Noah Barker at Lodos

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I think we're supposed to find something spooky connecting the guy at the RAND corporation (and later developing intercontinental ballistic missiles) also having invented windsurfing. Same guy who designed Tomahawk Missiles and the X-15 rocket plane. But don't care about any of that. This whole thing is better as not art. As just a boat.. An object whose design criteria doesn't care about art. As just a story of a man who loved developing really fast ways to harm people. An engineer who wanted to completely eliminate boredom. That's the art. 

Tomma Abts at Galerie Buchholz

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Stubborn becomes a horn filling the air, an ongoing announcement: "having or showing dogged determination not to change one's attitude or position on something." Stubborn. Repetition is part of the point, rubbing past painting into these "new" ones. The "abstract Morandi" - the permutations of a few simple vessels - flitting between abstraction and concrete shadows. Unsure whether these pull off the same miracle. 

Group Show at Galerie Clages

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A sort of encapsulation of current art. Cargo cult totems that we perform our art rituals upon. It might as well be magic what today's press releases claim. Incant. And wryly Werner's contraptions are the Rube Goldberg machines of art function, like Rachel Harrison and Jason Rhodes finally shaking hands - the factory, meaning disassembles and reassembles, semantically fractured, as content/aura. Art's ostensible value. The sign is material, the art is the machine for compositionizing them, meaning's byzantine Mouse Trap. 

See too: Antligature Rooms p.43, Cargo Cult

Peter Fischli at Galerie Buchholz

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This torturing our social symbols. Why? What does a technical interrogation garner? What are we looking for?

Alfred D'ursel at dépendance & Monika Stricker at Galerie Clages

(dépendance, Clages)

Hot monkey action day today at CAD. A sort of content of the night. With monkeys. But whereas one withdraws into dark heat the other goes full frontal - bearing all the fruits it can let hang out. A press release well to go with it:

"The depiction of a monkey actually always stands for something else, especially in paintings. Most of the time, monkeys act as a distorted picture of mankind, they articulate the tragic dimension of human existence, of life as a cultivated animal. Clearly, Rococo singerie painting only worked satirically ... Monika Stricker continues her engagement with the scrotum, which has now been going on for several years."

Exposing the nut of the matter doesn't diminish it. Turning on the lights doesn't necessarily let its content out. 

see too: Monika Stricker at dépendance

Adam Martin at Galerie Buchholz

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Think of the promotional image and its parallel to art documentation. And then around 2011 they became the same. Where documentation had generally lagged behind the object/exhibition, the image now preceded the object. Then replaced the object. And this was useful to art's promenade - the Matthew Barney effect. 

"[Cremaster was a] Levi's ad campaign of artistic hubris. Cremaster succeeded, regardless any filmic merit, on its ability to manifest excitement and intrigue as a promotional vehicle, a cultural mythos that mirrored the mythos within. At the time you could almost talk about Cremaster without having seen any of it, the image was so omnipresent. Seeing was of less import than having being able to have an opinion, know of it. Having gained traction ever since, this form of promotional vehicle cannot be understated in importance post CAD/insta etc. when pipes and what they can funnel is tantamount."

The image allowed an opinion, allowed the chatter, fostered the spread. At the same time the promotional image mirrored the structure of art - it refused resolution, instead creates a hole, a lack, that need to be filled. A gap mirroring art's life-support of eternalized "questions." Consumable without destruction, depletion. What is salesmanship in advertising, is the poetic in art.

Which is all to say (in the current vogue for promotional stills of people wearing 3D head sets staring off like Galileo into space) Martin's very lofi promo documentation is somehow alluring and perfectly opaque.

Claus Richter Easy Clages, Cologne

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"a whole fun fair" : the big cartoon, the toy store, thematic to our world which converts everything into transactable pleasure, the stores for adults not much different from a kid's store anymore. "Sesame Street and hyper-Western Americanisation, which Richter has internalised since childhood." In 2015 CAWD wrote: "the kids grown on cartoons have arrived and their childhoods have coincidentally, absurdly, become the accurate depictions of the way the world has begun to feel." And we're once again asked to read the malls for clues to our own humanity. We window shop for it, humanness or something like it.  

See too: “Puddle, pothole, portal” at Sculpture Center, Juliana Huxtable at Reena Spaulings

grounded at Berthold Pott

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"Group shows always look like you blew up a shopping mall, like its reassembly after catastrophe, like hangers categorizing airline wreckage. Trying to make sense in debris. Us, a cargo cult. Us, a primitive culture, drawing aurochs on our white cave walls. With the debris of culture. Our Mystic auto-anthropology. "

"art treats culture as a system of artifacts to be interrogated by its own white light certification process, a factory for meaning production." 

Which this show takes literally. Less a criticism than the exhibition understanding, reifying, the cultural ether. This is what these shows do. Catalog the wreckage. 

Bradley Davies at Clages

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Cartoon pastoral peasantry, and the like. An ever so slight hallucination.

Laurent Dupont, Lisa Jo at Braunsfelder Laurent Dupont

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You paint the thing over the thing, a face over your face, a representation getting closer and closer to its object until, well, they touch, link, and representation adsorbs, becomes, its object. A history of attempts to kill the artwork - here make a painting so redundant as to negate it - always fail - but we find them titillating, art as thing that cannot be killed. In its place a ghost of it.

Mathis Gasser at Ginerva Gambino

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"illustrate his thesis: that the collective unconscious’s anxiety—of the end of capitalism, the end of the world—has emerged in sublimated form as spaceships." Hovering "Big Dumb Objects": "They [Big dumb objects] function as science fiction’s equivalent to a MacGuffin, plot devices which serve to awe the viewer with mystery and intrigue yet bear little to no narrative explanation. The objects we face are visually so striking that they quash further inquiries into their exact raison d’être." The big dumb object, be it tumor or bubble, manifest fear as a physical object so it can be overcome, defeated by the plot. It is an effigy, a device to allow our dream-selves to create a monster that we can see defeated, turned over in hand, felt, and thought.
The big dumb object is painting.

Lutz Bacher at Galerie Buchholz and Sarah Rapson at Essex Street

(Clockwise from top left, Lutz Bacher, Susan Cianciolo, Sarah Rapson, Park Mcarthur)

Yellowing archive.

While early Conceptual Art was interested in the document (the instructional as a virtual, a program, cerebral) its second generation is a bit more lossy, interested in the fossil, more precisely the fossilization, that slow decomposition into eternality, history. Recoups its own acidification, hazing, foxing, all the condition reports it will accumulate. This "second generation" invests in the degradation of generations of bootleg tape. Fossils existing as strange evidence of a world. a pathos in the materials we find to mediate our touch to the world. ... The objects here, designed for ourselves, infer something about the bodies which they govern.

It would not take a freudian to posit why particularly women appear to be more sensitive to material conditions of the world. Like, while Kosuth was concerned for all the mysteries of "Chair," Wex and Mary Kelly were like yes, but we also get pregnant. The "cerebral" of men's white concerns was treated as the higher plane and, for all its agnostic posturing, the "conceptual" allied itself with a reverence akin the religious divinity it ostensibly exiled. Men, oblivious to their own bodies that had never been in question by culture, had the privilege to etherealize themselves above everyone's heads to some assumed universal while women's were increasingly entrenched in politic ground war.

Minimalism's infatuation for the industrial process, of say Judd et al, was, in part, premised on these industrial processes deletion of the body and its "expression" (if not a promise of subjectivity lifted entirely) in looking "pure," like objectivity, removing the human. ... Of course this was the lie of any commodity: that the clean aluminum sheets comprising boxes or laptops weren't simply wiped of their indentured sweat. Minimalism hid the body in the closet. Edward's balls coagulated these castoff bodies minimalism so desperately wanted to forget.

the body is expressed not through "figuration" but its intermediary.. Think of Cady Noland's institutional objects, learning something about the specifics of flesh under society. Of elder's walkers and handcuffs. We make objects for ourselves and so of course they express us. And eventually they exist for so long beside us, silently shape alongside us, that they begin to take on facets and express things that were latent, learning by proxy.

And today we are so acclimated to objects and commodities adapted to us that any object blurrying suggestion for the function they provide (to us) produces an uncanny effect. We say they look otherworldly, alien, simply because we don't know what good they are to us...

Knowledge is kept on rapidly acidifying papers, stored in databanks we anodize against oxidation in deep storage basements to feign permanence, our security. But the world slowly deteriorates, look into the issue of archiving, it's complex nuanced and impossible, it's baby blankets spilled on, barfed on, a biological archive cum Banker's boxes purchased by the gross. 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

which Bacher recurringly recall, cosmos xeroxed into the noise of their granular flooring, stellar scales spilled across expanses like baseballs or sprawls of sand. Mountains dissolve in grains that resemble liquids in geologic time. This recurring theme. The biblical "for dust you are and to dust you will return" is, as far as we know of entropy, scientifically accurate.



see too: Susan Cianciolo at Modern Art, Marianne Wex at Tanya Leighton, Ser Serpas at LUMA Westbau, Ghislaine Leung at Chisenhale & Essex Street, Laurie Parsons at Museum Abteiberg, Park McArthur at Chisenhale, Park McArthur at SFMOMA, Richard Rezac at Isabella Bortolozzi, Henrik Olesen at Schinkel Pavilion, Henrik Olesen at Cabinet, Henrik Olesen at Reena Spaulings, Pati Hill at Essex Street, Klara Lidén & Alicia Frankovich at Kurator, Melvin Edwards at Daniel Buchholz

Group Show at Nagel Draxler

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This is what 10 years ago looked like.

Ann Cathrin November Høibo at DREI

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Materially in excess, it condenses through glass, perspires its objecthood through the glazing. Painting we can feel through the window, that has replaced feeling. CAD is a window in an abyss of many windows. Everyone trying to feel something through. Our personal panopticon.

Jay Chung & Q Takeki Maeda at Koelnischer Kunstverein

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It's important to note the artists' strategies in mise-en-scene. These photos tell you nothing, give you no information but they connote an affect, one of literal and metaphorical velvet ropes. What, after all, is this photograph of? Of the air, in the impressionist sense. That emptiness they love. Cold like sharks. It'd be something if the artists didn't have at least some hand in the documentation. Or maybe there is just that much air. Like John Knight, the strategies of withholding generate power. In forests we imagine predators, in confusion invent gods, or artists.


See too: John Knight at Greene Naftali, Yngve Holen at Kunsthalle Basel

Julien Ceccaldi at Koelnischer Kunstverein

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Conjuring the stupidity and desperation of the forlorn, something J Ceccaldi repeats in the wasteoids and corpses against the Adonic beauties they cast themselves at. Turning the romance form into its caricature, comic with They Live glasses of romance tropes perhaps. Love never feels as thrilling or effective as it does in the commodified form of a Movie preview, in a montage, in a Pretty Woman story. I've never been a Disney Princess, but I have been a corpse. The movie makes felt this distance its spectacle, the main character's fawning for their love interest mirrors the viewers own longing for the narrative's created love, a creation of desire. The movie's resolution provides myth for the possibility of our own. It's not true you're just a living corpse.

Monika Sosnowska at Gisela Capitain

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Totemizing wreckage as an ostensible reworking of trauma - or as the PR calls it, "poetic metaphor" for artifactual images of the "place's" political and social ideologies, remnant of the politics that wrought them  - would feel a bit more genuine if it wasn't so aestheticized by what we could call "the big shiny": its auto-declaration as Art, a gloss and arrangement that no one could mistake. Something had started to call it ruin porn, a stylized violence, like they actually ship the wreckage of 9/11 around to be gawked at, souvenirs of cruelty or imperialism, and often aestheticized. These you get to project your own fantasy disaster movie scene into.

3 Shows, Julia Scher at DREI, Lin May Saeed at Studio Voltaire, Fernando Palma Rodriguez at House of Gaga

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The security camera, early exemplar of the our proprioception lost to digital realms as your body could be distended in mirrors sent through ethers appearing before you, behind you, and Magritte's Not to be Reproduced no longer surreal but our reality, walking into department stores. On facebook you reach out to poke, instagram click to like, your body a ghost appearing in other's mirrors. You appear everywhere. Like deafferented monkeys in lab experiments we lose control of limbs at the researcher doing studies on our psyche attempting to maximize engagement, a word which now means clicks, their hands in our gloves. Animals living with open brains.

Animals in environments degraded by plastics, EPS, Styrofoam. We with some idea rolling around in our heads about how long these foams last, largely abstract, largely uncertain, a million or a mere ten thousand, years, the foam will persist longer than paintings. In the presence of light it very quickly experiences photodegradation breaking down into a powdery substance that will chemically persist in the lungs and bloodstream of animals moving up the food chain. A fragile body, naive, that requires our protection. Sculptures which if improperly cared for become time bombs of their environmental toxicity, careful with them, leaching chemical into the fish they depict carefully, a preciousness we must protect.

The deranged mechanicals. Robots acting stupidly, uncaringly. A world we've designed as such. See the video here. Motors are dangerous, they are inhuman, lose track of where your body is, get your hand caught, its inability to discern the softness of flesh air you experience a rapid what is called degloving.

Wolfgang Tillmans at Galerie Buchholz

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The promise of Tillmans' photographs is that maybe we too are living lives worthy of documentation if only our own humdrum was given the micro-attention of such a lovely eye, then we too could be seen, could be seen as worthy, placed on walls, actually be seen. It's a base human impulse, the need to be seen, recognized. Tillmans' eye fills with the promise of this possibility, of someone loving you no matter how banal, even the lowly ogre's onion, which is why all Tillmans' photographs seem to come pulled from a drawer in your parent's house and seeing yourself 30 years younger: the photos aren't great but they come with hammering benevolence attended to creatures we care for, a walloping nostalgia that Tillmans has found as immediate packaging: that the inherently elegiac medium also promises preservation of someone's sight of you.  Which is maybe why Tillman's always evokes comfortable denim, this base promise of finally of someone finally seeing you because your butt finally looks good packaged by the right hand and someone will love you.



Careworn: Susan Cianciolo at Modern Art

Trisha Donnelly at Museum Ludwig

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An artist doing her best to abolish the possibility of a reference we can call common, bury it behind opaque markers. i.e. difficult to recount without resorting to the degrading telephone game of myth, scattered primary source quotes cut/pasted ad infinitum; the PR limbo bending backwards to avoid description, replaced with chimes; and objects which, even at peak banality aren't really describable without metaphor, some sorta whatsa type a deal. What you see isn't mine. Probably why there's such radical opinion difference, Donnelly's cult and the mudslingers. The inability to derive equitable terms, a reference to talk about, looking like slack-jawed yokels.


See too: Michael E. Smith at Sculpture Center