Jonathan Monk at CCA Tel Aviv

(link)

Before the internet, in 2008, there was a show called Who's Afraid of Jasper Johns? created by Gavin Brown and Urs Fischer at Tony Shafrazi gallery. The previous exhibition was photographed and printed back onto the walls (at 1:1 scale) and Gavin and Urs' new show was hung over the image. (There was also a shag white Stingel carpet throughout the space, a false waterfall tainted with viagra running down flights of stairs.)* It was bad taste toasted in an era of good taste, in 2008, just on the cusp of the hyperweb of Dispersion and hegemony of the image, a documentation overload which we were just getting our first taste of and making the exhibition feel titillating, looking over a cliff. Which we were. Looking back at it, the exhibition looks sorta bland. Exhibition documentation vertigo is both just the water of our current digital era, swimming is all we do now, but also, maybe you just had to be there. Maybe by embracing all the most nauseous parts of the digital they become wards against it.

*The show traded conceptual decorum for psychedelia, and as such became something of lightning rod of opinion. It seemed a celebration of excess, seemingly riffing on Christian Leigh's notorious Silent Baroque with its whole gluttony ordeal and quasi-hijacked gallery. There was also some irreverent metatextual stuff going on as well, Shafrazi gallery being its own character, sort of culminating in a story of the dinner's cake. 

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.

Simon Fujiwara at Dvir

(link)

"In Dvir Gallery in the south of Tel Aviv, Israel, Fujiwara is showing Hope House, a life-size reconstruction of the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam.""The installation is based on a 3-D model of the Anne Frank House sold at the house’s gift shop." -artnet.com

Fujiwara: "I was teaching in Amsterdam and wanted to take the students to see the house as we were discussing monuments and how ideology translates into material language."
"The Anne Frank House [...] is one of the few places where every mundane detail of a home—door handles, wallpaper, floorboards—transcend their material status and become symbols of tragedy and hope."
"Inside the house, I was told by the guide that almost nothing of the original house remains except for the structure. That the house was only purchased after the making of the first Hollywood film about Anne Frank and that it had since undergone several renovations to make it look as authentic as possible."


The "Authentic" being the sort of transpositional point for slippage, i.e. the selection of what is an "authentic" experience of a house that people wait 3 hours to see hungry but full of preconceived notions of what the Anne Frank house is. Accuracy isn't necessarily Authenticity (and even "accuracy" historians will note allows the latitude for ideologic creep). An authentic experience becomes the decisions of a group of people whose individual definitions and desires of what constitutes "authentic" are physically manifested in decoration, their subjective desires as carpet choice, photo arrangements. Fujiwara's garishly contradictory furnishing provides a sort of metastasized version, cartoonification of ideological creep, a funhouse of representation, the subject of the creator on view more than any historical artifact, like any historical retelling.



See too: Mathis Altmann at Freedman Fitzpatrick

Joav BarEl at Tempo Rubato

According to the PR this is the center of the world. And if you buy it, or curate it, you can place there on its clear altar under its dome any object you like.
But so of course the question is which world does it become the center of. Becuase Bruce Nauman built the center of the universe, fittingly, in Albuquerque. In cosmological terms all points are the center of the universe, dispersed, infinite. Everything expanding away from everywhere else. All distance increasing over time, though it’s hard to say whether between me and you. Between you and this thing. But so what’s the difference between a world and a universe. And whose world. And what is a center of a world.

Tonight I'm being paid $125 dollars to follow a partybus containing a celebrity reporting its location by texts to producers through the Los Angeles night.