Berta Fischer at Galerie Karin Günther

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The entrails of industrial material sciences. Look at this plastic intestine, this capitalist buffalo, this "sculpture as a joyful errancy."A new type of mud, like the invention of paint tubes allowed the painter to enter the plain's air, and now allows these balloons of empire, the bright stuf of production. Like a lead white that makes you blind, a reminder of plastics in your blood, coffee, eyes. The glitzy fun, plastic fun. Capital and a plasticity to the world.

Dara Friedman at Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof

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Our documentation are starting to look like those bad architectural renderings, cardboard people pasted by their creator's magnificent invisible hand. The same god hand that conjures the condos for the cardboard people. Figurants whose job is to lack agency, to not revolt.

There was more film clips last time here.

Charline von Heyl at Petzel, Deichtorhallen

(Petzel, Deichtorhallen)

No longer devotionals of ab-ex maybe not only because they draw from advertising and cultural chutzpa at large, but because they are dishonest. The impressionist showed the strokes that the Academy would have buffed and, winning the historical argument, paintings ever since have performed this honesty as Truth. Which these don't suggest any cathedral of Truth. Instead just sorta flip-out, covering and masquerading a can-can, like a painting in slow state of clonic seizure, and gesticulation as a sort of cerebral-visual paradox, optical illusion, disguise. What Kelsey called Big Joy could also be a state of mania, or anxious outburst, like seeing your friend on amphetamines and wondering what about his personality you liked in the first place. Abstraction is the friend in this metaphor. Because these paintings are brutal. I keep coming back to their somehow relation to the FEED, to the anxious state of transitionary image, of scrolling. "painterly recognition that is particular, depleting, and manic." People love these and I could stop talking about them if someone would write that their praise, that what we are all enjoying, is the delirious feeling of being struck in the face with air. Your eyes are a pillow and these things like fists.


See too: Charline von Heyl at Gisela Capitain, Charline von Heyl at Capitain Petzel

Ramaya Tegegne at VIS

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or that history is a process of consolidation, the enclosure of rectangles around its boxes, the eras vogues histories artists etc. the little territories as blanket of wares meaning Artistic turf that Tegegne attempts to keep frayed with discombobulated exhibitions of historical process's detritus, found appropriated and reproduced, as palliative against, or occasionally with, art's boxification - forcing what would be left behind in the move back into the box as her career.

Henning Bohl at Karin Guenther

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"Chappelle discussed the use of his image on Prince's single, admitt[ing], "That's a Prince judo move right there. … You make fun of Prince in a sketch and he'll just use you in his album cover. What am I going to do, sue him for using a picture of me dressed up like him? … That's checkmate right there."

The above image is actually from Bohl's last Balice Hertling exhibition, but the whole wrap up is summarized in the PR of this one if you wanna play along. It's hard to discern the knot when one is tangled in it. A brilliant tactic to ensnare the critic in the brambles they are ostensibly intended to disentangle, forcing seeing briers for the forest, grounded from the critic's usual ivory vantage, quagmired. Added to the "narrative." CAWD's attempts to remain deaf to artworld festivities like putting headphones on at Christmas and uncle Bohl's hearty and "dialectical" bearhug is impossible to discern as friendly or hostile so that when asked how you feel about Christmas your professional opinion always stated through a hostage's clenched and smiling teeth. Like, neutered. "not the social drama, but its modes of expression" and Bohl's hands proffering the original mugs.

Hanne Darboven at Deichtorhallen

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The feed we are forced to endure, the stream choked down like faucet glued lips, the staggering vastness of information; the .jpeg format or any digital container as a finite set of pixels arrangeable already contains within it the entirety of images, every photo that could possibly be taken, most are noise but there are nudes of you in it, of your father, nudes of Napoleon, simply shuffle the pixel deck enough, one will be accurate, the trick is finding something meaningful in the babble, in the stream knowing what meaning would even look like.

AR: Andreas Slominski at Deichtorhallen

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Originally Posted: August 19th, 2016

Note: This entry is part of August Review, our annual look back at this season’s key exhibitions. For more information, see the announcement here.

Ellen Gronemeyer at Karin Guenther

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Chagal for Dubuffet fans, smiling manically. History is filled with men behaving stupidly, the ape-theater praised interminably for it, the assumption that painters, no matter how hamfisted, are only acting stupidly, acting ostensibly different than being.  Amy Sherlock in Freize relates Gronemeyer's anecdote, learning ballet: "She didn’t know the steps, but something stuck with her: the teacher telling the dancers to ‘grin as stupidly as possible’, to imagine they were totally idiotic. To be relieved of the tell-tale responsibility of her own expressions, to abdicate the need for the correspondence between outer appearance and psychological reality, was, Gronemeyer found, totally liberating." The mania of today, of history so laughable we may, Toufic relates, die from it; the modern paradox of whether to laugh or cry related well by Lloyd Wise in Artforum, the question, "Is that a grin or a rictus?"


See too: Judith Hopf at Museion, Rob Pruitt at MOCAD

Etel Adnan at Sfeir-Semler

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Directness often hides. By removing the decisions that brought it to be, clarity is edited and terseness a political strategy that is inarguable. It strips the handles of which one could control the thought. Making a sleek delivery belying its concealment. And the emptiness of Adan's paintings speak to this. Like so much said in 140 characters or less, there is a loss. Occasionally this loss is elegant, occasionally brutally fascistic.

Andreas Slominski at Deichtorhallen

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Passed: Andreas Slominski at Proyectos Monclova & Barbel Graesslin, Andreas Slominski at Thaddaeus Ropac

Katja Novitskova at Kunstverein Hamburg

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Lurid visual culture, new material and new images used to impress and assert the power and validity of its images, to achieve the slick look of information that we have come to understand as irreparably meaningful.


See too: Katja Novitskova at Kunsthalle Lissabon

Nina Beier at Kunstverein Hamburg

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The small charge psychedelia of Beier's surrealism is the world become reproducible, a world capable of being reproduced in an unccanny distance between real and its surrealist cartoonifaction. Objects under glass become image, virtual, water and glass become exchangeable, able to print the world, translated, tiled, clicked, and dragged, falsified like currency. Magrittean prophecy rung true.

Alicja Kwade at Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, Amanda Ross-Ho at the Approach, Nina Beier at David Roberts Art Foundation