Kembra Pfahler at Emalin

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As art becomes identity - not that it ever wasn't - this overloaded branded version begins to make sense.

similarly: Juliana Huxtable at Reena Spaulings

Megan Plunkett at Emalin

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Dear grad students: a history of the concept of "paintings' eyes that follow you" - the "Mona Lisa effect" - literalized in the trope of "portrait painting peephole" - villain's eyes peering out at meddling kids. Essays on Sherrie Levine explain the feeling of being observed. Michael Fried's viewer/actor stage. The anxiety of observing, the anxiety of art, the anxiety of being unable to produce "meaning." Feeling others eyes at "not getting it," a social panopticon appears, "surely this is a joke." The Emperor's new clothes, one feeling exposed. 

Thus the artwork mutates to clue boards, becomes mystery awaiting its detective.

"There is a parallel between conceptual art and murder scenes. ... turning a messy world into object, language, into document. Turn a world's blood and guts into evidence ... Both the detective and the conceptual artist turn the world into a story, relying on aesthetic or truth, it's attempting one that you can get an audience to swallow, convince."

"[Art] is a cultural structure such that [its] prize is "what it is about." ...  there is something to be unlocked, understood. There is something to be won. This is the belief. Even the hardest attempts to slap the viewer with just fucking looking at the thing are always already subverted into questions of what this visceral slap means. Painting begins to be prized not for painting but for this mystery. And a mystery, should it not spoil itself, cannot tell you its answer. A mystery instead must load its objects with intent, clues, an ambrosia of noir, an affect of meaning."

"But you are not a detective, this is not a Clue board."

See too: Michael E. Smith at 500 Capp Street Foundation, “Stories of Almost Everyone” at Hammer Museum,

Daiga Grantina at Emalin & Paul Lee at Adams and Ollman

(Emalin, AdamsOllman)

Are we getting theme days now? Yesterday's painterly auto-satisfaction and today is fishnetted TuttleWurtz? Which ostensibly allows experimental comparison: constants can be ignored, the variables leading to data - we determine difference. For the sorting of garbage. Like, while Hesse's materiality was more organizations systems to flaunt it, Benglis's excessed itself to monuments, less organized than amassed (what Donovan would later make spectacle). Chamberlain versus Nancy Rubins. Tuttle's accumulation was painterly, made formal, pretty for the pageants. And Wurtz... Wurtz more just the treating the refuse with a dignity - combing the child's hair for picture day. And Miho Dohi's fungi amongst. And here we have two somewhere in the field, picking up the remains, assembling a late assemblage. There's a joke in here about recycling, or upcycling, or maybe just "reduce, reuse, recycle" it'll always be a different product.

See too: Paul Lee, B. Wurtz

Sung Tieu at Emalin

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Astrology like tarot cards finds alliance with art since the artwork has mutated to be less an object of beauty than a fount for interpretation. Art having gone from object to oracle. The point of art begins to be setting the spheres to rotate so they may occasionally align, a machine for semio-recombination we could call meaning. Artists become not merely the recombinators of signs, but the producers of machines to do this, to be turned to on, set to run. Endless interpretability becomes their function. This is art, possibly. 

Astrology: Ei Arakawa at Kunstverein Dusseldorf 
Tarot: Juliette Blightman, Dorothy Iannone at Arcadia Missa, Caitlin Keogh at Bortolami