Michael Armitage at Haus der Kunst

(link)

(Forgive some of the indelicacies on timing; Jana Euler was already Artforumly connected to social realism already in 2012, etc. The oh so spooky Zombies already labeled by 2014, etc. etc. Party's party began years ago. etc. etc. etc.)

Every hypothesis needs an experiment. And so if you see impressionist painting in the next year, know that it was hypothesized here first.

Mark Leckey at Haus Der Kunst + Kunsthalle Basel

Haus Der Kunst, Kunsthalle Basel

Sanchez called Leckey a hack ( in the sense of what "artist John Kelsey discussed"), taking issue with Leckey's lecture's magisterial administration of an audience swooning: hypnotic affection that would one day be called a Ted Talk or manipulating an audience. Thing was Leckey had always been trading in affects. It was like his thing. Taking cue from that other realm that predicated itself upon it, commerce, entertainment, advertising that was constructing the world and the commodities, objects, films, and talismans that produce it, and, Leckey, attempting to build the work from it. Fiorrici Made Me Hardcore - Leckey's seminal origin - is only and entirely affect, a semblance of surface run like warm oil over your grey orbital, and in the 15 years since a practice built of discerning this surface force, kin Sturtevant and Trisha Donnelly among others, giving birth to today's youthful irrevant abuse of it seen in the New Museum's Surround Audience and even badly by all those anonymous materialists speculated upon. What, at the moment, separates Leckey from his progeny's use of affect is attention to it, amassing at the very least an index of it, and interest examined, and not necessarily just exploiting it.


See too : Venice v Triennial , Mark Leckey at Wiels, Trisha Donnelly at Air de Paris, Zak Kitnick at Rowhouse, Sturtevant at Moma, &Thaddeus Ropac