Alvin Baltrop at Hannah Hoffman

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These photos are lovely now as Baltrop receives his late laurels. It wasn't laureled then. A suffering that is made into "authenticity." Pain as sales value added. The valorization process of art. "hardship reclaimed like wood by collectors of such." Dominant culture lays the concrete of its social conditions, proclaims "look a dandelion has grown," hangs its photo in our halls as testament to humanity. But it can seem like a testament to the concrete. A mythos of suffering starts to feel like instructions for it.

See too: Alvin Baltrop at Daniel Buchholz, Purvis Young at James Fuentes

Elaine Cameron-Weir at Hannah Hoffman

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Detail: Elaine Cameron-Weir, FOR MAKE ADMIT THIS VOIDE, 2017, Rubber jacket, leather, orthopedic jaw fixation hardware, stainless steel, amber

New Sex-assemblage - barnacling fetishes, totems, trends for the dental, bondage leather, medieval role-play. Accumulates objects operating sublingual, registers of the dog-whistle objects that affect all the tools of kink, advertisements, and Dwell, touch you in your feels, pseudo-witchcraft creating concoctions of objects emotional, touching us.


see too:  Camille Blatrix at Wattis, Ajay Kurian at Rowhouse Project, Katja Novitskova at Kunsthalle Lissabon, Nairy Baghramian at Museo Tamayo, Nairy Baghramian at Marian Goodman

Paul Thek at Hannah Hoffman

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The scraps and remains of his practice. An artist who formulated his own death, his tomb, lost and the grave robbing plunderers the institution would take a page from the book of, assembling artifacts. Much of Thek's practice was already fragmentary, funerary, reliquaries, so it makes sense now to steal a notebook page and place it behind glass. How peculiarly prescient Thek seeing all the methods of preservation and archive and entombment. The warmth of the page now resembling the boxes of meat then.


See too: Paul Thek at Mai 36

Barbara Kasten at Hannah Hoffman

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Kasten's are like exorcisms to make photography reveal its surface: what was made to represent everything but itself - not to see its silver substrate as Deschenes or an self-indexing gambit of Beshty's mechanical noodling- but a surrealist project of photography's desire-surface, the paradox of photographing glass, making its car-body self expose without getting a look under the hood, desiring the wet image of surface. Like making love to someone's glistening sweat.

See too: Tony Conrad's Glass

“Miranda” at Anat Ebgi & “A Change of Heart” at Hannah Hoffman

(“Miranda”  “A Change of Heart”)

Hey good job on this one CAD.

No one really certain why flowers are beautiful to humans, having evolved mostly to court insects to perform flower's mediated sex, though some believe in human's primeval use marking where fruit would later be while others going so far to state flower's cross-species interest as evidence for an innate and low-level hardwiring of a concrete biological concept of beauty independent of productivity. Marking food sounds truer. And perhaps this crass evolutionary productivity substantiating floral pulchritude might be why flowers are called "the lowest of the genres," gaming the system with hardwired desire. However what artist has ever been above cheating, and so if flowers have always been culturally significant beauty that some predict it's disconcerting that the flower doesn't appear regularly in still-lives until the Flemish (Greco-romans preferring their frescoes' bounty to be more literal like figs and kipper) though flowers have been used in funeral rituals since like forever apparently, for Millenia been associated with death, which whose morbid undertones makes sense with their western pictorial rise in Dutch Vanitas before then the great vanity of the Tulip Trade which must have abruptly shifted flower's image to one of power and commerce - a status symbol when then it was cheaper to commission a highly skilled painting of a tulip than the tulip itself like a Lamborghini- before the crash which perhaps neutralized the death/money value of flowers western significance to mere decoration, but the Chinese seemed to have used them as decoration far earlier, before becoming today's CAD's Office Flowers and I cannot find a source anywhere for a distinct cultural history of flowers anywhere to state definitely that flowers have always been culturally relevant as a symbol of beauty and not just death or purity at best online which is frustrating at best and I ordered a book off Amazon already.

It should be noted that tulips (imported in the 16th century to Europe from the Ottoman Empire) introduced a flower "different from every other known to Europe at that time, with a saturated intense petal color that no other plant had" and that flowers at then were mostly wild and do not all resemble the steroidal orgies they look today.

But so basically the flower today has become an almost contentless object culturally significant as "beauty" in that apart from a select few flowers (roses, say), they connote little meaning to anyone but a botanist besides an orgy of saccharine beauty, an object as experimental-constant through which an artist may perform tortures on a cultural concept of beauty unadulterated. Which obviously flowers aren't conceptually pure and artists are at pains to prove it again and again seen here, often desperate to reconnect them with the death for which they seem so willing. Our disconnect from the floral and flowers (as two wildly disparate things) is large and I have always enjoyed de Rooij for his endgame strategy of organizing flowers according to hypertrophied accounting mechanisms, arranged not for aesthetics but as a gross display of numbers, globalism, excess and the falsely eternal that makes tulip fields possible.


See too: Willem de Rooij at Arnolfini, Jenine Marsh at Lulu