Cerith Wyn Evans at Museo Tamayo

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We've been staring at lights for a hundred thousand years, fire to hearth to television to phones, the light we arrange our living rooms around, surely finding comfort in our control, ability to channel and manipulate forces. We can now flaunt it, bend the tubes of capital to allow its flows to move through our neon, make it baroque to brandish it - its light as proof of our life, the lights are on, we are vital. Where once the fire was symbol of home, lights are now proof of capitalistic viability: an artist keeping the lights on.


See too: Cerith Wyn Evans at Galerie Neu, Sam Lewitt at Kunsthalle Basel

Cerith Wyn Evans at Galerie Neu

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The beautification of conceptual art, by assigning it more visceral roles it had once, in theory, rejected, is a hypostatization of conceptual art's poetic function. i.e.: Conceptual Art was always maximally poetic, failing to deliver the bureaucracy its language promised - breaking the glass of language to expose perfume of its confusion, irreductive - and glossing beauty atop to prove it: annoying at best. Wyn Evans engagement with this problem seems, at least partially, the point, the aestheticization of experience and awareness of the gloss. This is the sinister pulsing quality of Wyn Evans, the fact that there is no need for this artificial light.


See too: On Kawara at the Guggenheim

Group Show at Taka Ishii Gallery

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The early 21st century of art will be remembered for a stylization of opacity (blankness) that, regardless of whether or not it actually did, connoted intention to mean. Silvered photographs with surrealist orbs hovering. That there exists a connotation or affect of meaning that remains separate from it, acting to totemize objects as clues styled to conjure the affect of signification. Much more apparent in group shows as the objects become disenchanted from their significant network. That what we find profound might be a mannerism.

"The fact that there were two of them signifies the end of any original reference. [...] Only the doubling of the sign truly puts an end to what it designates." -Baudrillard

See too:  Group Show at Salle Principale, Merlin Carpenter at MD 72