Gili Tal at Kunstverein Braunschweig

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When it rains it pours, cruelly, the abject waste of capital. Rain as the whip. Hammering rain. Against windows, against Lichtenstein's mirrors, returned or exhumed from bin of pop trash. "One does win against rain or repetition," says Rancière about the unrelenting bleak of Bela Tarr films. "the incessant rain destroys all. It has not only stiffened the coat he no longer dares to unbutton. It has been transformed into an interior rain, which springs forth from the heart and floods all the organs." A rain that is mass produced, printed by the yard.

See too: Gili Tal at Jenny’s, Gili Tal at Cabinet

Emanuel Seitz at Christine Mayer & Tess Jaray at Secession

(Christian Mayer, Secession)

Painting becomes an organization system for color. For "painting". Which then work backwards to find the logic, organization system. Which is something like meaning. 

Amelie von Wulffen at KW

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Ghosts in our garbage, [x] in our things. Nightmares in the waste repressed, under the rugs, stuffed into hills, called landfills. Our history. It accumulates. In corners, on paintings. The mud of culture. The brown of painting's history hides a lot; we'd prefer not to remember.

Shimabuku at Nouveau Musée National de Monaco

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Because of the hegemony of image, we don't see art like this much anymore. Shimabuku requires a time that no longer exists, the lazy day, a time for wasting on clouds. Long videos without much a clear point. It's that Bas Jan Ader, Francis Alys sort of breezing conceptual art. Gentle myth making.  You glean as much, or more, from the generous press text accompanying the the exhibition as you do the images, which in true poetical-conceptual fashion, don't mean much, but instead provides a lovely illustration. It's easier to recall a myth if you have an image of it. Recall a time when we had time for this.

R. H. Quaytman at Serralves

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Quaytman is forebear to today's painting puzzification. Like any good mystery, it's rife with clues. Painting becomes signs and signals, turn painting into information, the little motifs become points of reference, repetitions to build resonance. A resonance that feels like meaning. They are endlessly elsewhere. We are told "every detail... is subject to careful control." Careful control presuming purpose for such, but surely there can be anality without purpose. Or, anality itself is the purpose. The careful control of avoiding anything so specific as to be finally graspable, a very very finely tuned house of mirrors. "a novel without conclusion." Already in 2014, Quaytman asking "What are they adding up to—or, to put it bluntly, what is the “book” about?" The question becomes that of all painters, painting, how long can Quaytman keep the mystery without end interesting. How long can one delay? How to resist saying anything while still appear to be speaking. Enough mirrors and the ventriloquist need not speak at all?

Lucy McKenzie at Museum Brandhorst

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Displays and information, the stuff always embedded in other systems - legal grey areas because the signifier is always a bit ...removed. Inhabited. It's all fake. The painting above left is her own copy of the 2005 original. Which is not a forgery, but it is something. Slippery. In the style of. From which era are we looking. Is this mis-en-scene or are we actors? Who's thought bubble is this. 

See too: Lucy McKenzie at Daniel Buchholz

Michael Armitage at Haus der Kunst

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(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.

Marte Eknæs at Efremidis & Sam Lewitt at Z33 House for Contemporary Art, Design & Architecture

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(Efremidis, Z33)

Spooky object scary time. Ominous, cold. An emptiness we the viewer backfill with projections for what could be. See apparitions. See ghosts in the machine. Invent spirits in the trees, gods in the heavens that care about us. Artists as shamans show us the way, the truth, the light, the emptiness. 

Howie Tsui at The Power Plant

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There's no actual video included but eventually institutions will provide so much documentation you'll can assemble the film yourself, frame by frame, just like the artist, fill the missing pieces with frog DNA, reading between the lines, enough lines, eventually document a blank screen to create your own projector, eventually you will be the artist.

Cécile B. Evans at La Salle de Bains

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The storyboard/ideaboard has something so thoroughly [apt] to today. Unlike painting which finds its self-mysterizing its value (value in the interminably opaque, distantnced, surreal) the storyboard wears interpretation on its sleeve - it does not attempt to distance/detourn the information it contains - the storyboard collects referents, collects its valency. It's virtual, impressionable, loose. Choose your own adventure, hyperlink. It's more like the internet than a lot of the internet. 

Raphael Hefti at Kunsthalle Basel

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There are risks. In the process of his still young career, the artist has subjected himself to extreme heights and endured punishing heat, he once accidentally blew up his car (and as a result was under investigation for years by an anti-terrorism unit), and his hair temporarily fell out due to the substances he was using to produce his early photograms. For a solo show in 2013, he piled more than 25 tons of sand in his then-gallerist’s tiny London space and set in motion a chain reaction that sent an unstoppable flow of 1,600° Celsius molten steel down sand channels in an act that was partly sculptural and partly performative. No one was hurt and the gallery floors held up, but that these processes remained benign could not have been predicted with certainty. To make his art, and importantly also, to show his art, Hefti probes the limits of the possible, for himself as much as for the institutions who exhibit his projects. (This one being no exception: The weight of some of his works challenges the structural limitations of the historic Kunsthalle Basel building, the electricity coursing through other pieces court a high voltage risk.) 

This would make a great character in a book. Post-minimalism, but bigger. Turned to 11. Those Serras that killed people, awesome. Dealers out of business. The sum of all lines snorted. Oh yeah that's the stuff. 

Caroline Mesquita at Centre d’art Contemporain Passerelle & PIVÔ

(CdCP, PIVÔ)

The carapace, hard upper, shingles, a shell, a roof, an exoskeleton, a home. Suggesting an interiority. A beneath, the inside, indoors, the soft pink innards you imagine. An igloo is crunchy on the outside and chewy on the inside. This would be the recurring theme. A suggestion of what's inside.

See too: Caroline Mesquita at T293, Caroline Mesquita at Kunsthalle Lissabon

Keren Cytter at Kunst Museum Winterthur

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"In a more recent video, Killing Time Machine, a bunch of friends are sitting around, eating Chinese takeout food, talking about a deceased parent, reading old letters, communing, and so on, but everything is very flat—the dialogue, the energy. There’s no emotion. I was interested in literally making a machine that kills time, in seeing how I could make a movie become something physical, like a machine. Watching it, you’re aware that you’re wasting your time—it tells you that in the title—but you keep watching it for some reason."

The limits of our connection to the power of video narrative tested.

Laurent Dupont, Lisa Jo at Braunsfelder Laurent Dupont

(link)

You paint the thing over the thing, a face over your face, a representation getting closer and closer to its object until, well, they touch, link, and representation adsorbs, becomes, its object. A history of attempts to kill the artwork - here make a painting so redundant as to negate it - always fail - but we find them titillating, art as thing that cannot be killed. In its place a ghost of it.

Pedro Reyes at Museum Tinguely

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Castrated and made to sing. Art never feels worse than in trying to poeticize a politics - its process of symbolization more important than its musically flat final existence. Conceptual art might actually be the process of creating myth. The objects are manufactured merely to gather the public around.


See too: Dane Mitchell at Mossman, Dana Hoey at Petzel

Elizabeth Peyton at UCCA Center for Contemporary Art

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The joy of an Elizabeth Peyton painting is its mess, the disservice done to her pictured the glee in leaving it wrong, sick.  They weren't so much "toggling between vapidity and sophistication" as realizing vapidity was sophistication: vampire, tuberculoid. People wanted "regal," men with red lips and blue blood. A sickness that was their allure. The beautiful young men are already a putty, a generic interchangeability of any of the men on The Bachelorette, and Peyton's just added apple cheeks, crimson lips, death, paint as a smear of affection on hollow containers.


See too: Sam McKinniss at JTT, "Watermelon Theory"

Jochen Lempert at Contemporary Art Centre

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When the new Planet Earth (II) came out there was a critique that the tiny slivers of the planet in exquisite 4k and presented on 70 ft screens made those tiny glimpses appear larger than they were. Most of "planet earth" didn't look like that, that most of the world burns. They were right, the "documentary" had increasingly become escapist television. The "reality TV" that is a fantasy of a world that isn't on the edge, that still safely harbors flora, breath, life, isn't choking. Securing some fantastical turf for the "natural" we ostracize to parks and behind 4k glass.
So maybe Lempert's moribund nostalgia is actually a sci-fi, of our present from the future, as it wrinkles and curls and blows out. Tragedy.


See too: Jochen Lempert at Between Bridges

Derek Fordjour at Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis

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Maybe its people become decoration, subsumed to the overarching command of DESIGN.
There is a predicament of individuality, as people become uniforms, bodies become composition. Hands up comforts those in power. "The repair and disrepair of the canvas reflects the conditions of abandonment and scarcity present in the artist’s upbringing in the South." The hardship that is reclaimed like wood for collectors.


See too: Purvis Young at James Fuentes, Derek Fordjour at Night Gallery

Paul Kolling at Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof

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Visualization might be the shared space of science, art, and ad agencies. The ability to use information to affect. Tufte's Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative, etc. For art the importance is that "hardly any conclusions can be drawn" and that "What remains are questions."  Affect.

Paa Joe at High Museum of Art

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Deploying Museological Context. On one hand all objects require information to mean within a history and context, and on the other the deluge of history can imply that these objects' interest is their illustration or worse, artifact, of that history. Implying at worst that the objects are less than commensurate with the history that wrought them. This conflict would seem less were it not that western objects were treated as not-necessarily-requiring didactics, that we still treat the modernist myths of abstract universality well-true-enough, get to hang a Jackson Pollock without explaining the history of sublimated dick-wagging.