Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys at KIN & Gladstone Gallery

(KIN, Gladstone)

Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys is a long term investigation into the lowest level of stupidity we can still identify with. The lowest level of lifeform, brainmatter. The groaning idiocy of the fringes, the plains of simpletons, us, you slurring, drooling everyone, the world, these things contained by the world, by the artworld filled with the cranially polished, symbolically medalled, forced to consider farts. Perhaps stupidity is the The Thing, the attempt to assimilate an intelligence, to become human, invade us. Stupidity is a poison ready to escape its terraria, spread.

Kerstin Brätsch at Gladstone 64

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The point is, the production is product. The machine you create to create. This replaces meaning. The machine does. No one knows why Pollock dripped anymore, that knowledge is lost. What is important is that he created a machine that dripped. 

See too: Kerstin Brätsch at Gio Marconi, DAS INSTITÜT at Serpentine Gallery, KAYA at Deborah Schamoni, Kerstin Brätsch at Gavin Brown

Wangechi Mutu at Gladstone Gallery, New York

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Last time's nguva sculptures had at least owned the slickness of bronze. Palpable. These seem more bronze than myth.  These are monuments to, maybe rather than of. If we're having big badass sci-fi-myth sculpture.. then the sculpture part of that phrase seems the least interesting. The Alien-like pool in the other room seems to do it better. Towards a narrative art that is neither monument nor film setting.

Kasper Bosmans at Gladstone Gallery

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PR provides: "evoking political artifacts and labor practices reified into material gestures [...] presented as an ensemble of painting, sculpture, textile, and wallpaper, [...] rendering them as inert aestheticobjects."  Inert aesheticobjects.  i.e. The numbhanded approach, assessing objects with bloodless feelers that estrange them, cast across the gulf of meaning, the fissuring of symbol from its signified, this distance of the rift the interpretable space we call poetic. The symbols ability to store and dissipate information, hyperlink icons and broken links, and paintings with all the navigable space of ipads, littered with icons. The look of information, the pleasure of useless maps.

"Painting in the virtual space that our world increasingly appears. Space becomes an information deployment system, and layout becomes highly organized studied and manipulated. Style becomes a corruption of the subject. Reflecting the increasing prevalence the interface over the image."

See too: Karl Holmqvist at Sant’Andrea de Scaphis, Carissa Rodriguez at Wattis, Math Bass at Michael Jon & Alan

Richard Aldrich at Gladstone Gallery

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Aldrich's befuddlement of the terms and conditions of paintings makes for obtuse, tangential starts digressing from those painting histories generally acceptable as beginnings. If the paintings seem facetious or frivolous it is because Aldrich doesn't necessarily venerate the histories that are painting cannon, and so which attaching almonds to a painting is not only a thing to do but becomes naturalized as a term of painting - possibly - as all the talk of flatness once was, to be premised as a deduction of the ontological structure of painting rather than some rhetorical hubris, and the distance between the hypothesized normative frame of, say, almonds versus accepted flatness/expression/etc. as premise for painting, and the continual and spiraling versions as potentially acceptable fundamentals of painting and the ones in the book and the distance between these things.