Alvin Baltrop at Daniel Buchholz

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Rose colored lenses of nostalgia, a scene depicted as the fantasy it was desired to be, but the reticence or demureness in some of Baltrop's early voyeurism shouldn't be mistaken for anything but caution. His situation's precarity, a gay black man in the 1970s, is expressed on the surface of the photographs themselves, in its tentativeness, his body's extreme vulnerability. People threatened, murdered. A gay haven was habitually brutal. These people were killed, ostracized, displaced to the corners, to escape the purview of a society disavowing them. You see it in the photo's trembling hand.



See too: AA Bronson and Keith Boadwee at Deborah Schamoni

Melvin Edwards at Daniel Buchholz

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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.


See too: Ajay Kurian at White Flag Projects

Caleb Considine at Daniel Buchholz

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"This sense of content being astray has to do also with the process’ vying for significance."

Call the exhibition Clue. The puzzles of today's painting in which their individuated flat symbols present a real mystery of a subject. Looking like de Chirico designed a board game. Soviet Realism for the icon age, new devotional painting. Colonel Rublev in the museum with a candlestick.


Click these: Caleb Considine at Massimo de Carlo, Jutta Koether at Bortolami, Jana Euler at Kunsthalle Zürich, Mathew Cerletty at Office Baroque, Annette Kelm at Meyer Kainer, Annette Kelm at Gio Marconi, Jesse Chapman at Algus Greenspon, Kaspar Müller at Federico Vavassori, Jay Chung & Q Takeki Maeda at 356 Mission, Jesse Benson at Michael Benevento, Venice: Victor Man at The Central Pavilion,  Group Show at Mary Mary, Gina Litherland at Corbett vs. Dempsey, Emily Mae Smith at Rodolphe Janssen, Milano Chow at Mary Mary, Leidy Churchman at Koelnischer Kunstverein, Allison Katz at Gio Marconi, Adriana Lara at Algus Greenspon

Cameron Rowland at Daniel Buchholz & Etablissement d’en face projects

(Daniel Buchholz, Etablissement d’en face projects)

The critique of calling these Hans Haacke 2.0 would assumedly miss the point: it's more important to take up the mantle of real issues than to redesign its heraldry; the political real takes precedence over aesthetic peacocking. And that "Information" depicting, say, the lineage of certain institutions sketchy holdings as plain as possible might always look like that. And while Haacke's interest centered on the more poisonous assets of art, Rowland's purview concerned with the much larger systemically disenfranchised upon whose sweat these institutions were built and remain standing despite. For both artists the unadorned information/objects in both come across as ominous. Held blankly on walls and floors with little comment both artist's objects come across as simultaneous threat and dejection. No museum today would handle censorship the way the Guggenheim did with Haacke, rejecting his exhibition and firing the curator. Today with similar information you could hold a whole Museum PR department hostage or - and perhaps this where the dejection comes in - things would continue as they are. Maybe Fred Wilson's Mining the Museum is the better example.



See too: Jay Chung & Q Takeki Maeda at 356 Mission

Isa Genzken at Hauser Wirth & Schimmel + Daniel Buchholz

(Hauser Wirth & Schimmel, Daniel Buchholz)

Genzken's (post-fucking-the-bauhaus) work is a box containing the sound of its own making. Genzken so loved by artists as a consummate "maker," a producer without pretension or ideology but whose work advocates its creation: the amassment of itself, the making of the work contained within itself, the object created, creative.  Genzken founded strategies rather than objects, an artistic down-shifting, a speed that could overtake. "the most influential living artist not because everything looks like it, but because it predicated a conglomerate speed absorbing any last vestiges of particular attention to individuated objects" i.e. When we see Genzken we react to the deployment or manipulation/alteration to its strategy, the means of attending the object rather than object itself. Weirdly deny the consumptive act of looking by permanently existing in a state of limbo that, with the rise to rule of art's image alongside the internet, allowed its acceleration to not self-deplete under an all seeing eye. See Josef Strau.


See too: DAS INSTITÜT at Serpentine Gallery, KAYA at Deborah Schamoni, Isa Genzken at David Zwirner, Isa Genzken at Institute of Contemporary Art, Josef Strau at House of Gaga

Amy Lien, Enzo Camacho at various locations

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Our bodily tumult like serial killer sprees in some hallowed halls, the offices of Texte Zur Kunst, Buchholz, Mathew, Lars Friedrich’s apartment - our representation fractured in the need to stash our bodies everywhere in art franchised, split spread divide and reconnect - of course we become like monsters tentacling and "suck[ing] unborn fetuses out of pregnant women" to maintain our youthful semio-capital.


See too: Amy Lien & Enzo Camacho at 47 Canal

John Kelsey at Daniel Buchholz

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The behatted Kelsey's John Marinesque Watercolors prove Kelsey doesn't have anything to prove after decades romancing the artworld and sailing the echelons of cool across gallerist, artist, writer, fashionista etc. etc, finally expelling the exhaust of hyper aspiration where, like the mythic painted-in-secret still-life paintings of Clement Greenberg, the critic expended relaxes into the comfort of Sunday painting. The cash-in could be eyerolling but the watercolors are endearing in the attention to the body exhausting itself, fights are exhausting, which you can't but think now too of Kelsey - pretty much on his own death-bed of cool - reflecting his own exhaustion and while the legs arms often turn to overcooked elbow noodles, the determination to capture the body is present; the whale stuff, while coy, is shit.

Lutz Bacher at Daniel Buchholz

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Some days spent in bed wondering: Does CAD love anyone more than Lutz Bacher? answered by the appearance of another before us. Gotta Catch 'em all Quarterly. If Bacher's theme of the erosion of the monument-as-sign's ability to mean isn't still apparent, the spamming of its images should make it: The semantic satiation of saying it again and again mirroring Bacher's interest in the loss, in the meaning photocopied to death. Like Gonzalez-Torres - who CAD also obviously feels some large affinity towards - significance is in the continual depletion and refill of an ability to appear -significant or loved - in the face of another, an artistic problem if there ever was one.


See too: Lutz Bacher at 356 Mission, Lutz Bacher at Statens Museum for Kunst, Lutz Bacher at Daniel Buchloz, Lutz Bacher at Daniel Buchholz, Contemporary Art Quarterly 2, On Kawara at the Guggenheim

Wolfgang Tillmans at Daniel Buchholz

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Like well worn jeans we've gown comfortable in the softness of Tillmans, and so one would wish to find some sort of hard take to revitalize and refresh the practice, but one doesn't exist. Everyone loves Wolfgang. Tillman's activism was so couched in beauty and positivity as to be almost unremarkable, its seamy undercarriage was this trojan aspect, of looking fashionably pleasant while remaining avant in the subtle radicality taped up in constellations of subjects with a Tillmansesque grace that was unpretentious and gentle and modular, placable over a rotating set of subjects conjuring a loveliness almost overbearing, saccharine. But the rise of instagram with it the "small subject" that had seemed so radical then has become defacto as "unpretentious" photography is the ocean we tread weary, the artist having created the fashion that has come to obsolesce him, Tillmans will eventually amass a lifetime of them, these small moments, able to outpace the fashion.

Wolfgang Tillmans at David Zwirner, James Lee Byars at VeneKlasen/Werner,

Julian Göthe at Daniel Buchholz

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The sort of Figurative Surrealism that found satisfaction in the invention of new worlds sort of just fell off into its own genre fantasy which, like Winsor McCay, the pleasure of conjuring worlds was its meaning that one sadly must continually wake from. And ballyhooed fantasy that was conceded, relegated to the de-emancipated, and the slumbering masses. But as Göthe relays, "It is way better for you to have coerced, gently, a free man, than to have freed a thousand slaves."

Mathias Poledna at Daniel Buchholz

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After the fact of Poledna's crystalline film, an exhibiting of the mass labor, what was described as a "language of pure joy in a fantasy world with no worries, anxieties or fatigue that pervades the viewer’s every pore" exposing the requisite energy manifesting its fantasy, you can find numerous animators online claiming it in their portfolio, hands amounting in labor hours to let the Donkey have its clean moment. The pure bodies of cartoon animals aligned by sweaty men and woman, somehow erotic for that. In this sense cartoons are the perfect representation of bodily shame.



See too: Matthew Brannon at Casey Kaplan, Larry Johnson at Raven Row, Yuji Agematsu at Artspeak, “Puddle, pothole, portal” at Sculpture Center

Lucy McKenzie at Daniel Buchholz

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Different from other representational returns prizing the awkward and cartoon, Mckenzie's representation is surreal in its explicit literalness, a directness that in art is almost vertiginous in our distrust of it. The appealing comfort of the bourgeois home's surface, all surface, the modern question of whether we should believe in the sign or not, the surface or not, like clue boards we're not sure to trust, as the PR states: presenting legal grey areas in culture’s appetite for the genuine.


See too: Mathew Cerletty at Office Baroque

Udo Lefin at Daniel Buchholz

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The vacancy of Lefin's subjects, their nominal ability to mean, is given a creedance through the diligence and specificity of Lefin's staggering insistence on them. A level of effort proving the antithesis of a Richter-like draining of meaningful subjects, instead the acute particularness of his dead subjects reanimates them, and poisonous, having too much content, distasteful.

Frances Stark at Daniel Buchholz and Daniel Buchloz



Stark’s teenage formality distinct Matthew Brannon’s hypochondriac bourgeois, her posters and videos, though clean, contain a level of humanist existential goo. Stark drawing from DIY-punk ethos letting it all hang out the canvas, a gesture towards admitting the cultural disposability of art practice based in images today that stands over the face of the Deep, Instagram. Artists can’t get over it, blasted in an unstoppable deluge of culture daily. With so many “dealing with it,” detourning it into art, as if that was meaningful, launching conventional artist weapons in atomized age, Stark’s insistence in the forms cheapness itself, its mixtape assemblage of a disposable music video, affirms her as one of the few who actually get it.

Michael Krebber at Daniel Buchholz



Herr Krebber is a minefield for reviews. Where other artists nimbly or glaringly leave crumbs as symbols for reviewers delightful mouthful, instead here a booby’s trap to bite your tongue, and the smartest, silent, the boob himself. The fallout of a Krebbershow unpredictable, the initial awestrikingly dumb often long-running toward prescient. The whole incest-vampiring of all those bad reviews at GreeneNaftali, before then showing paintings at those writer’s galleries, and voila they’re on the map.
The German Buchloz shows tend more toward reservations than the often more detourned NYC equivalents, a little more stylistically “Krebberesque” and here looks no different. Squiggled and brayered paintings, how nice, look great. A press release that beats all the mysterio PR of the last couple years with a 1 ton weight. We could take it as “Fashionable Nonsense,” but maybe its theme of causal indeterminacy will seem aha fresh in a month. The peddler cries, “In the name of the prophet – figs!!”

Lutz Bacher at Daniel Buchloz



All the “information” in this show, the symbols etc whatever, already contain within them their loss. The WTC in snow, the Buffalo, the men as soldiers, the words scrawled, the random plunking of keys. The pathos of much of Bacher’s work is heavy here in its nihilism. The bareness of the rooms offset by a horrible subconscious construction, a non-sculpture of jagged metal reminiscent of the things you cough up at night, a cubist torture device. It offsets the clean minimalism of the photographs. An empty surrealist sculpture of half formed buffalo, over-slaughtered symbol of the American west, here vessels or volumes, who, in their skeletal incompleteness, let their empty contents vaporate, disperse vaporously through the sieve of chicken wire like loosely intertwined fingers. Their “Paleolithic cave painting” look an omen of the future crumbling.
The word desolate strikes you again and again and again.
The oft-premise of Bacher work is loss, the loss of humanity, of information, of containable knowledge, a hands-in-air gesture of trying to contain, label, some part of humanity as it makes it way towards expected apocalypse, the cusp of obliteration. The buffalo sculptures deploy their feel of a culture half there half on their way out. The scrawled text’s intermediary feel pre-premise their future obsolescence, “the title of this book, the theory of everything” hypothesizes then an endpoint for the work beyond one of human time, in the far reaches of nothingness with mock laughter at the soldiers and men who once occupied it, smiling and stern, goodbye.
The work continuously occupies the place similar to nostalgic photographs, creating the empathy for the present as if its already the past.

Lutz Bacher at Daniel Buchholz

“... revealing the poetic inadequacy of depicting and describing the cosmos.”

Poetic Inadequacy.

The xerotic appropriations a peel of dead skin; an isolation in which images are stripped to their imprint. The aggressive desolation of the original life or allure left to a tertiary alien distance, as though foreign, reduced to objective information, to what they may have once connoted to a human race. The nihilistic double-bind of the images thrown in your face leave the author’s hands in air’s surrender, as hostage, the images left afloat in the air of heavy white gallery frames.