Wade Guyton at Galerie Chantal Crousel

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Whatever happened to Guyton\Walker? That cute duo bring relinking Genzken to a Raushenberg root, and then turned it to comedy, printed it on everything. This was right before the algorithm, before KAYA, right before Walmart was caught selling a mug emblazoned with adults wearing diapers. Both Walmart and G\W were a parody of the same thing, mass appeal and the need to fill any and all space by placing everything onto everything else, both of the same quality. It seems prescient now, as the bargain bin of content rises to surface of every display possible. That these are starting to look like Gerhard Richter's priciest paintings seems to follow from the rest. You can put anything on a mug. Again, production is the product. 

Gabriel Orozco at Galerie Chantal Crousel

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Orozco used to make sculpture. Now Orozco sells tourist art, but as the tourist. Souvenirs not of your travels but his, buying his peripatetic romance. We purchase romance. - this is what artists sell, on Japanese paper. That they are almost literally inkblots is perfect. Because this romance is all you can project into it, interpret it. A diary of plants, us once again reading tea leaves left of porcelain walls, shit. 

The whole premise of "process-based abstraction"'s creating souvenirs of experience is premised on some vestigial trait of conceptual that may never have existed. Like, does On Kawara's "January 22nd 1988" on canvas actually mean anything outside a finger pointing toward it. Does an artist in the forest placing native plants on a canvas actually contain its sound? What information is stored? 

While this was the central conundrum to conceptual art since its inception, the rupture and distance between sign and object (always at risk that its sign didn't actually contain its object) it has since been taken as granted, as a granting agency for value added. .... Jason Rhoades built a career of mocking this value-added system, performing it under absurdly comical conditions, to create his referentially seminal signature: PeaRoeFoam, a mess of so much reference and history and jest that it self imploded. 

souvenirs of experience: Sam Falls at 303 Gallery, their valorization: James Hoff at VI, VII

Tea leaves from the bowels: Yuji Agematsu at Lulu

and of course, inkblots.