Clearing

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"often invoking the artifacts of art-history and civilization in primal, otherworldly forms. Huma Bhabha’s haunting figures can be viewed as a 21st century hybrid of ancient statuary and contemporary sculpture, while other works explore the poetics of abandoned and scavenged material" is perhaps one of the most honest depictions of our belief in sculpture's totemization of the art and the mystique of the runic object, stonehengification, perceiving a purpose we infer but cannot see, a culture that exists but denied to know to pour all our assumptions in big rocks.

Korakrit Arunanondchai at Clearing

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Making Matthew Barney seem sober, the YBAs subdued. We see the surrealism in theatricality stemming from, say, the carnivalesque sludge biomes vitrines of Max Hooper Schneider, Ajay Kurian, or Anicka Yi; embalmed trash of Yuji Agematsu; the Ikea jungle of Rashid Johnson; the faux/real haystacks Amy Yao, even the steaming shirt of Michael E Smith. I guess they were all stealing from Thek who stole from... who stole from.. , so maybe it is acceptable, maybe they're all friends. But the theatricality has been jacked to new heights, torn from a Chuck E Cheese. But the one thing we're maybe all growing tired of is the apocalypse presented to us in iPhone styles, the fetishization of our new trendbook, like its inevitable and your the first person to try and ride the wave of our demise by selling it back to us.



see too:“May the Bridges I Burn Light the Way” at STANDARD (OSLO), Max Hooper Schneider at High Art, Ajay Kurian at White Flag Projects, Kahlil Robert Irving at Callicoon Fine Arts, Ajay Kurian at Rowhouse Project,  Amy Yao at Various Small Fires, Anicka Yi at Cleveland Museum of Art Chadwick Rantanen at Essex Street, Michael E. Smith at Sculpture Center, Michael E. Smith at Michael Benevento, Michael E. Smith at Zero, Michael E. Smith at Lulu, Michael E. Smith at Susanne Hilberry, Amy Yao at Various Small Fires, Anicka Yi at Cleveland Museum of Art

Calvin Marcus at Clearing

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Marcus paints like a kid, draws like a kid, had huge crayons made for his big kid self. It would be an interesting history correlated, the desublimation of painting, its id-ification, from the surrealist's subconscious, to Pollock's becoming "nature," to finally the triumph of neanderthalism of say Joe Bradley, the history of men's important doodle. The mythology of the infantilized artist. Expressions of nubility, We must care for him, them, genius whose diapers we exchange.

AR: Lili Reynaud-Dewar at Clearing

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Originally Posted: March 7th, 2016
Note: This entry is part of August Review, our annual look back at this season’s key exhibitions. For more information, see the announcement here.

Aaron Garber-Maikovska at Clearing

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It's nice to see a PR admit an artists animist beliefs others attempt camouflaging with the rhetoric of conceptual art or vague reference to philosophic trends. The trend for dancing in front of paintings - of many Ei Arakawa, Otto Knapp, Lutz-Kinoy, et. al. - achieves a clarity here in totemizing and activating the brand beneath simply by its proximal highlighting, ostensibly Lowe's. But animism is a pube hair distinct from some post-Baudrillard product fetishism, see: Merlin Carpenter at MD72, and this exhibitions stark lack of paintings can't help but feel in reaction to the artist's unfortunate market darlingship (a google search page full of auction results and artrank's most collectible artist sub 100k - things only taken seriously by those who take them seriously) and statements in market reports like: "“His work is something to live with and not worry about because the quality is so apparent,” says Schachter who bought one of Garber-Maikovska’s works from a friend and promptly put it in storage." So the performance continues for those paintings unseen, an incantation to conjure critical reception and not market reports, a "language in a state of emergence" to quote Tumlir.



See too: Merlin Carpenter at MD 72

Zak Kitnick at Clearing

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Like Warhol's Shadows, the darkened frames projected zoopraxiscope-like as silhouettes stacked build a dizzying depleting motion that like Bausch's Kontakthof's accounting of the vast inflections of the word "Darling" or Foster Wallace's Pale King opening sentence's taxnomic vegetation, Sturtevant's Finite/Infinite, the trend for lists in art writing, the cycling and dispensing of information bludgeon's our affective connection to it, a "diminished emotional response to a stimulation after repeated exposure to it," a desensitization, a very modern ennui building tragic subjects recalling Ranciere's quip on Bela Tarr: "one does not win against rain or repetition."


See too: Zak Kitnick at Clearing, Zak Kitnick at Rowhouse Project

Lili Reynaud-Dewar at Clearing

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Tom Cruise dancing in his underwear and socks in parent's vacated living room performed a magnificent version of freedom despite imprisonment by the script contractually obligating his "freedom" dancing "unwatched" in stark white briefs before an audience of - who really could have predicted then - hundreds of millions. This tension of contractually obligated freedom is a general one of art and a specific one for Lili Reynaud-Dewar for whom being naked in exhibition spaces never seems to come with freedom but rather an artistic obligation to somehow perform within these spaces where freedom's intimacy is subordinated to the transactional obligation of performance implying a requisite meaning/"artistry" to the body and movements to be fulfilled, which Reynaud-Dewar does painted red dancing.

“History Made By Artists” at Clearing

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These artists create history one by crafting an atemporal artifact, another evincing sedimented layers of waste as time markers, and another by writing a poem for the possibility of. But really they create it through the exhibition's reverence towards it. History only exists when it is cared for, or else it just disappears, and so artists treat it with a tender weightiness, with a disproportionate amount of veneration, a wide berth.

Juha Pekka Matias Laakkonen at Corvi-Mora

Calvin Marcus, Chadwick Rantanen at Clearing

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Ranaten's objects are itchy, irritants in a body desiring to reject them. Ranaten's concern for the commodic waste that comprises much of modern life differs from many in that its cheapness is amplified, overhead lights hanging, made a wedge, shards of waste, fluorescents are gallery expendables, hanging, turns not-yet-trash into splinters of it. The thought of plastic inside you, a blanket in plastic inside you.

Zak Kitnick at Clearing

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The hieroglyphs of contemporary art products, are in effect an attempt at estrangement from the commodities that comprise them. Like Prince or Levine the doubling effects a remove, and now the genericism of product photography replaces it in anonymous otherness, printed steely to metal, meant to evoke the distance from the world felt. Cold, numb anhedonia to the pleasure afforded, nature's bounty and the newest product manufactured for connoisseurship's symbolic violence, sad, and the fact that Kitnick continues to pump these very heavy weights out again and again and again attaching an intention-dumb press release indifference to it not even, like, trying anymore is part of the emotive plea, Kitnick seems like real tired from bearing so much ennui.

Merlin Carpenter at MD72, Zak Kitnick at Rowhouse, Sophie Nys at Crac Alsace, Merlin Carpenter at Overduin and Co.