Caspar Heinemann at Cabinet

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"Cardboard like a sloughed flesh for transit."

"and soggy cardboard is like a rotting flesh"

"Your touch leaves a mark, sews a patch, you reproduce yourself in the objects you attend. Preciousness in warm cardboard, wearing touch, eroding to someone's love."

like a flesh, ornamented and stringed. Dripped pearls and a hole slightly greased.

Jana Euler at Cabinet

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"a sort of conceptual abstraction for your walls." Against our wishes for clean aluminum concepts and graspable truths, a "conceptual abstraction" is like having mud in your mind - an ungraspable muck, inside your head. And Euler's feel loose, threaten spillage, a filth inside. Do not open them up in here. It will get everywhere. I am not the cleaner, I cannot keep up with this level of dust. They watch you now. They will see you get it on you, your projection, a woman turning horse.

Ghislaine Leung at Cabinet

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0465773005 is the title of this show, a glowing sign within the show, as well as an H&M "cashmere blend" sweater that is only 10% cashmere. This could be a coincidence (though the number itself sorta relays its odds) but Leung's sort of abide it, the gradual creep of its suspicion, the John Knight cold cut ominousness in staging. Why must the light be blackout? Why the floor silenced? Why does the carriage require staves? The creep builds suspicion: a house haunted under glistening sterile light. A crime scene scrubbed, we, detectives.

see too: Ghislaine Leung at Chisenhale & Essex Street, Ghislaine Leung at Künstleraus Stuttgart

Gili Tal at Cabinet

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the question of what outside your window could be less interesting than this. You draw the shade on the world just to be mocked by this, a curtain that [shows your banality back to you.] won't let you escape banality. If the photos are by no means good, would it not be fault of the world they depict? It is your city that is ugly, and you should be forced to buy one of these as reminder that your castle not separate from. This mindset allowed for the suburbs, its devolution into ugliness, people moved in personalized containers, personal vehicles in trajectories to their big boxes sheltered, their home, their work, moved in submarines of personalized climate, protected in white walled towers. Curtains are a weak force against the world that these posit perhaps someday someone will invent something to break glass, and the world will flood in.


Modern Gothic is a mode or genre prevalent in Contemporary Art from the early 21st century to this day. Characteristics of Modern Gothic include the presence of banal, irrational, and transgressive thoughts, desires, and impulses; grotesque settings; dark humor, and an overall angst-ridden sense of alienation. While related to the Southern Gothic tradition, Modern Gothic is uniquely rooted in contemporary Capitalism's tensions and aberrations. During the 21st century, the everywhere-nowhere setting of today's post-industrial cities became “the principal region of Modern Gothic” in art. The Modern Gothic brings to light the extent to which the idyllic vision of the progressive, collectivized City rests on massive repressions of the region’s historical realities: capitalism, class, and patriarchy. Modern Gothic texts also mark a Marxist return of the alienated: the region’s historical realities take concrete forms in the city's banality of power structures that highlight all that has been unsaid in the official version of Modern history. Because of its dark and everyday subject matter, literary scholars and critics initially sought to discredit the gothic on a national level.


Modern Gothic: Morag Keil at Project Native Informant, Georgie Nettell at Lars Friedrich, Georgie Nettell at Reena Spaulings, Gili Tal at Jenny’s, Will Benedict at Overduin & Co., Merlin Carpenter at Overduin & Co.

Keith Farquhar at Cabinet

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It's about the latent. Like the trojan horse hiding in men's bicycle shorts armed to possibly hurt you from darkness. Looking like an IKEA catalog of art seems the point, cause crappiness is kind of the point.. "They dramatise an existential threat to notions of artistic sovereignty." Creep is "the tendency of a solid material to slowly move or deform permanently under the influence of stresses." But creep is also a man with his penis out under bike shorts. Things become embedded with connotation like a gym locker room is embedded with naked men. Conceptual austerity becomes filthy-with. Like content that can be applied, sticky. Clung to Chris Wool, like you peeled it off it. How children are sticky, their plastic like grime accumulators. Wood to absorb ass sweat. Symbols filled with things to gag you with. Cardboard like a sloughed flesh for transit. Thing "used," or going to be used. Things creep, and there is prevailing undercurrent of sex, perhaps "buggery," that runs under the work, like a goo spread.

Lucie Stahl at Cabinet

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They hyper materiality of Stahl's earlier HiDef gurgitation is traded here - the resin soaked works which worked like soap's tighter attempts at control, sent physicality slipping from grasp, everywhere expelling digital gloss - a slipperiness that this exhibition finds in the cognition of pumping. The concern for wetness and Metaphor's sponge: pumping, like liquidity, milking rooms, the intravenous network of pipes, exchange, capital flow, financial meters, water tables, inelastic demand and liquid assets, dry powdered milk and barreled crude, black and white, gallons and barrels, flood plains and dry market: In 2012 a drought in New Zealand causes the worldwide prices of powdered milk and crude oil to diverge for the first time in a decade, this according to a website tracking such flows, the Progressive Dairyman. The point being the interconnection of flows that deliver also tether us, pipes become bars.

See too: Tony Conrad's Glass

Henrik Olesen at Cabinet

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Take for instance the coroplast sheets these are on, corrugated plastic, sheets of industrial quantity and cheapness that is less thing than stuff, a temporal substrate, a material capitalistically expendable, what we call "disposable" despite stuffing landfills for eons, denting and scuffing with ease to become "waste" while remaining stuff, flakes like your dead skin collecting under beds with dirt as dust, the cells that Olesen keeps adhering like wet toilet paper to everything, and the hangnails sticking out from walls, an imitation game of filth, waste failing to crystallize packagability, use, the matter of bodies that meaninglessly accumulate, failing representation.  "Polypropylene has been reported to degrade while in human body as implantable mesh devices. The surface's degraded material forms a tree bark-like layer." a skin cell, sloughed.


See too: Nancy Lupo at Kristina Kite & Yuji Agematsu at Miguel Abreu, Henrik Olesen at Reena Spaulings

Calla Henkel & Max Pitegoff at Cabinet

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Notable to the migratory flocking, Henkel and Pitegoff decamped to Berlin and opened a bar. In business it would be called a "blue ocean strategy," i.e. with Berlin's art party become more Donner than dance, the artistically snowbound cannibalizing, a bone thrown to waters bloodying was respectable way to neutralize hungry dogs, demonstrate oneself a source of sustenance, feeding the hungry with cocktails, was no small ingenuity. The theater that came next placed the bar's social capital in the spotlight, literally on view, staged, showcasing the finer patrons on a pedestal and brightly lit to be gawked upon. Before exhibiting the bar itself. Whatever institutional critique it held was mostly in the fact that it could do it better, insinuate itself better, prove the sporting of it, point dull yellow lights at the gameroom of it. And here, in light of the continually furthering of the Berlin trope of artist diasporas of song and dance routines to attend the paintings and objects, it's hard not to read this exhibition as proving it can do the whole carnival with a single expensive carousel.

see too: Karl Holmqvist and Ei Arakawa at Overduin & Co.

John Knight at Cabinet

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The subtle assertion of power rising the tiny dictators, covering the world with chain link fence to keep theirs. Knight with the usual verve excises as a grand authorial means, exerting as much power as is his.  The austerity as though seething through clenched teeth, we seem to implicitly understand this type of anger.


See too: John Knight at Greene Naftali

“Photo Waste” at Cabinet

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The alienation continually recurring is well produced here in a simple series of categorical illustrations listed as exhibitionary requiem; events silenced; a world where Discovery of the means of production is profound entertainment; and drawing from back to a time when when looking was still a profound pleasure before its subsumption into a new semio-self-production conjuring a whole new coin: “selfie” alighting ourselves in immolating spectacle glowing blue, remembering things so way past, today no one goes to bed early against the illumation of de Brabant's new castle glass standing in for a world we believing ourselves connecting.

Anthony Symonds at Cabinet



Looking back, Symonds 2002 RTW collection is amazingly bland, save a few foreshadowing bikini's spyder webbing, fitting for tennis clubs, before the art thing allowing libidinal fancy-freedom and now it's dressed mannequins for sale, strangely unacknowledged weirdness of selling dressed mannequins, not just outfits. But so the point: Symonds wasn't always avante-fashion technicalities, approaching at one point an almost suburban subtlety. But so 2014 you've got some elegant dresses (on mannequins) and a quote lifted from classic documentary Paris is Burning (which why?) some patterns and mirrors and one technical space robe to remind us of Symonds more out coutureism, fine. Fashion art fine. Most of the discussion will remain ignorant to Raf Simmons, and pretty much fashion as whole, like did an architect ever look at Jorge Pardo's home and should we have rescinded the money. Fine.

Anna Blessman and Peter Saville at Cabinet



There's a moment of misrecognition looking at the objects, but it quickly resolves into a familiar comfort. The objects aren't as strange as they are desired to be, barely-strange items. The exhibition looks really good. These objects look perfect, like products, or would if they were less generic and seemed to have more of a function, instead they come across as art products. Bertrand Lavier meets Michaela Meise.