Eloise Hawser at Somerset House

(link)

Plumbing the depths, the correlation between waterways and our most technically advanced medical imaging, the ability to peer under surfaces and into our sewage systems you and me. The human body is indistinguishable from any sufficiently complex sewer. The metaphorical transpositional points are numerous, we're all just bodies of water with structural needs to remove waste through complex veinous systems, and the methods of mapping those bodies mirror each other somewhat as tubed networks. "This will be the first time phantoms, a crucial part of modern medical practice, will be shown in a creative setting" seems like an oddly specific Guinness World Record, but a preliminary search through Leckey's Universal Addressability of Dumb Things and Kelley's Uncanny shows it maybe technically correct if beside the point in a long history or alternative figuration. The long symbiotic history of medical and artistic representations, artists interest in them. Why did Simone Ambrogio come back, what are these medical professionals really up to? The difference in interest may be instead of the representations is how the representations are made here, flaunting the medical science it remains at least somewhat disconcerted with, the new means of figuration, your body like a toilet.


See too: Quintessa Matranga at Freddy, Yngve Holen at Fine Arts, Sydney

“Transatlantic Transparency” at Mathew

(“Transatlantic Transparency” at Mathew New York, Berlin)

In the intentionally bathetic ending of Lerner’s novel (quoted in the press release) the Poet, throughout stricken with self-reflexive paralysis, described by one reviewer as an “examination of just how self-conscious, miserable, and absurd one man can be” arises from the dream of his Madrid fellowship discovering his problems somehow gone the moment he leaves them.

Not that there's anything wrong with that. The exhibition's formalism is criticism only in the sense of contemporary art's allergy to the word, but of course Wilde’s “It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances...” and so. Appearances are politics, and in an age where the image replaces thought, the formalism often exists as an interesting necessary tool. So why does this exhibition feel so defeated before born? Like the press release, it itself uses its stylistic assemblage to bog itself in its own mire, only to get sad about it, defeated by its own appearances.

HE HAD ENOUGH RESPECT FOR PAINTING to quit. Enough respect for quitting to paint. Enough respect for the figure to abstract. For abstraction to hint at the breast. For the breast to ask the model to leave. But I live here, says the model. And I respect that, says the painter. But I have enough respect for respect to insist. For insistence to turn the other cheek. For the other cheek to turn the other cheek. Hence I appear to be shaking my head No.
-Ben Lerner from Angle of Yaw.

“National Gallery” at Grand Century



The exhibition was a month ago but its good timing this late-entry-prior Miami arrivals to get the free advertising, labelled on the map of relevancy, legitimation and visibility. Before there be just serpents in the uncharted. But a few famed friends shed light as german markers of this new territory, addendum to Empire’s realm.
The show hung on the ceiling.
Looks fun - Genzken at 66 still has it, and Kennedy’s work was always made to do this - but in it’s desire for “a heightened physical awareness that serves to explore the idea of vision as corporeal” and “a temporary resistance to mass circulation” the irony of its installation upset lies in the fact that it was always going to end up in the trading routes of it not Empire, then any of the other outsider networks, pretty much made for it by the gallery National’s standard two day party affair, documentation for the hungover circulation, and that that is all that is left, temporary resistance as a good foreplay, because every good sea man does eventually want to get swallowed.