“Iron Lady” at Isabella Bortolozzi

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New perfume advertising with adult actress Stoya. Adverts edgy, too much for public consumption, moved to backrooms, our art galleries, which with ease adopting advertorial space that our art increasingly resembles. The designers, the photographer get credit, Symonds, Pearmain, Lebon, actress none, the intellectual labor we prize, the body we don't. Well Stoya likely got paid, classic capital. You can pay women for their nudity and they can pay you to be clothed, adorned with your scent. Fashion as the fantasy of men imagining women, men dressing women with their fantasy, fashion. Symonds fashion influenced by bondage.


see too: Stewart Uoo at 47 Canal

Steve Reinke at Isabella Bortolozzi

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Call it affectual torture, like its psychological cousin, it erodes the ego-defense of its victims through learned helplessness, psychological regression and depersonalization. Reinke's videos are a methodical stress-testing of our emotional capacities through tonal short-circuiting. It's funner than it sounds submitting to psychological bondage. Reinke films' slow pacing and calming paternal voice leads through footage and images with jarring music, unexplained scenes, and philosophical manhandling as a bad-trip Nature film fritzing our relationship to its input, creating a helplessness at the hands of the torturer who remains in control of the sensory input. Desensitization that makes one impressionable to suggestion, coercion and inculcation. It's an interesting metonym for the suggestive function in the affectual-coercion of wider culture, from our selection of olive oil in a grocery store down to our birth, the socialization and replication of a normative culture we find inside us daily that Reinke seems firm in his odds against. When Reinke, in "The Genital is superfluous," says of the drunk shirtless men wrestling wetly on formica flooring that they "want to go back to the placental state" it's been so pummeling getting there you submit to it, believe him.


See too: “Rum, sodomy, and the lash” at Eden Eden, Rachel Rose at High Art

Carol Rama at Isabella Bortolozzi

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Johanna Burton: "A vibrant, nasty, eccentric, erotic, corporeal, and irrefutably feminine (one might say feminist) wrath is everywhere visible in Rama’s oeuvre, yet hers is hardly piss without pleasure." Yet Bortolozzi's several exhibition insistence on the chaste, if not austere, abstract and incorporeal Rama complicates the narrative of a one-track artist. It could be a totally different Rama.

Richard Rezac at Isabella Bortolozzi

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Writing in the LA Times, David Pagel called Rezac "dyslexic minimalism." The metaphor is functional, Rezac's sculptures follow the syntax of a language but disordered, their ordering law unavailable yet suggesting a function or ergonomics. And today we are more than acclimated to objects and commodities adapted to us, and any object displacing suggestion for the function they provide (to us) produces an uncanny effect. We say they look otherworldly, alien, simply because we don't know what good they are to us. This makes them strange.


See too: Katja Novitskova at Kunsthalle Lissabon , Nancy Lupo at Wallspace

Aldo Mondino at Eden Eden & Isabella Bortolozzi

(Eden Eden, Isabella Bortolozzi)

Son, see this is an example of... it's like, you know how we're at those estate sales, or perhaps the awful Ikea your Grandmother enjoys taking you to that you seem to enjoy despite your father's preemptive educationals against incognizance. The one's when we're there you ask me what some strange item that your still fresh mind cannot categorize yet has still somehow aesthetically enchanted your young eye? See these are, in a sense, like that. But instead of your father being there to answer that the object in question is a designed-to-look-designed apple corer made by hands your age, or a mediocre lithograph, or a sextant, imagine instead... The ones where we look for chairs like the ones depicted in the glossy and shadow-less reproductions on unnecessarily heavy bond that woman that your father works keeps on that insipid glass table which book she scolded you for touching? Yes, Son, Eeemes, E. Long E. No, Son, no. That will be the day. Your father just repairs and resells the chairs. Son. No son, don't say that. Son, Eames chairs are representations of the bourgoi- The last nail in the coffin of craft towards the industrialization of representation supplanting the - Look the art - Son you know your father has always preferred the unauthoritative use of Quaker- We're middle cla-  Look this is all beside the point. ... No, educated poor, son, we're not poor. Look happiness is- Son. Son the art. Take a step back and look at the art. It posits a godless world son. Imagine a world where the question cannot be answered of what the thing is. Son, imagine a world where no can tell you what something is, no benevolent over-watch granting the bedwarm comfort of knowing, son. No son. Yes, they do look like something familiar don't they. This is the comfort of everything prefixed with the word "Pop-" Pop-music, pop-culture, pop-art. It's about comfort. These, they seem innocuous, but they illustrate the possibility of horror, of the cold arid land pre-rational humans, pre-language, pre-comfort. You see the more categories the artist can position the object between, the more confusing what the object is, the more successful. The object will exist at the tip of the tongue. It will inhabit its representation, but it will not be it. It will replace what looks like comfort with something cold. Yes it might look "neat" son, the in-technical word you chose, it may describe its familiar and affable surface that it uses, but this is just the shell that your still young mind places around it to justify, to hold back the cold dark thing of uncertainty that it wishes to place deep inside you, because it's not that.

Juliette Blightman at Eden Eden, Karma International LA

(Eden Eden , Karma )

Penises, coitus, sleepers, planes, interior's rumpled sheets and clothes, a predilection for fabrics, drifting across subjects in Wolfgang Tillman's diaspora in Vuillard's bobo perfunctory.  The stasis held by the girl aloft, suspended, above pool, and the bathing orgy exemplify its two worlds colliding of innocence and sociality, the quiet purity prior stretching before the banging of sex.