Gili Tal at Kunstverein Braunschweig

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When it rains it pours, cruelly, the abject waste of capital. Rain as the whip. Hammering rain. Against windows, against Lichtenstein's mirrors, returned or exhumed from bin of pop trash. "One does win against rain or repetition," says Rancière about the unrelenting bleak of Bela Tarr films. "the incessant rain destroys all. It has not only stiffened the coat he no longer dares to unbutton. It has been transformed into an interior rain, which springs forth from the heart and floods all the organs." A rain that is mass produced, printed by the yard.

See too: Gili Tal at Jenny’s, Gili Tal at Cabinet

Gili Tal at Cabinet

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the question of what outside your window could be less interesting than this. You draw the shade on the world just to be mocked by this, a curtain that [shows your banality back to you.] won't let you escape banality. If the photos are by no means good, would it not be fault of the world they depict? It is your city that is ugly, and you should be forced to buy one of these as reminder that your castle not separate from. This mindset allowed for the suburbs, its devolution into ugliness, people moved in personalized containers, personal vehicles in trajectories to their big boxes sheltered, their home, their work, moved in submarines of personalized climate, protected in white walled towers. Curtains are a weak force against the world that these posit perhaps someday someone will invent something to break glass, and the world will flood in.


Modern Gothic is a mode or genre prevalent in Contemporary Art from the early 21st century to this day. Characteristics of Modern Gothic include the presence of banal, irrational, and transgressive thoughts, desires, and impulses; grotesque settings; dark humor, and an overall angst-ridden sense of alienation. While related to the Southern Gothic tradition, Modern Gothic is uniquely rooted in contemporary Capitalism's tensions and aberrations. During the 21st century, the everywhere-nowhere setting of today's post-industrial cities became “the principal region of Modern Gothic” in art. The Modern Gothic brings to light the extent to which the idyllic vision of the progressive, collectivized City rests on massive repressions of the region’s historical realities: capitalism, class, and patriarchy. Modern Gothic texts also mark a Marxist return of the alienated: the region’s historical realities take concrete forms in the city's banality of power structures that highlight all that has been unsaid in the official version of Modern history. Because of its dark and everyday subject matter, literary scholars and critics initially sought to discredit the gothic on a national level.


Modern Gothic: Morag Keil at Project Native Informant, Georgie Nettell at Lars Friedrich, Georgie Nettell at Reena Spaulings, Gili Tal at Jenny’s, Will Benedict at Overduin & Co., Merlin Carpenter at Overduin & Co.

Gili Tal at Jenny’s

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The more pathetic and depressing aspects of commerce's reign are mirrored in Tal's reconstructions of it, like those half empty coolers, a lightness mimicking advertising's own getting closer to grim comedy alongside a press release from hell once again reminding us all of our relegation to capitalistic damnation: even that incessant gadfly of PR fodder, the flaneur - ever abused privileger of every artist's cockamamie tourism - is put to place as another symptom of globalized identity, flighting only over the surfaces of exchange and capital. Objects terrifyingly depressing.

“Transatlantic Transparency” at Mathew

(“Transatlantic Transparency” at Mathew New York, Berlin)

In the intentionally bathetic ending of Lerner’s novel (quoted in the press release) the Poet, throughout stricken with self-reflexive paralysis, described by one reviewer as an “examination of just how self-conscious, miserable, and absurd one man can be” arises from the dream of his Madrid fellowship discovering his problems somehow gone the moment he leaves them.

Not that there's anything wrong with that. The exhibition's formalism is criticism only in the sense of contemporary art's allergy to the word, but of course Wilde’s “It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances...” and so. Appearances are politics, and in an age where the image replaces thought, the formalism often exists as an interesting necessary tool. So why does this exhibition feel so defeated before born? Like the press release, it itself uses its stylistic assemblage to bog itself in its own mire, only to get sad about it, defeated by its own appearances.

HE HAD ENOUGH RESPECT FOR PAINTING to quit. Enough respect for quitting to paint. Enough respect for the figure to abstract. For abstraction to hint at the breast. For the breast to ask the model to leave. But I live here, says the model. And I respect that, says the painter. But I have enough respect for respect to insist. For insistence to turn the other cheek. For the other cheek to turn the other cheek. Hence I appear to be shaking my head No.
-Ben Lerner from Angle of Yaw.