“No Thing” at Eva Presenhuber

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because though Pendleton's sign shows through, the permutations act to make it safer for consumption, an aesthetic that acts like a packaging, rather than spilling it out on the floor, crawling towards you. Instead petri-dished for white-gloved examination, the pretense that no one has to get dirty.

“No Thing” at Eva Presenhuber

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If laughter was the earthquake alleviating the tension of the joke, then Pope.L's don't really relief its valve. A refusal that turns humor into a weapon where misunderstanding the joke might have risks. "Swiss Are People Lonly." "White Peo abstr ation." Pointed fingers. What are the stakes of misunderstanding? The generalized artworld fear of misinterpretation someone's artwork becomes conflated with the generalized fear of Blackness, of one's foot in one's mouth, of white spaces suddenly filled with an innuendo that doesn't confine itself to safe quotational space of art, the usual polite holding patterns of white walls, and art mumbo treating its signifiers as some archaeologic thing, subject to whatever formalist schooled things that can be thrown at it - the whole Richard Prince affect - but Pope.L's are living breathing wet things, crawling towards a floor near you.

See too: Pope.L at What Pipeline, William Pope.L at Steve Turner, William Pope.L at Catherine Bastide

Trisha Donnelly at Eva Presenhuber

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Not quite the Ian Rosen whole-in-one, you can find more images on Presenhuber's website But Donnelly has made a career of limiting the availability of the document that feeds the current apparatus of art, instead edited into an esoterica through regulation, the Donnelly mythos floats on the inability to know, though even actually seeing them never helped answer anything, the nebulous otherworld aesthetic that like H.R. Giger channeled an techno/medical aesthetic for a decade before finding in the Alien its embodiment that Donnelly refuses, a ghost.


See too: Trisha Donnelly at Museum Ludwig, Ian Rosen at The Finley

Henry Taylor at Eva Presenhuber

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It's a odd property of most paint that you can't brighten the tones of black skin by adding white; brown's vibrance is muted by white. While the tonal value is "lighter" the chromatic intensity is lessened, creating confusion as to what is the highlight. An artifact in history's poor representation of blackness by mostly white painters in the paint itself.

Karen Kilimnik at Eva Presenhuber

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Untold reasons why 600 telescopic install shots and 6 of the paintings; there's more on Presenhuber's website here.

But so, Last time on CAWD we heard arguments for and against the presence of critique in Kilimnik's rococo ostentation, sleeper cells or upstanding citizens of the gentry.  Hainley said critique, but Leiberman's struggle to ascertain where it may have lain railroaded by Kilimnik herself's swearing against.
Which of course the whole thing an expression of artworld assumption that art must critique, particularly the presence of wealth it must interminably distance itself from melting into. Assuming artists all smiling ascetics happy with their pay in high nourishment of art's gas, the beautifully ambiguous and ideal, Art, as opposed to any of the dirty ruses of social capital, vanity, or symbolic violence that art somehow totally aligned but distinct from by some high plane of intentions, the whole art world lacking some undergraduate Bourdieu.
But so for Kilminik the superfluous rococo absorbed, the paintings as lighthearted brushstrokes connoting but not being the 18th century's most unchecked privileges. Like Simon Denny making his panel mates bristle at aligning himself with enterprise's most valued assent, content, we seem to refuse to believe that Kilimnik might just like depictions of wealth, the vain objects we understand implicitly that 200 year old versions connote while objects of art today don't - who sells for more Kilimnik or van Loo, we flatly refuse to believe it, write dissertations spreading pesticides against, no matter how many time she says it.


see too: Simon Denny at MoMA PS1, Karen Kilimnik at 303 Gallery

Gerwald Rockenschaub at Eva Presenhuber

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Imagine an adjectiveless object, a characterless object, a featureless one. Imagine an object so empty of description it cannot exist within it. This the dream. It is hard to throw words at a vacancy. This is ultimately its value. An object that lacks adjectives to describe its simplicity becomes a specific object. Specific objects defeat language by requiring a inordinate amount of words to describe their simplicity, fills your mouth with oblong and awkward words and so you just have to look at the thing.

Josh Smith at at Eva Presenhuber

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Half decade ago the most reviled painter on campuses, now they sorta look just like any other painting made today. Whether this is because Smith as the last Naumanian understood the wild importance of Ford's speed (and in-distinction) creating busywork spam into cultural consensus, or any true influence is hard to discern.

See too: Ann Craven at Confort Moderne, Zak Prekop at Shane Campbell