Group show at Astrup Fearnley Museet

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You could say it's an "everything but the kitchen sink" exhibition except there's actually multiple kitchen sinks. Which the PR is exemplar of the mythic language crowning art in which art can hold a seemingly endless paradoxical traits, until art can seemingly do anything, represent anything, timely timeless, individual, universal, and back again. A magical property of being in the eye of the beholder, an inkblot. And so one would like for a straightforward list of what exactly art cannot do, that is the art exhibition we need. 

Group Show at Laurel Gitlen

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Sidner's ability to plasticize an idea. The lesson here is any idea, even a middling one, put into overdrive, excess 110%, might be something, just make sure its crystallized in glass.

Plasticizers: Camille Henrot, Camille Blatrix, Magali Reus, Benjamin Reiss, Anna Uddenberg

Group Show at Galerie Clages

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A sort of encapsulation of current art. Cargo cult totems that we perform our art rituals upon. It might as well be magic what today's press releases claim. Incant. And wryly Werner's contraptions are the Rube Goldberg machines of art function, like Rachel Harrison and Jason Rhodes finally shaking hands - the factory, meaning disassembles and reassembles, semantically fractured, as content/aura. Art's ostensible value. The sign is material, the art is the machine for compositionizing them, meaning's byzantine Mouse Trap. 

See too: Antligature Rooms p.43, Cargo Cult

Winner Takes All at Marianne Boesky Gallery

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What a title for gathering similar art, it sounds like a highlander battle,"There can be only one!" Like there's going to be blood. Who will win? Who will be cast as the ornament of history. Stay tuned to find out on Winner Takes All. 

Group Show at Queer Thoughts, New York

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A group show that's color coordinated. You could almost wear it as an outfit. Color graded to a Matrix like blue-green, an Amelie use of Red. So young but so cold blues. Vampires are immortal eternal teenagers, that's why they're prone to angst. 

“Strained Intimacies” at Hussenot

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Various fleshes. Art art pornography, with a "look but no touch" world, perform the same function. To get something to feel through the glass. Various methods exists to get the sensual to appear, to make the human endear itself with glossy magazine flesh. A flesh begging please.

see too: Rute Merk at Gallery Vacancy

Group Show at New Museum

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"Grief and Grievance was partly inspired by Black Lives Matter’s astonishing deployment of grief as a politics, but there is no equivalent sense of urgency here. Again, circumstances are partly at fault: in Enwezor’s initial concept, performance work evoking physical presence was supposed to give the show a pulse, but COVID changed the music. Kevin Beasley’s sculpture Strange Fruit (Pair 1) (2015) is usually intended to mediate performance, but a curatorial note instead offers its silence as a gesture of plague-era respect. Despite its evident care and seriousness of purpose, Grief and Grievance’s focus on melancholy as preeminent black expression invites the question: Why hold a funeral for the living?"  - Hannah Black, 4 Columns

“De Por Vida” at Company Gallery

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Painting is important because that scrotum only exists in oil. Of another dimension, a substance that has never existed before. It looks nervous, like a game of "got your nose." The Manet-like fracture that keeps the whole hind in its own ampul. A fearul gum that competes with heavy stare. I am reminded of Autumn Ramsey's painting of a cat butt, the torso's "ivory white revealing hind's cool pink turning over into the warm autumn of anus." A brush had to touch every part of, every color was constructed, every curve was a choice, and someone shaved it.

See: Autumn Ramsey at Night Club

Group Show at Tanya Leighton with Sadie Coles

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...exhibition most interesting for its documentation which turns to documentary. The work no longer accruing laurels through rent-space but argued in cultural speech. This is a subtle but powerful shift. Looking for new ways to internet its object. The press release becomes narrative voiceover. History becomes filmic juxtaposition. We've always had the accrediting power of Art21, or whatever mini-documentary, but now its put out in an exhibition, in place of it. That open headspace of clicking through images we can't let go uncapitalized, that's free real estate. Let the voiceover soothe. This might become a thing. At the time I had thought Leckey's Proposal for an Exhibition was the way forward, maybe this is what will come - Advertisement/documentary.

Group Show at Altman Siegel (Wade Guyton)

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Because history is more interesting than painting. Because culture more surreal than surrealism. Because the unconscious of society already printed for you. Now it's a plaque-as-painting for a museum to own. To allow them to put the didactic next to. In a museum you need a painting to mark it. That's just how museums, dumbly, work. 

See too: Wade Guyton at Academie Conti & Le Consortium, Wade Guyton at Friedrich Petzel

“Crumple” at VIN VIN

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A sort of paganism that pervades. In this exhibition and elsewhere, we smear paint, assemble objects, to arrange something like "meaning." A like-meaning, or an affect of it. A yule pole for every occasion. 

See too: Aaron Angell at Koppe Astner, Solange Pessoa at Mendes Wood DM

Group Show at FUTURA

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Looking forward to more of this type of documentation. Like the archer, both sculptures posit a space that is shot through, projected, an external world that overlays our own.

“A Love Letter to a Nightmare” at Petzel

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Group shows always look like you blew up a shopping mall, like its reassembly after catastrophe, like hangers categorizing airline wreckage. Trying to make sense in debris. Us, a cargo cult. Us, a primitive culture, drawing aurochs on our white cave walls. With the debris of culture. Our Mystic auto-anthropology. Sexy legs made in wheat aren't surreal but reality when a world sells children cereal with fat assed bee, then sells adults figurines of that bee. This is reality, a sexy hotdog is practically a readymade. Merely exploded.

Group Show at Kunsthal Charlottenborg

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We all thought DIS was responding to the internet but were actually getting in line with the turn toward aestheti-tainment. Museums and galleries, no longer solvent on symbolic capital, with a relevancy we could call dusty, turned toward audience engagement, and realigned with missions with populist modes. They invited celebrities for ad campaigns, made memes and light of their own once stiflingly prestigious collections, having lost distinction between low and high the museums to middle brow with a budget, a sort of consumerist factory of light experience. A prediction for our future.


See too: “Stories of Almost Everyone” at Hammer Museum

“Group Show” at Hussenot

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Teenage and whether coy or sympathetic, not many want to prolong their teen proclivity, and here it is not only enshrined but endures, cast as art we don't grow out of but into. Comfort in not nostalgia but a return to adolescent states. What is true about our world is that the teenage years return as powerful forms of commodity.


see too: “Puddle, pothole, portal” at Sculpture Center

Group Show at From the Desk of Lucy Bull

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, a social gathering, alight with friends, you decorate yourself with those on your arm, all gathered around the thing that presents it, a gallery in your front room. Exploit what you have, brandish what got. Ornament to each other.

“EARTH BODY” at Essex Flowers

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It seems honest, no? a photograph as evidence to our return to Mendieta, our desire for figures of crust, our pilgrimage back into history for what is current. How much art today is looking for means to accumulate body. Here it is.

“Kasten” at Stadtgalerie Bern

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Culture loves continually reimagining if Hitler had won the war. And art too could use some speculative histories where Judd was merely a megalomanic loon left to the desert, where painting weren't trading cards for the rich (maybe tapestries were still en vogue because communal labor was still too instead of neoliberal myths of genius) and one where "boxes" (Kasten) are the pinnacle genre of art.* Imagining alternative histories are important in articulating that our, or any, history isn't rational, ours are not natural forms, painting is not natural form, that other realms are plausible. Speculative fiction writer Ursula K. Leguin's acceptance speech for National Book Awards: "...the profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings." So did the right of so much of our cultural monoliths. Why isn't the world built for people in wheelchairs. Does MoMA really need to get bigger.

*Spec script is something like this: At the end of WWII, Russia is given credit for defeating axis powers and economic recovery is well supported by the allies and emerges global hegemon, emerges victorious in the cultural cold war with a lauded series of traveling exhibitions of Fabergé eggs and the publicity of a Nicolai Pollack who deconstructs the egg into an expression of the contained, drips dye in place of diamonds, is given spread in Zhizn magazine, and eventually transmutes into a postcontemporary situation where global exhibitions of boxes are posted on a website called "sovremennoyeiskusstvoyezhednevno.com." Painting is limited to houses and the remedial Sunday types. The film is dead serious which goes over a lot of heads.

“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. 

“No Joke” at Milieu

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Groups shows look like if you blew up the mall and then cleaned up pretty well.