Frances Stark at Gavin Brown

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You have to admit, artists are grass to the hammering of cultural winds, growing sternly against it while sternly whipped with it.  So more text in space, the billboard space of advertising, of ad copy, of slogans, mottos, quips, of the ability to deliver a phrase into you. Clipped from its context, it floats, wafts with a sort of empty vigor. The blunt brunt of the advertorial, slapping you with words you can read, recognize, but fail their handshake of emotional resonance, whacked with a Whiffle bats, the lack of becomes its main force. The bathos of artistic text, failing, becomes the means of overcoming that hollow form of advertorial address by embodying it, deploying it for all its tragic cruel means.


clipped words: Matt Keegan, Kay Rosen at Grazer Kunstverein, Hanne Lippard, Nora Turato at Metro Pictures, Gene Beery at Shoot the Lobster, Karl Holmqvist at Sant’Andrea de Scaphis, Sue Tompkins at Lisa Cooley, Jenny Holzer at Blenheim Palace, Barbara Kruger at Sprüth Magers Peter Fend at Essex Street, CAWD on Fetish, Frances Stark at Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Frances Stark at Daniel Buchholz and Daniel Buchloz

LaToya Ruby Frazier at Gavin Brown

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Ruby Frazier's photos appear as from some distant past because surely we can't believe it's the present; photos from last year seem in some nebulous era that surely isn't this new millennium the complications of the black and white and registering of historic tumult. We have facial recognition tech in the palms of our hands and water we can't send through pipes. Perhaps this would seem a paradoxical if we didn't know the facial tech was manufactured in buildings surrounded by suicide nets and towns were destroyed when companies could find cheaper backs to stand on.

Joan Jonas at Gavin Brown

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Without a central theme like spine running down the diasporic artists work generally leaves them relegated to some periphery. We like our artists to be about something, always circling their core. It makes it easier to consume. It is an odd trait of humans that we like to know what we will see prior to seeing it, well documented in film trailers, foretold plots, and increased ticket sales. As much as we like our artists to be "independent spirits" we also want to know them, have them under control. Joan Jonas isn't really like that, people continuously wondering why she hasn't got her due.

Jos De Gruyter and Harald Thys at Gavin Brown

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Painful, de Gruyter and Thys' developmentally delayed style, filled with speech impediments, slow progress, and language drifting into nonsense, is, like von Trier's early film, an idiocy against social decorum, our socially vulnerable conversations, socially conscious movies, replayed by the slow and impaired, mocking our banal conversations we've had, transmute conversation into madness. Comedy edges total breakdown of sense, turning to a horror that seems to endlessly please dG&T. This banal horror of too-much, of waste, of, in spite of such, cruelly, maniacally plain smiles.


See too: Jos de Gruyter and Harald Thys at Wattis, Jos De Gruyter and Harald Thys at MoMA PS1

Rob Pruitt at Gavin Brown



No one is ever going to stop Rob Pruitt. You can’t evict the returned prodigal son, that would be too.... ironic, like being stuck in an Alanis Morisette song, stuck in the 90’s with a teenage artist that just turned 50, 50, and still kicking holes in the drywall and smoking ciggies in rebellion (to what?) and getting the couch sandy, and we put up with the loud music in hopes he’ll eventually grow wings and grow up and make something of interest. But he’s got the loudest soundsystem on the bloc, screaming, and a lot of cool people like to ride in the irony of his obviousness mistaken for interest. The Pepsi style of corporate “throwbacks” - doodling on notebook cover “paintings” - couldn’t even be called nostalgic it’s such an empty gesture, runaway on the cheap high-school amphetamines of vampiring of his studio assistants, the young people that make these, mining their 90’s childhoods for Pruitt’s empty laugh, and what’s mistaken for dumb is actually sinister, that no matter how old Pruitt or his schtick gets, he’s like “That’s what I love about High-school kids, I get older, they stay the same age.”

Mark Leckey at Gavin Brown



Leckey has always been a direct artist, his dramatically unmysterious expunging of the work - and lectures as work often - frequently makes the objects stranger, their power more communicable, aren’t simply veiled surrealist abstraction; and instead great pains to make sure you get it - I mean read the PR- opposing Baghramian’s Art-turned-subject-monster DnD beholder, instead the pop psychologist flair for a sort of Trisha Donnelly cum Darren Bader cybernetic cultural-academic bent. It’s definitely a way out for a lot of cornered art, but few able the flat finesse of Leckey. The dry exposition of the original proposal 4 a show video stunning relief of so much overwrought hand wrung art, too badly not seen here.

Kerstin Brätsch at Gavin Brown



Since the patternal permutations are endless in indifference, little interest found in their production line marbles in interminable variation (though the PR does its job unpacking and assigning new roles to the symbolism.) Brätsch’s work never quite looking as good as their commodity packaging counterparts found on store shelves everywhere but still fine, its more about the curled paper tacked and temporary walls and mystic install.
Of course some collector is going to put them in a frame, but for now they look crappy and disheveled and good. Well it would be enjoyable to get in here in the A.C. and take a break.
But no one is ever going to believe in these surfaces, or get up close and just admire like the nebulousness of it all, man, the same spirituality found in patterned mandala of so many bolts of fabric, again inbetween production lines, like that Henning Bohl show at Casey Kaplan, or the sublime rot of Sigmar Polke. This is Gavin Brown afterall, the gallery who finds interest in the profound gap of meaning and enterprise in art.