Christelle Oyiri at Galerie Buchholz

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Pitchfork just released "The 100 Best Rap Albums of All Time." There's all sort of ways to recast memory as historical monument. To upcycle your fandom. Memory concrete. "cultural signifiers bedazzled. For reconsumption. An artistic filter that serves as admission ticket for its cultural content into the halls of art." How else would "movements that developed outside the dominant models manage to preserve their history?” This is a little more personal, idiosyncratic, than Pitchfork.  It's true, no one needed a Jonathan Taylor Thomas painting to nostalgia the 90s. Appreciate that this artification isn't in the umpteenth rehash of modernism, or painting, mild abstraction. It's just cast as monument, clearly. With some little skull earrings. Perfect for the museum we're rearranging. 

see too: "But maybe his continual painting of hamsters, or making hamsters of his subjects, that cloying adorbz of the neotenic focus-group-tested rodent/celebrity, is what drives the want to wring the necks of those oh so vulnerable and useless. Everyone so cute, loved, like the adored really needed a court painter."

Robert Colescott at Galerie Buchholz

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Galleries sure seem to have a magic power in finding and exhibiting "rediscovered" artists' safest work. Maybe it's the simply the work left in the estate for private sale; maybe its may be leaning toward further evidence of a politically charged artist being accepted "so long as your language is abstracted into wallpaper." This work from his Cairo days is interesting, but cynical parts run high these days. And Colescott was a master of cynicism. The eighties paintings have sarcasm in their surface, it's in the brushwork, their cold cartoon. They dripped with cynicism. So admittedly it is interesting to see this earlier more probing "earnest" painting. Colescott is important, not only as forebear to today's "modernism colorized" but also in an escape from it, in participating but not necessarily letting the master's tools be the only ones you allow yourself. 

 

see too: "It has nothing to do with the painter and everything to do with institutions who helm our ship's navigation relentlessly toward this inkblot goal. Mladen Stilinovic: 'an artist you cannot speak english is no artist.' But he had it wrong. The point is not to speak. The point is to make yourself abstract enough it doesn't matter."

Lutz Bacher at Galerie Buchholz

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Every Bacher work is its tombstone, a final gesture, a remnant for someone to remember. In this exhibition monuments to a fiction: sci-fi explorers of galaxies that Bacher, in other works, would xerox into dust. These are the fictional navigators of that dust — cosmic in scope, absurd in premise."The absurdity and nihilism of cosmic scales entering the personal ones" is taken up by sci-fi as a sublime, the bold explorer who will never see even a portion of it all, but into the night boldy goes. This is Bacher's oft-premise of the doomed gesture of trying to contain, label, some part of humanity as it makes it way towards expected apocalypse, the cusp of obliteration. All the information in Bacher's work already contain the threat of their loss. Like a museum to a fiction - it is already gone. A Science categorizing dust to which we shall return. But their universe, being, exists in its telling, and so these monuments, in keeping the story alive, keep their being alive. Of course it's a fiction so it's already dead. Just like you. It's both optimistic and absurd, haunting and comedic, stupid and sincere, making it lifelike, and fictional, perfectly Bacher.

 

see too: ten years of writing about Lutz Bacher.

Matt Browning at Galerie Buchholz

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Modernism with a human touch. Hand whittled. But modernism is already dirtied. For all their high idealism the Mondrians are dirty, their line shakes slighty. Judds have fingerprints, blemishes. The stuff you're not supposed to notice. The stains that arrive from the artist's studio, that the archivist knows not what to do with. The "hands" of artist. Sometimes we want hands and sometimes we don't. The spills and the drips authorize the sugar sweet thing we call the authentic. Distill this authentic down and you get sludge. That might be too much hand, too much dirt, that might be craft. 

Anne Imhof at Galerie Buchholz

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This is the merch stand that subsidizes the concert. Like baseball cards having little to do with their stars hitting power, the people collect them anyway. A squiggle, the author's scrawl on paper, a gesticulation in architecture. This is abstract expressionism. Drip of the author. 

Katharina Wulff at Galerie Buchholz

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We could group Wulff in with the History Bruise/Forgetful Surrealists painters - there's that feeling of painting's artifacts resurfacing, of paintings misremembered. Because everything seems unplaceably not quite nameable but too familiar. This is how a cluttered genericness becomes somehow specific feeling. Walking through a museum that doesn't exist. 

 see too: Forgetful Surrealists 

Tomma Abts at Galerie Buchholz

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Stubborn becomes a horn filling the air, an ongoing announcement: "having or showing dogged determination not to change one's attitude or position on something." Stubborn. Repetition is part of the point, rubbing past painting into these "new" ones. The "abstract Morandi" - the permutations of a few simple vessels - flitting between abstraction and concrete shadows. Unsure whether these pull off the same miracle. 

Peter Fischli at Galerie Buchholz

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This torturing our social symbols. Why? What does a technical interrogation garner? What are we looking for?

Adam Martin at Galerie Buchholz

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Think of the promotional image and its parallel to art documentation. And then around 2011 they became the same. Where documentation had generally lagged behind the object/exhibition, the image now preceded the object. Then replaced the object. And this was useful to art's promenade - the Matthew Barney effect. 

"[Cremaster was a] Levi's ad campaign of artistic hubris. Cremaster succeeded, regardless any filmic merit, on its ability to manifest excitement and intrigue as a promotional vehicle, a cultural mythos that mirrored the mythos within. At the time you could almost talk about Cremaster without having seen any of it, the image was so omnipresent. Seeing was of less import than having being able to have an opinion, know of it. Having gained traction ever since, this form of promotional vehicle cannot be understated in importance post CAD/insta etc. when pipes and what they can funnel is tantamount."

The image allowed an opinion, allowed the chatter, fostered the spread. At the same time the promotional image mirrored the structure of art - it refused resolution, instead creates a hole, a lack, that need to be filled. A gap mirroring art's life-support of eternalized "questions." Consumable without destruction, depletion. What is salesmanship in advertising, is the poetic in art.

Which is all to say (in the current vogue for promotional stills of people wearing 3D head sets staring off like Galileo into space) Martin's very lofi promo documentation is somehow alluring and perfectly opaque.

Anne Imhof at Galerie Buchholz

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Adolescence repackaged as fashion, repackaged as art. We get it. This is vampire. The capitalist extracts value from his laborers as the artist/fashionista extracts libido from teens. The excess of energy in locker rooms. Teen boredom that sediments itself in scratched desks, keyed cars. A culturally loaded mark marring expensive glass, now for sale! "My kid could do that" becomes "my child literally did that in high school and was forced to see the school therapist." Like Michaela Eichwald at dépendance, "a school desk's attempted Baphomet comes out more as a hairy devil with tits, not really satanic at all. Because the acne poxed kid's hard desire for satanism outshines his ability to actually conjure it. (This is endearing.) ... a teenage libidinal excess that has a tendency to spill, run over, an excess energies that stain things." An artist then collects that, markets it as art. The circle of life. 

Think Klara Liden repacking vandalism for its safe glossed consumption. This switches anarchy for apathy. Bored teens being the hottest. The art of that fashion runway stare, where no one smiles, why? That would be the craziest thing to wear in fashion.

Klara Liden at Reena Spaulings, Michaela Eichwald at dépendance, Leave the teens alone 1, 2

Martin Wong at Galerie Buchholz & Raúl de Nieves at Company Gallery

(Buchloz, Company)

Recently received, a lovely email (yet responded, apologies), which among else broached a question of cheesiness, which long thought short: there exists an allergy to work that isn't actively in some way rejecting the viewer. Cheese cloys. And we're antagonists. Afflict the comforted and all that. At the same time, Art has an abusive history with commodifying pain and dispossession as late-stage heroism (generally after the halo reward is blocked by several feet of dirt.)  So a hard time reconciling an embrace of Wong's body-ill-at-ease on one hand, with personal jade over de Nieves celebratory excess. And no flies on fruit ever prevented the consumption of a little dutch vanity. Jewels past their expiration date are in fact are historically ripe for most riche taste. 

see too: Kathleen Ryan at Ghebaly Gallery

Trisha Donnelly at Galerie Buchholz

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Donnelly's game is plain, obvious. The detractors points clear: it's mysterioized, basic obfuscation as easy enigma. And the art, just skylines turned, reflected, solarized, whatever. CAWD could label them another example of inkblot art. (They are.) But despite, there still remains. And it is this affective quality despite, that becomes their carapace. Attempting to tell the detractors the photograph looks like deep sea evil, rapture, and that despite the rudimentary workings there's something occasionally affective. Despite. Think Nairy Baghramian uncanny lumpen, her photos of clouds. Or Michael E Smith's cancerous suggestions. It is this ability of Donnelly to separate and divide and make evil our inability to share feelings, to see christ (or not) in the photograph. The innocent question of "what you see" in the cloud becomes apprehensive. Yes the game is dumb, plain, obvious, the quality is despite. 

Isa Genzken at Galerie Buchholz

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This exhibitions just smells of car showroom, huh. The point surely - the ellipsoids look like cars, liquid in time. 

Benjamin Buchloh criticized my ellipsoids for having too much content. He said to me, "You haven’t even understood Carl Andre yet." I said, "Of course I understand him. But I can hardly try to outdo Carl Andre." Of course, it was exactly this "content" that I wanted to bring back into the ellipsoids so that people would say, "It looks like a spear," or a toothpick, or a boat. This associative aspect was there from the very beginning and was also intentional, but from the viewpoint of Minimal art it was absolutely out of the question and simply not modern. 

See too: Isa Genzken

Moyra Davey, Peter Hujar at Galerie Buchholz

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And art often feels like a process, technology, for imprinting nostalgia. Casting banality in bronze, silver, with a halo of rose. "Nostalgia a toxic substance used to preserve our memories in formaldehyde's rose tinted veil." Photography provides "immediate packaging: that inherently elegiac medium also promises preservation of someone's sight of you." So you get to preserve your recognition like pickled pigs and call it romantic. Nostalgia's artistry becomes its own technology. I don't think this is implicit to art. Against this someone like LaToya Ruby Frazier's grayscales confuse time and conflate eras, make chronology slippery, and deny a continuum of progress, inherently anti-nostalgic.

See too: Wolfgang Tillmans at Galerie Buchholz, 

Jutta Koether at Galerie Buchholz

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Well these are as ugly as they come. There is almost weight to the ugliness, like it sags off the picture, obese with garishness. Koether seems continuously giving painting an excess content, the hyperlink references, the hung on glass, adding layers until it's gluttonous, unwieldy, here: bloated.


See too: Jutta Koether at Bortolami, Jutta Koether at Museum Brandhorst

Monica Majoli at Galerie Buchholz

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"There was [pre-AIDs] such a high level of connoisseurship…of everything that people like this were interested in. Of everything. That made the culture better. A very discerning audience, an audience with a high level of connoisseurship, is as important to the culture as artists. It is exactly as important. Now, we don’t have any kind of connoisseur audience. When that audience died, and that audience died in five minutes. Literally, people didn’t die faster in a war. And it allowed, of course, the second, third, fourth tier to rise to the front. Because, of course, the first people who died of AIDS were the people, oh, I don’t know how to put this, got laid a lot. Okay, now imagine who didn’t get AIDS? Okay? That’s who was then lauded as the great artists, okay? If the other people who hadn’t died, if they were alive, if they all came back to life, and I would say to them, Guess who’s a big star? Guess! Guess who has a show on Broadway? Guess who’s like a famous photographer? They would fall on the floor. Are you kidding me? Because everyone else died. Last man standing."

I think this is Fran Lebowitz quoted in the PR (slightly confusing) but also I think this is Hainley quoting her to tell people to shut up? since those not raised on the magazine these are extracted from  - or saw the shift from these soft naturalist men to post-AID's armorized beefcakes - are at a loss for a language they are always translating. And, of course, a prayer for that audience's return.

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But so again here Majoli's internal softness against things with harder inclinations. Say, previously the "rubbermen" whose hardedge clouds of humans men suspended, their breath contained in rubber, hanging like mercurial thought bubbles, were almost able to be blown away like a smoke ring. And have you seen her abstractions? Again hard edges but formless nights. Outlines. People disappearing into chiaroscuro, night or light like scalpel. Everyone has an armor in Majoli's paintings, they are armored, depict soft things in armor. Like crabs whose hard shell contains sensitive forms. 

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

Andy Warhol at Galerie Buchholz

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Hey you know that really famous artist that everyone is pretty fatigued of but continuously sells for millions?

Well we unearthed a few more unseen scraps from under the floorboards.

Florian Pumhösl at Galerie Buchholz

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Andrea Rottman in describing Pumhösl's arena: "To use art historian Hal Foster’s formulation, the once-solid canon of modern art has become 'less a barricade to storm than a ruin to pick through.'" And Pumhösl like a salesman with the brilliant idea of smashing sculpture to create more fragments to sell, detachery of every appendage he can snap. Rottman says as much and Diederichsen states this amplified piece-mealing as a hyperbolic retooling of modernism, repeating the same stripping (laconicness) on that already stripped language of modernism taken to the cusp of oblivion: "but reduction in this case represents an attempt to formulate a problem: What is the minimum condition for a sign?" At what point will we finally turn our heads away?

Atsuko Tanaka at Galerie Buchholz

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like scratch pads for some diagrammatic traveling salesman problem more than color arrangements, look more like information instead of mere aesthetics. It gives them an air inferring organization, a suggestion of reason, some inner working, lending that mystery we love trying to assess like sly smiling portraits. Big color come bearing the brand of Gutai, no wonder suddenly everyone wants these now.