Cosima von Bonin at Marianne Boesky

(link)

The commodity is the form we now think in. The variations of fish getting more and more micro, they blur together, or are these just the same sculptures as before?  Which may be the point, the purchaser isn't buying the particular product on the shelf but the idea behind it. This store's Scotch-Brite® Non-Scratch Scrub Sponge might be pink and the one in the commercial is a more regal yellow, but you are not any longer buying the sponge for its color, you're buying it for what it can accomplish in your home.


Se too: Cosima von Bonin at House of Gaga & Magasin III Jaffa, Cosima von Bonin at Friedrich Petzel

Cosima von Bonin at House of Gaga & Magasin III Jaffa

(Gaga, Magasin)

The first show of Cosima von Bonin in both Mexico and Israel the press releases with trumpets. Which feels more colonial than culturally humanitarian, proffering the west's hegemony further into the world. New outposts everywhere. How dreary it would have to lack proximity to these objects of capital. A tooting symptomatic of our belief in art as a beneficial if not outright moral substance in need of spread, of announcement. The commodity is the form we now think in, and these are teh "good" commodities.

“J A N U A R Y” at dépendance

(link)

Paintings we bruise to reestablish some body, flesh, into the cartoon that has become pervasive, some hematoma between the lines inked to delineate ourselves. We don't want to be cartoons. Our bodies, paintings, can't take hammers like a liquid cat can.

Cosima von Bonin at Friedrich Petzel

(link)

"Von Bonin's post-'90s work anticipates the professional artist's return as full-time manager of her own brand-image.  [...]  Graw describes von Bonin's shift from ephemeral and intensely collaborative projects to the kind of object production befitting an international art star both as a decided "capitulation" to market forces and, paradoxically, as a devious "outperforming" of the market's demands. [...]  In any case, von Bonin's use of style as a means of elaborating games between subjects and objects, between the artist and her works, is as controlling as it is evasive. It is where the contemporary subject loses its distance from the commodity, but it is also the place where distances can be reappropriated and made strange again. " -JKelsey

"Her art is soft and sociable but dangerous underneath" - JFarago

"Von Bonin is no handmaiden to either the marketplace or academia. Somehow she slips betwixt and between these two extremes of our current art-world narrative, indeed creating her own, alternative 'plot.'" -F Hirsch

This seems to be the place where writers stop. Having attempted and failed to peel the stubborn adhesive from the surface they claim, "ah look how stuck together they are!" And admittedly von Bonin's adherence to the commodity - despite every critical attempt to remove it from - is sticky stuff, and eventually one wonders if there is a layer at all, or merely a patch drawn to appear such. And the whole critical art world grouped around attempting to pick quarters painted on the palatial shopping mall floors while above their bent necks the objects transact. The critical establishment hallucinate quarters because they are needed to eat. They stand around in the shape of an old president.

"I, too, wondered whether I could not sell something and succeed in life. For some time I had been no good at anything. I am forty years old... Finally the idea of inventing something insincere crossed my mind and I set to work straightaway." "What is it? In fact it is objects." -Broodthaers.

See too: Simon Denny at MoMA PS1