Frank Walter at David Zwirner

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"the artist Frank Walter who died eight years ago. He lived in extreme poverty, was the child of a slave owner and a slave, a fragmented identity. He travelled extensively in Europe during the fifties and sixties, where he experienced extreme racism. Afterwards he lived in the Antiguan countryside, intensely interested in questions of ecology and agriculture. He was a pioneer. And he painted over 5,000 paintings! An unbelievable body of work, which has not been seen so far. He also wrote poems, worked in nearly all art disciplines. He was the Leonardo da Vinci of Antigua. " –Hans-Ulrich Obrist"

I wish we could stop picking up the bones and proclaiming vitality, picked from the wreckage, like an archaeological dig waiting on the culture to fall - waiting for hardship to patina into aura. Starts to feel like a celebration of pain. The skeletons are worth more to the natural history museum. "Dominant culture lays the concrete of its social conditions, proclaims "look a dandelion has grown," hangs its photo in our halls as testament to humanity. But it can seem like a testament to the concrete. A mythos of suffering starts to feel like instructions for it."

See too: Alvin Baltrop at Hannah Hoffman

Oscar Murillo at David Zwirner

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like Water Lilies, spilled in crude oil. Painting history, a denim we distress. "The hardship that is reclaimed like wood for collectors."

While the ultra-wealthy trade the scatalogic nappies of adult-child-brutes whose own naive styles self-declare their idiocy as avant and thus valuable as coins amongst collectors, Purvis Young's would seem more "authentic," ... patinated with all the struggle to be taken seriously most of his career, and all the worrisome that we wait for the outsider to prove value through wear beat into their objects, while sterling dudes are acclaimed in architecture magazines for the sheer size of their ruby studios; the point not to make fun of them but that for one group the valor is in silver for but another it's in hardship now reclaimed by collectors of such.

A distress we can apply like paint, manufacture reclamation. 

See too: Purvis Young at James Fuentes, Derek Fordjour at Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis 

Felix Gonzalez-Torres at various places throughout the world

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The contract for participating asks for images of the installations and that:

"It is understood that by providing these images, you are providing copyright-free permission for their use in online and print publications related to this exhibition, and for non-commercial use by the Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation, including on its website."

Which turns the cookies into machines for production, for producing the work, a system by which we all relate to each other through the image...

Joe Scanlan on FG-T in "Uses of Disorder":

      Most exemplary in this regard were the untitled paper and candy works, stacks and piles from which anyone could take a piece without returning it or diminishing the firsthand experience of anyone else. At the same time—and in apparent contradiction with that reception—this process of eternal deferral was a welcome panacea for a ruling class in need of a mechanism by which they could create the appearance of public generosity without having to disturb the supply chain of power....
     It demarcates a public site and then converts any events that transpire within the site into part of the work, into private property....
     But the most important characteristic of this dynamic is the refusal ... to appear powerful or acquisitive at all. This too is a kind of “wig,” a controlled ethos of casualness that conceals not only its intentions but also the act of concealment itself. The art and persona of Gonzalez-Torres thus mark an important transformation in the style and atmosphere of power, from the ordinal authority of modern capitalism to the pseudo-communitarianism of today. If the formal properties of 1960s Minimalism—hardness, geometry, impenetrability, silence—were aligned with those of the military industrial complex, then forty years later Gonzalez-Torres’s work exhibits precisely the inverse properties—flexibility, organicism, accessibility, eloquence—and yet aligns with the same thing: the dominant social order. Gonzalez-Torres’s signal accomplishment was his realization that the most expansive, pervasive way to amass power is to not seem powerful at all....
     These very features of Gonzales-Torres’s work parallel those of the Internet economy, where superficial, user-friendly atmospheres mask deeper emotional and psychological manipulations. In the startup days of any social network like BitTorrent, Facebook, or Twitter, part of the appeal is the excitement of feeling responsible for the construct by simply participating—and encouraging your friends to participate as well, since greater activity strengthens the construct and increases its functionality. How the construct can or will become profitable is a mystery to everyone involved, and this mystery is another part of its appeal. Everyone is free to pursue their own ends and these motivations are their own reward. Of course, joining the network requires surrendering your right to the value of any data your activities there might produce...
     ...although this production is mutual, the profits from it are not shared...
     One of the great unacknowledged truths in Gonzalez-Torres’s work, and in the chronic denigration of material pleasure in art in general, is that the call for nobler ambitions almost always comes from people with guaranteed incomes, of whom it can be said, if nothing else, that at least they know first-hand the evils of which they speak....
     ... who seized on the participatory aspects of his work as a kind of election to be won by the artist or curator who garners the most votes...
     That the political potency of Gonzalez-Torres’ work has atrophied but its beauty has not, however, demonstrates how timeless is beauty and how brief are notions of political access and cultural power in a technologically advanced society. It also confirms the class differences inherent in that inevitability—after all, Ars longa, vita brevis is rich people’s thinking. 

....it is dubious to maintain that Gonzalez-Torres’s sculptures are egalitarian or even generous in our time.

Josh Smith at David Zwirner

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Wow.. this press release is practically bulging with self-pleasure:
"First" "Infinite" "instantly" "absolutely everything" "A whole new world" "immediate" "now" "the spirit" These are the words you can buy with blue chips. The artist is pure experience, sensation. Plugged into the raw. So, it doesn't matter they look like bad post-impressionism, the point is that the artist is electric - is channelling. Dancing around saying the word Truth.

Christopher Williams at David Zwirner

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Williams' institutional mirroring - reusing walls, indexing the gallery, reflecting and marking the gallery - its ostensible critique also simply multiplies and reiterates its institutional halos.


Christopher Williams at C/O Berlin, Christopher Williams at MoMA

Josh Smith at David Zwirner

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Maybe what Smith actually provides is relief. Against paintings overdetermined to like the nth degrees by whatever surrealist imago kool-aid the artworld currently swimming, Smith's is an interminable vacation to fields of ever stupid flowers. None of these painting individually matter. Functional. Require zero attention. Just exist like idiotic specimens of a genus Smith. Perhaps this is what Eliza Douglas was responding to, an idea executed, eventually you live long enough with it to learn to love your captor.

Kerry James Marshall at David Zwirner

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The paintings everyone's talking about because it's easier to talk about prices than art. That's the hegemony of price. It is the abstraction allowing exchange, both monetary and conversational. Everyone can talk about it, even if poorly.


see too: Kerry James Marshall at MOCA Los Angeles

Sherrie Levine at David Zwirner

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Images both are and aren't generic, even the most bland are still specific singular instances of a larger regime of similar images, like stock photography's multi-cultural workplace theme. Images become soft by their ubiquity, their dispersal, a continual re-staging erodes their specific edges to become some semi-solid substance of genericness. And any new instances are based on the patterns of the last one. Iconic photographs are often predicated on a tension of specificity given to a ubiquitous theme, a concerned mother, a puddle jump, a flag raising, each iconic image eventually returning to some blank marker of vague icon. Each remembrance is like an appropriation, a rephotographic theft of its specificity to soften it back to the soup of ubiquity, of theme, of trope, back to stock image.


See too: Sherrie Levine at Simon Lee

Ruth Asawa at David Zwirner

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"David Zwirner is pleased to announce the gallery’s first exhibition dedicated to the work of Ruth Asawa since having announced the representation of the artist’s estate earlier this year."
And like that the Asawas sprout all over Manhattan, in group shows, in windows, on CAD, museums, the Whitney, recently acquired by MoMA, moved out of backrooms as though its suddenly now time to care when there's something to be made of it. The collective rolling of eyes goes unharnessed.

Jordan Wolfson at David Zwirner

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Wolfson is a semio super-villain, weaponizing Naumanian irony to outwardly undermine the connection to affective means, objects which establish identification (the artist's interest in the gaze and facial recognition tech as well as nostalgia and cultural mythos) only to systematically abuse and deplete that link through endless tonal dissonance and juxtaposition, e.g. playing saccharine love-songs while a boy who looks into our eyes is repeatedly dragged and dropped onto concrete from a steel marionette of the artist's hand, basically irradiating the gold underpinning our emotive currency, held hostage and tortured. It's akin torture's use of learned helplessness and depersonalization to make its subjects concede to it.
The most successful villainy involved is that in order to say no to a very formally successful scourging of the emotive would require we admit that we believe there is an inherent "good" in art, that art be helpful, admit that we believe ourselves the good guys.

MARTEN: The whole sum is a stylization of wrongness or error.

WOLFSON: That is what I wanted.




See too: Steve Reinke at Isabella Bortolozzi, “Puddle, pothole, portal” at Sculpture Center,  Ed Atkins at Serpentine Gallery

Isa Genzken at David Zwirner

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To make one of those statements that art writers have tendency to make based upon an inflated assessment of their own opinion's import feeling significant though ultimately isn't: Bruce Nauman has passed the torch of most influential living artist to Isa Genzken. It happened in field about 4 years prior as part of a much unpublicized ceremony 28 miles due south of Santa Fe. Without fanfare, neither artist even leaving their respective vehicle, handed through lowered windows, Nauman reported to have said "Best of it." The two made eye contact and somewhere off a small goose was made to fly, along with several terse press releases from the agency that assess such matters. It was said that Genzken's speed finally attained escape velocity from the crushing gravitation of Nauman's iron mire.


See too: Isa Genzken at Institute of Contemporary Art, Ben Schumacher at Musee d’art contemporain de Lyon 

Wolfgang Tillmans at David Zwirner

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Tillmans unanimously loved with a work just so friendly, empathetic, every frame softening its subject, Tillmans the great tenderizer, photographs in well worn softness like comfortable denim in its endless micro-sensitivity, a magisterial flow into the interstitial micro-politic of the personal as political. The cotton t-shirt, the fabric of our lives. Tillmans is intoxicating; affirming and empowering, imbuing the ordinary with nostalgia, our dreary lives with the hope of aesthetic empowerment. "NICKAS: It is documentation, because it documents the fantasy. TILLMANS: Yes."

Luc Tuymans at David Zwirner

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Tuymans performed life-support on what Richter had tortured, trying to reinject the lifeblood of photograph painting: pathos. That the corpse is only slightly warmer is part of its misery.

See too : Herbert Brandl at Barbel Grasslin

Tomma Abts at David Zwirner

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Abts’s indifference to Artworld concerns is a triumph of deafness, a Morandi-like hermeticism, buckling-down to the same task endlessly, slowly, stubbornly insisting on the cobwebbed autonomy of painting long ago cut and bled out. That despite Zwirner’s PR qualifying Abts as “continuously explor[ing] the activity of painting,” and not simply “painting” like a Neanderthal, Abts is a painter, and, since we’ve long forgotten how to speak about “dumb” painting, everyone instead argues why these aren’t, and speak of an “emotional rationality” and “anything but expressionist,” spreading pesticides against the fear of the subject reappearing like selves in the mirror.

The pleasure of Abts’s paintings is that of origami, or well constructed puzzle, like setting a good corner in New Mexico pasture, the blankness of a Morandi, solving simply its own internal puzzling, like shaker furniture, a clever construction in a protestant like satisfaction of a few-frills job completed.

Jason Rhoades at David Zwirner



These things are starting to yellow, sadly, and wilt. The peas no longer green. Remember when they looked brilliant? Remember when it delivered this jewel? Bless you Rhoades, if only for that.