Group Show at House of Gaga

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Recognizing art is different from seeing it. We experience registry rather than sight. It's not a camel, it's a Heji Shin. It's never more noticeable than in group shows of a certain age(?).  Becoming recognizable as an artist is a certain type of death. Which many experience as unfortunate success. This is important recognition. 

Danny McDonald at House of Gaga

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This is the interpretation box of art. (see: yesterday) A object we can't see "inside," so place its empty vessel to skull, ask for clues. From the debris of culture. Making this cargo-cult art. The compostionalized altars of cultural refuse. We are welcome to interpret the reassembly of it. Assemblage meaning. Composition as a device we associate with art, and art with meaning. Therefore these edible arrangement of content makes "art" - which is meaningful, tautologically. Ostensibly. 

See too: Danny McDonald, Cargo Cult

Karla Kaplun at House of Gaga

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As predicted here, but our backing into the future has come incredibly fast, past Shimizu's waterlilies, Manet, Degas, now our regression accelerated to "eighteenth-century academicism and seventeenth-century Baroque." It was Gaga showing these in 2020, ahead of being behind. Towards the neo-win, the new renaissance. 

Sam Pulitzer at House of Gaga

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"On the internet you would see items auto-designed by algorithms, the internet dredged of images to place it on a mug, Walmart printing an iPhone case with a man in diapers. Everything onto everything. Vertigo in feeling one's toes sense the full ocean of production. A tornado of reference and attachment, and the audience attempting to see in the whirl anything to relieve the anxiety of so much garbage. "

PR: "consciously creates unprecedented combinations of form without guaranteeing that they will resemble anything at all in our ordinary, sinful world or even in the otherworldly realm of pure form."

PR: "this visual detritus would be found laying in wait for redemption as aureoles of broken fate."

"Hoarding as a sort of extended compassion for the derelict neglected of culture, a sympathy moving to material a world simply would like to rid itself of. Composing it into art objects becomes a blessing for sending the objects into the "heavenly" afterlife ... Hooking the hose from the expelling parts of our cultural body to the part that feeds, [ass to head.]"

See too: Darren Bader at Andrew Kreps, Ser Serpas at LUMA Westbau

Pasiphae at House of Gaga

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Pellicer was Metcalf's 4th wife, his third wife was Pellicer's sister (with whom he had children), and this is but one fun fact in lives wildly full of them. Wars, missing fingers, metal smithing communes, Paris, Brando. Surprise no movies have been made. The world is as full of stories as it is of art. This shouldn't feel like competition, but it does. Preserving the art, even good, seems like wrong archaeology. Keeping what we have the showrooms for. 

see too: Ana Pellicer at House of Gaga

Bernadette Corporation at House of Gaga

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The point being, the brand of the artist was tantamount to the work which created and informed the brand. Not a painting but a Picasso. Identity was always a governing force of art's valuation. Art's function is more often the creation of this identity/brand. The lamentations for any current identity vogue fail to realize that this was core to art. The metadata to art is often more telling than its object. 

See too: Bernadette Corporation at Stedelijk Museum

Cosima von Bonin at House of Gaga & Magasin III Jaffa

(Gaga, Magasin)

The first show of Cosima von Bonin in both Mexico and Israel the press releases with trumpets. Which feels more colonial than culturally humanitarian, proffering the west's hegemony further into the world. New outposts everywhere. How dreary it would have to lack proximity to these objects of capital. A tooting symptomatic of our belief in art as a beneficial if not outright moral substance in need of spread, of announcement. The commodity is the form we now think in, and these are teh "good" commodities.

Josef Strau at House of Gaga

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Well, they're pretty in a crushed can on the street sorta way, or a butterflies broken in the gutter, angels compressed into glitz souvenirs. Pretty in that any sorta silver sort of way, like shiny things be. Pretty in a "why?" sort of way. The way butterflies seem garish and unnecessary to a world and inspire our wrath so children crush them and artists crush them against canvas, looking for ways to bejewel our production, steel it against the unpleasant taste of mouths eating coin. They're fine in that way of pleasantness, pinnacle of subservience that is the crux of high dollar abstraction, submission to their surroundings by letting it walk all over them.


see too: Josef Strau at House of Gaga

Alex Hubbard at House of Gaga

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Jury-rigging some Wonkanian projectors has a certain pleasant inanity lacking in all the resined and painted squares flaunting their inanity as tokens of what is funding these here. The projector proves its function, you see it working, satisfying some libidinal candy impulse, however inane, like watching candy be made, loving the byzantine contraption that creates it, implying some warmth, that the machine cares, however little it does.


See too: Isabelle Cornaro at Museum Leuven, Nora Schultz at dépendance, Oscar Tuazon at Le Consortium & Paradise Garage,

3 Shows, Julia Scher at DREI, Lin May Saeed at Studio Voltaire, Fernando Palma Rodriguez at House of Gaga

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The security camera, early exemplar of the our proprioception lost to digital realms as your body could be distended in mirrors sent through ethers appearing before you, behind you, and Magritte's Not to be Reproduced no longer surreal but our reality, walking into department stores. On facebook you reach out to poke, instagram click to like, your body a ghost appearing in other's mirrors. You appear everywhere. Like deafferented monkeys in lab experiments we lose control of limbs at the researcher doing studies on our psyche attempting to maximize engagement, a word which now means clicks, their hands in our gloves. Animals living with open brains.

Animals in environments degraded by plastics, EPS, Styrofoam. We with some idea rolling around in our heads about how long these foams last, largely abstract, largely uncertain, a million or a mere ten thousand, years, the foam will persist longer than paintings. In the presence of light it very quickly experiences photodegradation breaking down into a powdery substance that will chemically persist in the lungs and bloodstream of animals moving up the food chain. A fragile body, naive, that requires our protection. Sculptures which if improperly cared for become time bombs of their environmental toxicity, careful with them, leaching chemical into the fish they depict carefully, a preciousness we must protect.

The deranged mechanicals. Robots acting stupidly, uncaringly. A world we've designed as such. See the video here. Motors are dangerous, they are inhuman, lose track of where your body is, get your hand caught, its inability to discern the softness of flesh air you experience a rapid what is called degloving.

Jay Chung & Q Takeki Maeda at House of Gaga

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Artists continually forcing a reading between the lines they force distinctly apart so that the blank white space feels ominous and full, like a detective novel, figure it out, Jay Chung & Q Takeki Maeda adept at objects in aura of evidence or clues. Bits of knowledge that are brought up in the PR, starting with the failure of the cult to deliver its prophecies, its promised cataclysm falling to a gaping white nothing burger, a lot like the art's lines. Providing no auto-bloodshed or endorsement, instead a musing on the aquarium shark (and its connection to Hirst) as a symbol of contemporary art's "predicted avant-garde revolutions [that] never came to pass" and the "set of special texts, rituals, and institutions whose purpose is to manage the disparity between the prophecy and the reality of its non- appearance."  This is all uninteresting, another meditation of art's failed deliverance we've been rehashing for 20 years but now cults and sharks and texts. Except for the text accompanyment which is itself its little own hard-boiled plot that itself empties and fills like a corpse on the beach and you could attempt to use the detective's cultish tools to attempt post-mortem on the story's failure to deliver catacylsm or just think of it as "set of special texts, rituals, and institutions whose purpose is to manage the disparity between the prophecy and the reality of its non-appearance."



See too: Jay Chung and Q Takeki Maeda at Francesca Pia, Jay Chung & Q Takeki Maeda at 356 Mission

Ana Pellicer at House of Gaga

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Huge jewelry, what could be better, smarter? The idea is almost psychotically perfect, magnificent. Bejewel the architecture, placed around the institution's neck, in the courtyard, what all those modernist objects implicitly stood as, pearls for a building, softening stark verticality. These were made to adorn the Statue of Liberty, but sensibly they fit anywhere, fill the same function, there's been a rise in jewelry/art crossovers, in the youth of today, and its because maybe we realize it's no different.


See too: Lucy Skaer at MRAC,  Amanda Ross-Ho at The Approach, K.r.m. Mooney at Pied-á-terre

Alex Hubbard at House of Gaga

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The move from perspectively delirious videos recording their own production - a sort of Genzkenian prolepsis of claiming the production the product - and acclaimed then before into the recent and ongoing big wet&sticky Jolly-Ranchers whose vestigial remains of the viewpointally ambiguous videos is their most interesting, albeit liminally, part; that Hubbard continues regressing into now actual figurative representations of the ambiguity and masking a drinking problem (there's a bar behind the paintings!) thematizing the boozie distress of authorship, the eyerolling tragedy of those painters drunk to death, and perhaps signals Hubbard has staged his own intervention and we can move soberly on.


See too: KAYA at Deborah Schamoni, Isa Genzken at David Zwirner, Isa Genzken at Institute of Contemporary Art

Josef Strau at House of Gaga

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Strau’s concurrent rise with the hegemony of art's image (say, CAD) makes a sense. Text attached to image delaying consumption of object as image, of the dumpy intentionally inconsequential sculpture (lamps), couldn’t be more important. Everyone was talking about painting beside itself while the image was being consumed in ever accelerating means, and Strau attaching text to image, delaying reception by anachronistically giving word to its reception at the moment it made it consumable without giving it away. This was huge. Like Harrison’s semiotic diaspora it delayed finality of its consumption even as it was made immediate.

Danny McDonald at House of Gaga

(Danny McDonald at House of Gaga)

The toy/action-figure has become a major feature in art.
From Steinbach’s belief in the formal beauty of the product, to Harrison’s abuse of their semantic connotation - demolitioning of meaning - and the cargo-cult pickings arranged as marxist totems, toys now bespeak a Pop-freudian analysis, dredging up the subconscious of culture - a C-3PO with robot tits, an Alien brain tumor, Schwarzenegger slurping a pink dick, the monster made to hold a mirror to itself; that, like a Jim Shaw pop-surrealism in Cady Noland means, becoming assemblage Rorscharchs of what this culture could possibly mean, and fun to boot, the hot new item on everyone's list surely.


See also: Pentti Monkkonen at High Art, Flat Neighbors at Rachel Uffner, Jim Shaw at Metro Pictures, Mathis Altmann at Freedman Fitzpatrick, “Puddle, pothole, portal” at Sculpture Center