Gedi Sibony at Greene Naftali

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It had been exciting then, its barely-thereness, so slight, that "unfinished too soon" look we all at that point had craved, the provisional existence we felt stood in for life, a triviality allowing Sibony to package the feeling of noticing. Notice their niceties that felt almost moral in trash. You couldn't even have imagined a hued sculpture, that would have been baroque. There was something so charming about its lack of artistry, almost not art that it now just sorta looks like.



See too: Gedi Sibony at The Arsenale, Oscar Tuazon at Le Consortium & Paradise Garage

Venice: Gedi Sibony at The Arsenale

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The small pleasure of Sibony's found paintings is their modernist uncanny within vernacular abstraction. That those uncaring, underpaid to blot out corporate logos for truck's resale, might - through dumb luck or undiscovered brilliance - have painted something fine. Their unartful reason a pleasantly fresh breeze of non-art. Dumb hamfisted inelegance, brilliant.  That brushstrokes without art intention always look best, and these just made to cover, to stop beer from selling itself, so painting could.

These "paintings" are easy to mock - the enterprise if you don't believe falls quickly into pastiche - and the can still being kicked down the line from the last bland Greene-Naftali ex - definitely Sibony and his objet trouvé animism with the least finesse, most bumbling, but saleable.


see too : Yuji Agematsu at Artspeak , Zak Kitnick at Rowhouse Project , "Seven Reeds" at Overduin and Co.

Group Show at Bortolami and Galerie Neu at Gladstone Gallery
Ian Cheng, Melanie Gilligan, Carissa Rodriguez, Anicka Yi
John Knight, Manfred Pernice, Tom Burr, Klara Liden, Kitty Kraus, Gedi Sibony, Reena Spaulings, Sergej Jensen





Bortlomi
You go see these shows only to be confronted again with its screen representation. Why do you even get out of bed, its representation, historical sediment, becomes the real version in catalogs. Arendt's we're all images to others. All this stuff is on monitors anyway save for Anicka Yi’s art-fetish-displays, or maybe Melanie Gilligan’s lenticulars, primeval .gifs for the real world, the most basic version of affirmed presence, good job you got a bed sort. And eventually with Ian Cheng’s Oculus Rift experiments, not shown here, it’ll all be here. Remember when an artist made Katamari Damacy- that was a sculpture. Carissa Rodriguez’s prints at least suggest a complicit defeat in attempting critique of the new digital supremacy, everyone else seems left-behind in the uncommitment to digital acceleration’s disposibility.

Neu
Which makes Reena Spauling’s poor portraits all the digitally-smarter for their commitment to disposable ideation. Spauling’s whole project premised on every whatever-is-beyond-insipid self-reflexive “art idea” executed with jest, and smart, social cred made to be liquidated and poured through the network of pipes, brilliant. And then you’ve got John Knight actually still dragging real objects across the world, displacing them with antiquated labor-power, and just really the most needless idea of reflexive context art that he’s known for, reminiscent of the sisyphean Heizer’s levitating the mass of his rocks to get his jollies off, and so in the context of all that it makes sense why so much of the other art is limp in these shows, barely able to erect itself in bed in the morning, and because its not hard to get really hard to get up in bed when you’ve got some form of super-cool steroids like all these people seem to have.