Sanya Kantarovsky at Marc Foxx

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“‘Stylization’ is what is present in a work of art precisely when an artist does make the by no means inevitable distinction between matter and manner, theme and form. When that happens, when style and subject are so distinguished, that is, played off against each other, one can legitimately speak of subjects being treated (or mistreated) in a certain style.”(Sontag)

It would seem this sentence already feels antiquated, painting today prerequistely stylized with the past worn as its own sleeve. There isn’t a painting today not “stylized” with its own past instance, that doesn’t dress itself in it.  Kantarovsky doesn’t treat style as symbolic fashion to be worn, but merely the water one swims in today, the status quo for an art submerged in the redirection of flows of “content.”  That some could be mistaken for a Kai Althoff matters less than none, the difference is ideological, one cold one warm. Interesting now to see this show finding a child illustration-like pathos within it. The thin veil of the press release decoded with a simple substitution cipher, the enigma revealed:

“Surrounded by a chewy gelatinous sugar coating[...]Laden with [painting] history, [Kantarovsky] is burdened as well with the impossible task of conveying sweetness in a largely bitter and disenchanted world, a world overwhelmed with familiar pictures of unfamiliar people. Each [painting] packs a memory of itself, staining the tongue with streaks of saturated color, issuing a syrupy nostalgia for [?] itself—abated only by the hope that some still remain in the pack.”

Chris Burden Metropolis II at LACMA

(Metropolis II)

the highest function of art in democracy
is to keep potential dictators out of the candidate pool
by offering them a much less socially costly
illusion of immortality.
- Mark Leidner

Burden’s sculptures express stupid power, mimed and caricaturized from the world's existing forms, brutal and dumb, big and deaf.
At 11:30 a.m. on a Saturday the children sitting patient with the machine begin along with it to whirr and squeal, running in the same circles as it. They could not be more enamored with seeing their playthings scaled to the epic one of money’s fuel. Their unsublimated desires erected by the ordering principles of capital, having not yet even known this was their desire.
And As a caricature the sculpture feels apt. The inexplicable pointless whizzing of thousands of cars mocks the outrageous scale of Los Angeles’s travel system's own competing with the Great Wall in sheer determination as solution. Inelegant.
For Burden the question of, “How did our world end up like this?” is posited as the product of thousands of megalomaniac children grown never learning their childhood fantasies of the world need not be enforced upon it. That the train barons and real estate developers creating and having created the world may have less to do with money and more with the latent remains of childhood fevers. The rest are left in the lumbering audience’s stands that surround it which brutally ask viewers to bear witness to it, grandstanding their viewership of the world as constructed. The children run giddy.

“Seven Reeds” at Overduin & Co.

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As others have extrapolated, Kassay’s silver market stardom was, in the style of ancient plated mirrors, an object of vanity for the rich, giving them back exactly what was loved most, their surroundings, their homes, their empire and visage. To prove the point the more well silvered even reached higher prices. The theory serves as a parable to distinguish the vanity of the rich from the more philosophically noble raisons of the art world, and that Kassay’s shift to monochromes, however derivative, was a welcome advancement past vain ideals.
Yet the monochrome itself is a flattery of the viewer. In its minimalist mode it highlights the theater of its surrounding, as Fried described minimalism almost half a century ago:

“theatrical because, to begin with, it is concerned with the actual circumstances in which the beholder encounters literalist work. Morris makes this explicit. Whereas in previous art ‘what is to be had from the work is located strictly within [it],’ the experience of literalist art is of an object in a situation - one that, virtually by definition, includes the beholder.”

Or to quote the infamous monochrome brand of Codax: “ another aspect of monochrome paintings is that they function somewhat like a mirror. They are essentially blanks. With little evidence of the hand that made them, it’s harder to attribute subjectivity to them than with most other art, so people are confronted with themselves a bit more.”
That monochrome or minimalist modes are themselves a vanity object, in which the viewer is flattered for all the intelligence that they can project into the blank objects. Serving to imbue their surrounding, gallery or living spaces with the auratic privilege of “art.” Lacking even Imi Knoebel’s color-content, the works drabness serves to disperse content and reinforce it as its surroundings, its space and viewer on the stage before it, like totems of whatever ideals they allow to be contained. That so much gentle painting today rather than a production of content, merely acts as directives for the flow of content and persons that come to it, trickling through it.

See too: Merlin Carpenter at Overduin & Co.

Jesse Fleming at 356 Mission



Whereas Paul Pfeiffer’s frozen basketball players represented the interior ecstasy of the players before the audience, Fleming’s film works outward into its receiving audience mirrored in its screens. And like Doug Aitken’s use of commercial-production’s affective means as the product itself, Fleming’s immaculate visual spectacle produces a seductive and blinding spell, absorbing its religious imagery into the enrapture of theater. The PR interview names this visual-trance by the psychology term “Flow” in which one is “fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity,” the activity here of its viewing. Yet the full involvement of the quad-channel jumbotron here does more to dislocate the viewer entirely from the it with the hypnosis of its virtual replacement, a dislocating amnesia, like 356 Mission’s other film spectacular, Sturtevant’s FINITE/INFINITE, in its grinding visual takeover of the viewer. But whereas Sturtevant’s film continually ejected the viewer every 11 seconds from its theatrical suspension, Fleming’s virtual supplanting of a continuous and unending “flow” might find its ultimate potential of enraptured viewership in the eponymous fictional film of Infinite Jest, a deadly and ultimate terror.