Simon Dybbroe Møller at palace enterprise

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You can take a picture without a lens, make an image of the world. These displays are apparatus that are camera, they make an image of the dust. The photograph they create is the distance from that object dust. This is not a metaphor. They make an image, a distance, they are a camera.

 
"Photograph" has become synonymous with "image." This is top 10 historical blunders. Through this historical snafu, we have chosen a specific technology as defining image. Photography is actually a niche form of image. Photography is a subsidiary of printmaking. It should not have come to represent an entirety of "image." 100 years before photography, the “picturesque” was a term invented for painting. Or Mt. Vesuvius explodes, exposing its human to its ash albumen, and awaiting the development by plaster handling archaeologists. This is an image without photography.

Isabella Solar Villaseca at O—Overgaden

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Artists take note! The t-shirt is an honest signal. Unlike for so many artists who must subsume their signs/fandom into craft objects as value, the lowly t-shirt attempts no artistic bruhahaha. The t-shirt is stupid, democratic, it is your vote - which is why we like it - and why so many bad artists attempt to leverage their tastes as "art," monumentalize their like into statues, little fascists that artists are. 

Mads Lindberg at C.C.C.

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A movement called "thrift store unconscious" - that "every image has the right to exist beyond its aesthetic quality" - that images exist because someone somewhere, regardless of skill or self-awareness to conceptually edit their mental garbage, had the desire for garbage. Paintings like a physical wish, and these ones just happen to be kinda gross. Someone cared enough to make these. This desire "speaks" - has meaning, a subject appears, however abject, the grey slime of the human, in paint form. 

"The surrealism of today's painting mirrors the fact that any of the medium, in quantities vast enough, begins plotting points of the cultural unconscious. If you amass enough hand made images you begin so see dreams emerge. Painting, a virtual box that you fill with what you desire, but the desire is, if not caged, steered around themes that can be inferred by the collection circling around them. You can't see the pier but you can see the fish circling around them: the nude, Jesus, the phallus, pink things, us. Shaw's collection is like Wade Guyton's ostensible promise of printing our dreams, the conveyer of painting collecting like flypaper a civilization's subconscious."

"These are some of the worst paintings you will ever see," Jim Shaw's thrifted paintings.

 

No couch!

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No couch! Amazing! 10/10. What a performance. In all the wildest dreams...

see too: Summer's couches, Venice: Anne Imhof at German Pavilion

SIGNA at Simian & Angélique Aubrit, Ludovic Beillard at Centre d'Art Contemporain La Synagogue

(Simian, Cd'ACLS)

We had always predicted Wilkes to come back, but never expected its haunting to be literalized into performance. Nor in matching colors. Wilke's materialism no longer enough, we need stronger ghosts.  

see too: Cathy Wilkes 

Nina Manobra at Jir Sandel

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A lullaby maneuver "...boredom, and layers, layers, layers. Layers of Boredom, Layers of Time..." Framing a show in boredom almost feels like relief, honest - and thankfully not intellectualized.  Boredom is stupid, dumb, not smart, and here someone crawls around on the carpet filming their gnatty flight over its monochrome. The monotone, those fleeting glimpses of total malaise where no one is writing a press release to attempt understanding.

David Ostrowski at Jir Sandel

(link)

Preferring not to, inhabiting the other, the parasite, etc, etc. In 1994 Heimo Zobernig was asked to make a design for the dust skrim covering the Generali Foundation's facade during renovations. He painted the Foundation's logo as large as would fit in the wrong colors and pretty poorly. Refusing the responsibility of the creative act, giving in to corporate signs - I find the critique is in not doing what art was supposed to, soften the facade with "design" but instead merely repainting its logo forcing an ugly re-exposure - no facade at all. Anyway that was decades ago and here we are again.


Past: David Ostrowski at Sundogs

Maria Wæhrens at Jir Sandel

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Painting comes with a story, history attaches painters to moments and ideas, paint as reaction rather than paint, often rather rarely talking about painting at all. The relief of talking about history rather than art. Maybe someday this will change. Maybe someday we will have painting.

Lina Viste Grønli at Christian Andersen

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Attempting to short circuit the conduit/loop by placing tongue already in objects. The words inside my head are no longer mine. Someone sitting on your shoulder, expecting you. Common to Lina Viste Grønl.

Rasmus Høj Mygind at Jir Sandel

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Personally I think Epstein did kill himself.* But in an exhibition about contingency this is hardly the point. It's about enacting a viral birth in reality, the Epstein meme is its own title, its own reality in meme-like propagation, simply reading/thinking it propagates it, which like the far-right's conspiracies spread less by truth than by simply continuing to collect consciousness of. This becomes akin to art/entertainment where consensus/agreement is less powerful than commonality, fame reduced to shared-knowledge-of, Kardashian-like, as art and things become self-reflexive self-illustration. Pollock illustrates abstraction, Judd minimalism, enter the history books. Which these are self illustrations, self-propagate. The point isn't abstraction it's amoebic survival in consciousness. Against self-annihilation, towards extending consciousness, what we call viral may simply be confused life.

* Even if we're feeling conspiratorial, the shadow org would only have to tell him he must. Perhaps a semantic argument. But it is a scarier thought, rather than being strangled by gloved assassins, that someone doesn't need assassins at all. Instead people follow orders to kill themselves because alternatives to suicide are worse. Someone who can conjure worse-than-death.

Tom Humphreys at Christian Andersen

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While Hupmphrey's gang has gone onto bigger better things, Humphreys doubled down on the stupid. Paintings like found in the bins of art school. The revulsion we feel at "bad painting" becomes proof of at least some internal power of painting. The Kippenberger game of self-infliction without the personality panache to recoup it, instead, again, paintings that don't relieve their stupid, but rub their face in it, even yours. This could be a Vittorio Brodmann or Nolan Simon situation, in which the slacker ruse eventually decurtains its prowess, reveal eyerolling deft brushwork, but Humphreys seems like someone who might commit to mud.

Till Megerle at Christian Andersen

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Megerle's earlier drawings with all their provisionality, like comic book schematics for inkblot architecture, retain some of that previous ambiguity here: the amorphous bulbs of lumpen potato people, forms of soft confusion, the graphic line replaced here with corpulence, a dumbness that flatters them, doubt as to what is taking place in them, uncertainty opens as possibility: art's usual interest in opacity replaced with a direct mystery.


See too: Mathew Cerletty at Office Baroque,

“Sirens” at Christian Andersen

(link)

Wolfson made clear that Irony could be weaponized. And here a CSI spoof becomes Sirens' lure, showcasing the world as a way-more-than-directionless cast of characters flailing at even the start of existential questions, obliviousness becoming a goofball existentialism, Caddyshack meets Nausea, and the wait for Godot replaced by a boneheaded stonerism, the absurdity cranked to 11 on a world that reflects not bleakness, but the barren stupidity of Hollywood cliche. When a character - in a spark of clarity - decides to de-mire themselves from the bog of their helplessness, "change the world," the plan ultimately involves selling mermaid meat to the rich. Hopes dashed, and meaning becomes a jumbled mess that ultimately catalyses the apathy it depicts, and the plot is obviously lost to a the gaseous settling of I'm-not-even-able-to-mean into the cracks of everything, interspersed with a few solid jokes. It's just a prank, Bro, and non-sequitur the major currency of comedy today.
As David Robbins becomes evermore relevant, the problem of artists moving closer to mainstream forms is that one enters into direct competition with people who are professionals at it. And this risk of wild amateurism in comparison makes risk averse artist shy. Artists obviously do something different. The metaphysical pondering of the mermaid is probably the highlight of the short, and the jokiest question becomes the most pertinent for art, "How can you move into the future riding a dinosaur?"

Lutz Bacher at Statens Museum for Kunst

(link)

Every Bacher work is its tombstone, the thing which represents its end, the last person remembering their name.
The framing is contextually ambiguous and stripped of their time and negated by the remoteness of their handling a viewers attempts to position themselves in relation to the subjects feels instead their meaning transpire and fade. The small facts make them mean less, caroming off the possibility of understanding. A hallucination of connection, of information adrift from meaning.

See too: Lutz Bacher at Daniel Buchloz

Elmgreen & Dragset at Statens Museum for Kunst

(Elmgreen & Dragset at Statens Museum for Kunst)

Thomas Demand at Avlskarl



Look Demand has subtly altered his practice. Look they’re big abstractions. Look they’re not that interesting. But look they’re probably selling like hotcakes with 1/100th the labor, 1/1000th the effort. Look nice, Sugimoto-esque, perfectly unassuming abstractions, ready to be made decor.
The Richter effect - the big abstractions sell for double. Enter the blue-chips cashing in their cult-cred toward respite from their laborious labor, the lazy borey stuff sells the same under brand names. There's like a waitinglist ready to get in line for this, this cash in.