Sara Deraedt at Maxwell Graham / Essex Street

(link)

Art abhors a vacuum, we critics race like rats to fill void with our hot air. Me, a pattern seeking brain, notices: D's continual insistence on containers, empty or to be filled. Vacuums, a "fishbowl" gallery, empty water bottles, prisons, and then now these... chambers. Several of these past works include in their materials list the cubic centimeters of volume they contain: 2010 cm³, 448000 cm,³ - Steel, screws, paint, 364480 cm³, etc. (Pedantically accurate, they include 10 cm³ of airspace in the 2L water bottle.) A small detail from an otherwise reticent artist for this exhibition: "All objects are human body size." In other words this is the space for you. You project yourself. The art just there to contain it.... yeah, like a prison. It reaps your profits.

This is not "audience-as-decoration." Because you are indentured to this bespoke void.



Enjoy your stay: The empty space for ghosts

Ibon Aranberri at fluent & Joseph Kusendila at Essex Street

(fluent, Essex)

A visual homology, empty displays, technical drawings, broken wood. Bones we could contrast and compare through ancestry. Or look to the future, the takeaway is, against the visual overload, there is a turn to an emptiness we find appealing, and competing visual cultures move toward symbiosis. Visual art an extension of sexual selection, plumage, or the ability to lay waste to, handicap theory. "honest signals" "authentic art". Move from a sociologic read of art to a biological one, a funnily fertile metaphors. 

Jay Chung & Q Takeki Maeda at Essex Street

(link)

CAWD, previously: 

Artists continually forcing a reading between the lines they force distinctly apart. So that the blank white space feels ominous and full, like a detective novel, figure it out, Jay Chung & Q Takeki Maeda adept at objects in aura of evidence or clues. In dark forests we imagine predators, in confusion invent gods, or artists.

And this exhibition showing why "reading between the lines" is so precarious, from the preface:

 "Bad Driver is a work of post-truth conceived in this post-truth era. It is a collection of historical writings that constructs a generalized picture of “Asians,” following an outline made up of a constellation of fixed racial stereotypes. ... The authors have “done the research”—as conspiracy theorists say—and uncovered factual evidence that support these preconceived notions. ... a portrait of “Asians” that rely on the reader’s presumptions and internalized prejudices far more than the materials cited within." "...the fact’s factual quality was dependent on the surrounding details of its original context. Once severed, the fact immediately lost its verisimilitude as a fact."

Making interpretation a matter of delicacy. I want to say I feel vindicated for previously not wanting to enter into JC&QTM's game - this artifactization for anyone's interpretation clue boards - i.e. not become the detective - but there is something enjoyable in reading these, in playing this one's game. You feel the process of your brain latching onto fact - "connecting the dots" -  despite being forewarned how worthless these contextless facts are. It still works. Chapter 4 for instance we are shown the questions on a Chinese driving test with their obvious dogwhistle possibility, but JC&QTM casual bypassing of the correct answer suddenly allows all the answers their possibility, reaffirm the racist cliche. This would be stupid if you didn't feel how incredibly effective it is in building an insidious implication. It is like a cliche in reverse, watch it be structured, maintained. The wellspring of implication, aura, that functions no matter how many times we say it's just Disney magic. This has obvious parallels (and critique) for any art that apparels itself with the "serious look" - the ominous monolith - the blankness for projection - allows unconscious thoughts to fester - the actor that claims innocence. 

See too: Heji Shin at Reena Spaulings 

SoiL Thornton at Essex Street

(link)

Thornton seemed to have the insight that there are more interesting things than "painting," and that these things are (or can be assimilated with) painting, that painting is not the historical given. There is no "natural" painting but merely an inherited set of tropes that no one said you even have to play by. Rules to a game you didn't even realize existed. Kin say Richard Aldrich where almonds or pennies might be an equal painting axiom as Greenbergian "flatness".  Inflate a mattress, call it painting, it's not revolutionary except for the fact that no one else is on the same gameboard. 

A "befuddlement of the terms and conditions of paintings... obtuse, tangential starts digressing from those painting histories generally acceptable as beginnings. If the paintings seem facetious or frivolous it is because [x] doesn't necessarily [deem sacrosanct] the histories that are painting cannon..." Need not reinscribe them to reflect in them.

See too: Richard Aldrich at Gladstone Gallery, Darren Bader at Andrew Kreps

Carolyn Lazard at Essex Street

(link)

"Heat as a replacement for warmth." A band-aid to stand in for mother's compression. "a world we must continually attenuate." We design a "humanity" and it reappears in alien forms. You can't redesign warmth; you design its substitute. Technologies of the human. Of "care." The Journal of Technologies of Care. Because we don't, or can't, care. Aliens emerge. Colby Chamberlain channels Marta Russell: the Americans with Disabilities Act that G.H.W. Bush "signed into law to trim welfare rolls." Neoliberal care, freedom for the "uncompensated labor necessary to reproduce oneself day after day." Adorno channels Tocqueville:  "tyranny leaves the body free and sets to work directly on the soul. The ruler no longer says: ‘Either you think as I do or you die.’ He says: ‘You are free not to think as I do; your life, your property – all that you shall keep. But from this day on you will be a stranger among us.’" Care made equivalent to function. Efficacy equivalent to its efficiency.

So much art currently deploys and compostionalizes medical/insitutional aesthetics but rarely cares for its material conditions. And so what happens when Gober sinks are stripped of their touch and we are left with a stainless version- scientifically designed to shed the human. A world that won't purify on its own. We continually design a world that is hospitable in all ways but human.

Park McArthur at Essex Street

(link)

The world is mediated and there are no natural forms of that mediation. That forms of mediation appear to naturalize as similarities establish themselves throughout the artworld is as often the mere failure of art's imagination (and signals of its conformity) as it is one of the worst forms of normalization that make it seem as if a consensus has naturalized these forms. But you might choose differently if other options were available. The most basic boring forms of art's mediation are political choices, a system we choose and reinforce. You might choose to filter the world while for others it might not be a choice. Like when you buy another bad painting based on a JPG and CV.

Lutz Bacher at Galerie Buchholz and Sarah Rapson at Essex Street

(Clockwise from top left, Lutz Bacher, Susan Cianciolo, Sarah Rapson, Park Mcarthur)

Yellowing archive.

While early Conceptual Art was interested in the document (the instructional as a virtual, a program, cerebral) its second generation is a bit more lossy, interested in the fossil, more precisely the fossilization, that slow decomposition into eternality, history. Recoups its own acidification, hazing, foxing, all the condition reports it will accumulate. This "second generation" invests in the degradation of generations of bootleg tape. Fossils existing as strange evidence of a world. a pathos in the materials we find to mediate our touch to the world. ... The objects here, designed for ourselves, infer something about the bodies which they govern.

It would not take a freudian to posit why particularly women appear to be more sensitive to material conditions of the world. Like, while Kosuth was concerned for all the mysteries of "Chair," Wex and Mary Kelly were like yes, but we also get pregnant. The "cerebral" of men's white concerns was treated as the higher plane and, for all its agnostic posturing, the "conceptual" allied itself with a reverence akin the religious divinity it ostensibly exiled. Men, oblivious to their own bodies that had never been in question by culture, had the privilege to etherealize themselves above everyone's heads to some assumed universal while women's were increasingly entrenched in politic ground war.

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.

the body is expressed not through "figuration" but its intermediary.. Think of Cady Noland's institutional objects, learning something about the specifics of flesh under society. Of elder's walkers and handcuffs. We make objects for ourselves and so of course they express us. And eventually they exist for so long beside us, silently shape alongside us, that they begin to take on facets and express things that were latent, learning by proxy.

And today we are so acclimated to objects and commodities adapted to us that any object blurrying suggestion for the function they provide (to us) produces an uncanny effect. We say they look otherworldly, alien, simply because we don't know what good they are to us...

Knowledge is kept on rapidly acidifying papers, stored in databanks we anodize against oxidation in deep storage basements to feign permanence, our security. But the world slowly deteriorates, look into the issue of archiving, it's complex nuanced and impossible, it's baby blankets spilled on, barfed on, a biological archive cum Banker's boxes purchased by the gross. Your touch leaves a mark, sews a patch, you reproduce yourself in the objects you attend. Preciousness in warm cardboard, wearing touch, eroding to someone

which Bacher recurringly recall, cosmos xeroxed into the noise of their granular flooring, stellar scales spilled across expanses like baseballs or sprawls of sand. Mountains dissolve in grains that resemble liquids in geologic time. This recurring theme. The biblical "for dust you are and to dust you will return" is, as far as we know of entropy, scientifically accurate.



see too: Susan Cianciolo at Modern Art, Marianne Wex at Tanya Leighton, Ser Serpas at LUMA Westbau, Ghislaine Leung at Chisenhale & Essex Street, Laurie Parsons at Museum Abteiberg, Park McArthur at Chisenhale, Park McArthur at SFMOMA, Richard Rezac at Isabella Bortolozzi, Henrik Olesen at Schinkel Pavilion, Henrik Olesen at Cabinet, Henrik Olesen at Reena Spaulings, Pati Hill at Essex Street, Klara Lidén & Alicia Frankovich at Kurator, Melvin Edwards at Daniel Buchholz

Pati Hill at Essex Street

(link)

"the drudgery of adult administrative duties and the messy thrills of high-school collages and punk zines." Erotic photographic frottage against bureaucratic method. Like Bacher's xeroxes, they imply the noise, entropy and dust to which they, their objects, will return.  The photograph is the object's loss. Inherently nostalgic. "Inherently elegiac" The ghosts that photography threatens.

The PR wants to reiterate that these predate Pictures appropriation by some years. And, connectedly, Hill's ex-husband's gallery had been showing Sturtevant since '65. And like Sturtevant's consistent reiteration that she was not appropriationist and thanked the pictures gang for their providing a "negative definition." What she was not. Regardless of who was first. The point being a negative definition and that while the Pictures gen treated the world as image (available for all forms of permutable misdeeds), Hill's 1:1 copying seemed far more interested in the objects and their traces, not inherently its theft. Far more Gonzalez-Torres than Sherrie Levine.

Ghislaine Leung at Chisenhale & Essex Street

(Essex, Chisenhale)

(Right before The Stepford Wives he wrote Rosemary's Baby, a guy with obvious anxieties over the maternal.) The Stepford Wives, a novel about "frighteningly submissive housewives in [a] new idyllic Connecticut neighborhood," the housewives feared to, but unknown whether, have been replaced with robots. The novel's continuous adaption into varyingly successful television and film striking some type of cultural consciousness chord. Having been written in an era (1970s) of increasing modern "miracle" conveniences and the then latest "smart objects" is hard not to read as a fear of these conveniences, submissiveness, actually infiltrating us, our subjects, robots, of convenience and object submission until we became, if not kitchen appliances ourselves, at least frighteningly subservient molded to kitchen surrounding us. The fear of our kitchen as a mold. Molded on a production line, molding ourselves to its convenience. Such that options for expression become limited by the cultural detritus available in stores. Which shouldn't be read as a fear of loss of individualism (a reactionary fear spawning Hippies dressing Ayn Rand in flowers calling it a movement awaking twenty years later in corporate board rooms doing to the earth what they did to that field in upstate New York) but some sort of fear of virtuality and the world rendered in some sort of Reichstagian cartoon, an imperial diet of commodity, perfection we all see ourselves attempting to reflect, scary cultural ideas of blonde heads beaming in striking black suits. These lights are untethered. You join in union, with a multitude, a choir, signing "THE BOSS." Whether or not highlighting these cultural walls with a gloss is helpful, it does make for good scary. We fear that one guy who is so painfully nice, not because we fear him snapping, but because we fear his so perfect reflection of cultural ideal turning into himself a commodity, one that we might have to reflect.

See too: Ghislaine Leung at Reading International

Zak Prekop at Essex Street

reverting impressionist attempts at revealing painting's construction that Prekop turns into a game, all the jazz hands of "how's it made." It’s easy to say what is good about these. There's a level of illusionism defeating their ostensible lineage - abstraction's - matter-of-factness. We have a trust in abstraction that it isn't attempting to "hide" anything from us, its paint merely there, that these utilize against us as bait. Set the parameters and run. To mess the usual temporal signifiers of painting, what's on top not necessarily laid last, making for a confusion of the hand and appearing printed. Flat Cubism. Painting as the interesting display of its information, solving the problem of painting by heaping more on, a less neurotically charged Hans Hoffman's "push and pull" theory, painting reduced to interesting conditions.


see too: Zak Prekop at Shane Campbell

Fred Lonidier at Essex Street

(link)

"1984 Benjamin H.D. Buchloh wrote '[Lonidier's] work addresses the questions of the detrimental impact that we would not normally be confronted with as a museum or gallery visiting art audience, since the system of representation that we traditionally refer to as ‘the aesthetic’ by definition extracts itself from the economic and political reality of the basis of culture in everyday life, in order to construct the aesthetic mirage that generates pleasure due to its mysterious capacity to disembody and disassociate our perception from the weights and demands of the real.'"

A blinding piece of criticism. The circuses of the aesthetic. Lonidier mending or "fixing" conceptual art's rupture of language to make it say actually something rather than serve up that effervescent lightheadedness I associate with it and deep sea fish. Ron Cook is a bricklayer or craftsperson, which is true, and there is no need to bring Tom of Finland into this despite my desires. We should attempt to recalibrate our politics not to the high drama of spectacle, but to the begrudging daily wear. Let's not get entangled with Ron's glistening bulk, but rather in how we can ease Ron's burden, even the unattractive Rons. Its hard to pay attention to these less attractive details, but this is something art and its sensitivities should be training us for is the point I guess. 

Lewis Stein at Essex Street

(link)

"LS: We become much more conscious of our movement through space, and the things exerting force on us. I took a “primitive” art class at Berkeley and the takeaway was that the world was alive for those people. That is what I wanted for our modern world—to emphasize how we can make it alive for ourselves."

Some made nearly half a century ago, Stein an obvious precursor to today where interest in cultural artifactification  and art space's white light used as anthropological study become primary means of a number of trends. The world is alive and humming with the energies that conceived an object as well the current emptiness inferring the ghosts that will inhabit it.  Darwin, looking at a flower, was able to draw unseen the moth that would eat from it.  A door handle infers a maker and user, and art is the Fried-ian stage that plays it. The animism pervading art is the prickling of this ghost moth-user.

See too: Park McArthur at SFMOMA, Melvin Edwards at Daniel Buchholz, Klara Lidén, Alicia Frankovich at Kurator, Park McArthur at Chisenhale, “Ungestalt” at Kunsthalle Basel, Dylan Spaysky at Clifton Benevento, Kahlil Robert Irving at Callicoon Fine Arts, Alexandra Bircken at Le Crédac & BQ

AR: Jef Geys at Essex Street

Click here to read

Originally Posted: May 31st, 2017

Note: This entry is part of August Review, our annual look back at this season’s key exhibitions. For more information, see the announcement here.

Group Show at Essex Street

(link)

"Baer repeatedly crunches together heterogeneous visual registers to produce a kind of spatial-temporal pile-up." (-James Cahill) Temporal pile-up like Baer's recent resurgence with body of work difficult to discern if timely or anachronistic. The quote could describe Jana Euler work just as well. But later, "In recent decades, Baer has consistently straddled personal and cosmic registers." Baer a little more shamanistic in the deployment of symbols. But so maybe that's what this exhibition is about, the soft proffering of symbols through thin veils, the different means to do it, Smith's body stuck to walls, Vogel's thrifted objects, Smith's Munch touchups, Baer's past now tinging the present.

Jef Geys at Essex Street

(link)

Reflexivity in art, a long tradition of who can silver their mirrors with blank ham-handery best, e.g. Daniel Buren, Zobernig, Stella, Codax, etc. who strip content to make the bluntest blankest things forcing interest everywhere besides the art, is for Geys more a process of stuffing your navel elegantly full of mirrors to gaze en abyme into it, packing them tightly, pristinely, to see a hall of navels winking like eyes, the rules of Gey's objects - well indexed in the PR - redirecting you through this hallowed hall of art that supports so much of it, which if you look close enough through the mirrors you will see that its white skin walls are flush with blood.



Daniel Buren at Bortolami, Heimo Zobernig, Dena Yago at Sandy Brown, “Seven Reeds” at Overduin & Co.

Sara Deraedt at Essex Street

(link)

Vacuums look like Star Wars robots, that is a technology not sleek but faux mechanical, overly so. The term "greeble" was invented for Star Wars' scene builders to describe the false detailing added to increase surfaces visual complexity, to thus exoticize if not heighten the inferred technology. Vacuums are a tube that sucks and yet their encasements evolve all sorts of sleek sexual-mechanical curves and corners, a shell that infers the inner without much referring to it. Agree with the assesment that these are more Konrad Klapheck than Christopher Williams, but only because the objects themselves are. Removing William's pornographic white light for the pseudo-affectlessness of point and shoot reveals the objects themselves as Klapheckesque. The casing isn't designed for the object inside but for person deciding upon it, obviously.


See too: Nina Beier at Croy Nielsen, Nancy Lupo at Swiss Institute, Nancy Lupo at 1857, Nairy Baghramian at Marian Goodman, Katja Novitskova at Kunsthalle Lissabon, Klara Lidén, Alicia Frankovich at Kurator,

Chadwick Rantanen at Essex Street

(link)

Mass market crap given torture burden, little batteries tasked oversized objects, drones that will exhaust soon. AAA batteries have a little under half the ampere-hours of their AA counterparts and Rantanen has made them to overwork themselves, speed demise, intentionally crafting kawaii critters to abuse their labor-force in the circuits of his machinery. The gestures seem less absurd than frustrated, Rantanen's exacerbation of late-stage-capital's more aggressively abject objects. Self-inflicted. The director of fetish crush films Jeff Valencia speaks often of desiring to be the subject under the feet of the crusher, identifying with the object/animal being crushed.


See too: Calvin Marcus, Chadwick Rantanen at Clearing, “Puddle, pothole, portal” at Sculpture Center, Dylan Spaysky at Clifton Benevento

Valerie Snobeck at Essex Street

(link)

As abstraction, the bodied-object no longer resembles us alone. Our bodies accessorized, attached, hooked up to small wired black devices that we bring with us everywhere, became uniform. The millenia of clothes and decoration were highlights individuating our bodies' translucent lumpy bag across cultures, differentiating. But now every body contains a little black box.


See too: “Flat Neighbors” at Rachel Uffner

“Friday, July 24, 2015″ at Essex Street

(link)

In this episode Forrest pens a love letter. The love letter is open letter, made public PR, an address sung upon the highest mountain top found: the LES exhibition, and then posted on his own factory of the visible, but addendums abound at pains to make clear that it was CAD's board of directors choosing to announce the letter and not Forrest, because that would be like weird, and but who is going to tell their boss their love wasn't worthy, and but who wants to be a critic of a love letter anyway, particularly when people's literal lives and loves are at stake, not us, the letter is undeniably sweet. Jealous singles swell. So from our team to yours we all wish you and yours a happy outcome.

But so the most interesting reveal in this episode that for all CAD's fears of nepotism, CAWD actually wrote the review for Puppies Puppies back in March, back when it was quickly becoming an expectation for Puppies Puppies next solo to be featured on CAD, one of the extremely few penned early in anticipation for its eventual coming, PP an obvious CAD favorite, before knowing anything about the love revealed here. So here's hoping it comes.

“The Contract” at Essex Street

(“The Contract” at Essex Street)
Artists: Jay Chung and Q Takeki Maeda, Maria Eichhorn, Wade Guyton, Hans Haacke, Park McArthur, R. H. Quaytman, Cameron Rowland, Carissa Rodriguez

Haacke’s overt literalism was due to its merely exposing what was read between lines, its belief in the act of transparency. Oddly everyone in this exhibition - which takes its title in reference to Haacke - makes work that is overtly opaque, obfuscating and mysteriorizing itself in the opacity of its use of cultural symbols. If Haacke’s work was about transparency in the value extracted from art objects, the rest of the work in the show is about contemporary art’s extraction of value/content from culture, complicit in its own theft of value, “borrowing” symbols that were never lent. While appropriation foregrounds its act of theft, this exhibition’s implicit form is a possibly insidious version that guises itself as a form of critical doubling. Quaytman’s “borrowing” of Andrea Fraser’s most vertiginous performance, reprinting it under her own brand image - even if old orchard friends - placing even what has become her logo over the top of the image, what is this but a strange form of theft among friends? Is this exhibition an homage to "Haacke’s" seminal contract, which attempting through transparency to ink slight power to artist’s, or a simple vampiring of cultural capital of it, placing artists, literally, around it as if osmotically credibility it would absorb.
"Haacke’s" poster, contract, and idea was free; I can’t imagine anything else in this show is.