Genoveva Filipovic at Federico Vavassori

(link)

The scatlogical undertones of most painting goes unremarked, its primordial stuff, energized by libido, as dirt suspended in goo, as some form of infantile creation, of selling dirty diapers.
"It would be an interesting history correlated, the desublimation of painting, its id-ification, from the surrealist's subconscious to Pollock's becoming "nature" to finally the triumph of neanderthalism (of say Joe Bradley) the history of men's important doodle and the mythology of the infantilized artist. We must care for him, them, genius whose diapers we exchange."
Filipovic's "toy with the white cube’s capacity to render a pile of [brown stuff] expensive." according a Frieze review of her Vilma Gold show. Not even Shimizu's were this shitty even when expressly painting it, and people eating it. But provisional crappiness here seems the point, the reverse digestion of painting's normal sublimation turned to shit.

“S.O.A.P.Y. III” at What Pipeline



From Frankfurt to London to now Detroit, it's a M. Carpenter marketing campaign that so many of the cool crowd attempt (with 1/10th the irony) since their elders networked success, a still physically viral necessitude in spite globally flat internet.
S.O.A.P.Y.’s magick and allegorical dungeon-capitalism acts as a fictitious umbrella, an excusable space not bound by art’s habitus. Things can get wacky when you’ve pre-excused them. So here we get a sort of 8-bit RPG of fetishized magic art-items. Healing amulets, and green orc-sax players, Parasols of Lambo-shadow, and wands and crystals galore - arranged in a grid like so many early nintendo adventurer’s inventories. Punning on the Städelschule materialist-surrealism. Art-Magick. Painting’s square like the battle screen. You’ve encountered the leather pants nihilist.
The excuse works, we get some campy-mysticism not normally allowed, but its a style laden on top the assemblage of tropes not meant to be taken too seriously, a sort of fresh air.