“HOOKS & CLAWS” at Gregor Staiger - Bruno Gironcoli

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Ask and any Austrian artist will roll their eyes at how famed Gironcoli is and everyone outside of Austria wonders who the fuck you are talking about. Seems to be the general vibe. Gironcoli has been dead ten years but you could confuse them for a Jordan Wolfson, Marguerite Humeau, Helen Marten or whatever. Just enough for the surrealist soup'dujour.* They are modernist sculptures that abscess with the wrong thing: what is supposed to be the clean lines and  modern ergonomics of say Henry Moore or di Suvero tinges a little too dumb, fecal, stupid, wet. Like Mike Kelley paintings made into sculpture, the abject mess of high/low. The way Children's toys always seem one vibration button away from sex toy. Every one of them somehow far more uncomfortable than a Paul McCarthy buttplug on your plaza.


*As how H.R. Giger was in the past considered campy at best for his blend of Machino-sexual organisms, Gironcoli's blending of hulking pop-sculpture with tinges of Actionist entrails was similarly a bit too on the nose. Similarly having mild resurgence. 

Shana Moulton at Gregor Staiger

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Equating our investment in the celestial power of "self-care" with primitive digital effects would seem to be mocking both: a particularly pleasurable bath delivers the only the filter of Google's Deep Dream, a yoga practice against belly distension births a green screened moon to the heavens. The effects are child-like, naive like the character, and require suspension of disbelief. This seems the point, any skepticism towards crystal effects, video or holistic, might render them moot. You've got to actively believe for the things to have effect, a placebo effect like a Disney ending: the point was the power was inside you all along if you just believed the pill would. The placebo effect so strong in the US that drug manufactures have difficulty time creating new painkillers that are stronger than sugar pills. The effect is not seen in Europe, or pretty much any where that does not allow pharma advertising. That this mass inculcation might be the strongest effect of all, like we're all living in a theater in mass suspension because thats what gets the crystals like art to work.



See too: Shana Moulton at Kunsthaus Glarus

Sonia Kacem at Gregor Staiger

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Elegant sticks, folded; like origami they, through simple steps followed, make a goose. The transparent invoked skin not hiding the skeleton of fabrication here. Instead simplicity and plainness, a sort of protestant ethic, finding interest in the job as its result. You see the construction, are forced to appreciate all the effort that went into it, none of which is hidden, witness the effort expended.

See too: Oscar Tuazon at Le Consortium & Paradise Garage

Florian Germann at Gregor Staiger

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Like Zorio's "Per purificare le parole," circular motion through cooling liquids performs a occult function, no longer impoverished but updated in the clean sexy design of modern function, a 2.0 making one nostalgic for the poverty we see returning, now funnily enough the circle is automated.


See too: “Flat Neighbors” at Rachel Uffner, Michael E. Smith at Lulu

Shana Moulton at Gregor Staiger

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Moulton assuming the dress of pop advertorial address - here New Age stylings in lo-production training-video awkwardness - playing its advertising of people to themselves. It's an off-comedy in the vein of Mike Smith and David Robbins, self-deprecating humor at mass culture's consolidation and prepackaging of identity through its transference of an emotive link, here with a character, like laugh-tracks, to stand in for our own. No matter how bungling the address we desire the naive awe Moulton's character feels at "gloves." and Moulton's uses this to play against it a Rachel Rose like assemblage of effects, rupturing our affective link with it through its onlsaught of signs, tone, irony.  It's ultimate laugh is the empty-feeling that its humor ultimately lays bare.

see too : Rachel Rose at High Art , Petra Cortright at Société , Pipilotti Rist at Hauser & Wirth

Vittorio Brodmann at Gregor Staiger



Well painted cartoons in lavish colors, deft paint. Less a Condo watch-me-paint-something-stupid than 4th generation Guston, trickle filtered through the present painting substrate, Sillman and Schutz and Vance and Lassnig - funny amalgam in a Picasso Baby reverent irreverence, dissonant with the painted ennui of awkward bodies, the baseline for painting today.

Nicolas Party at Gregor Staiger



The wall motifs oft used beneath the paintings a buoy softening the blow of their initial banality. But first hating these paintings is the point. The crucial moment comes when you give it up, criticality, and let the nicities of them wash over you. They want you to accept them as they are, to require nothing more. God they're so horrible, take some pleasure in the perversity of liking them. A man wearing eye makeup.