Abraham Cruzvillegas at Chantal Crousel

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According to the PR, the works in the exhibition "are the result of a long term reflection" on the Las Limas Monument, "Señor de Las Limas."

"Made from materials picked up around the city ... they are all put together to be carried and carry something else... based on scientific proposals as to the transportation techniques the Olmecs used for the Señor de Las Limas... Abraham Cruzvillegas completes his sculptures by a hybrid activity: strapped to his body, he embarks each one on a journey between the gallery and a place of personal importance in this day-to-day life."

According to wikipedia page for the 1000BCE Señor de Las Limas: "What these sculptures symbolized to their culture is not clear." Which is true now too. What do these sculptures symbolize to our culture, chairs in the air. We can't even figure it out now. "examines the notion of labor" or more specifically the valorization processing labor into art through myth.  

see too: Abraham Cruzvillegas at Kurimanzutto

Jean-Luc Moulène at Chantal Crousel

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Moulène riding fine line of decorative tripe and experiments unnerving enough to shrug easy swallow - a straddling that tensions each. Moulène always threatening to fall into the high powered kitsch of Urs Fischer or Ugo Rondinone but never actually doing it. The automotive sex of the purple shiny thing is made explicit by the inflated concrete tits, its latent sex unhidden.

Rirkrit Tiravanija at Chantal Crousel

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Those fucking potted palms. What a trope - since at least Broodthaers(?)... the same species even. Plants ironize the space of art, their temporality (as decoration and life) clashing with our notions of art's eternality. "Life is short, and art long." Here is the art is short. Requires watering. Dies after exhibition. Broodthaers even called his installations "decors" a primordial institutional critique, the system itself up for question, that has now become a stand-in, a symbol, invoking critique. "If so much art looks like Broodthaers today, it is because Broodthaers was of the first invested in the arrangements of display as a credence to meaning, institutional or otherwise."

Then some poetics crusted into marble. On art rags. It's the art's metadata that's important here, the halo. The signals of "critique" are just polish for that halo.


See too: David Hartt at Graham Foundation, David Lieske

Thomas Hirschhorn at Chantal Crousel

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Hirschhorn provided fantasy. Conflated the constructions with construction work, of a philosophy being useful like plumbers, a pragmatic attitude that "fans" of philosophy armed with nothing but his packaging tape could assemble some good in the world. In hindsight much of it was tone deaf and not really useful. But it looked utilitarian. That was important.
This exhibitions "conversations" are a clever way to commodify another's thinking in a neat package AND provide a fantasy, of our communication being clever. Making your fandom pay through resale.

Reena Spaulings at Chantal Crousel

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Reigning champions of the dumb art gesture so profoundly, inertly, token as to rupture any semblance of hope for meaning; it found comedy in the malignant stupefaction of the "art gesture." Proudly took the hot wind from the sails of conceptual structures moving art and blowing hard.  The work actively attacked the insider: anyone who understood Spaulings game did not receive art's usual self-congratulations but the unloading of 40 foot soldiers of uncommon stupidity inside your head. A virus affecting only those in-the-know while the blissfully unaware remained free of its belittling folly. Writing this, I've actually needed a thesaurus for "dumb." That the work draws heavily on Kippenberger's "paintings as excuses for their titles" or Club Paint's even more beautifully perfectly asinine paintings matters less than none: the derivativeness actually aids in amplifying its flat hammed power, the more you get it the more it evacuates.


See too: AA Bronson and Keith Boadwee at Deborah Schamoni, Martin Creed at Hauser & Wirth Somerset, Merlin Carpenter at Overduin & Co.

Thomas Hirschhorn at Chantal Crousel

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The Aesthetic bullying of Hirschorn is continually justified upon the premise that if the world is this violent so too may I be, which makes some sense, a world comprised of violent images justifies artists having some tendency/responsibility toward them, of which Hirschhorn, bundling himself in political declarative truisms, has no issue meeting or exceeding this violence under the auspice of political knowledge or at least rhetoric, serving as gross illustrations of the madness of culture. True grotesque violence can't, shouldn't, be consumed in the way artwork generally is, with its polite meanings and lineages and references exonerating genteel abstraction.  Hirschhorn instead aesthetically screaming. But as the provided documentation examples, no matter the madness involved we are just men standing around politely considering it.