Jacqueline Humphries at Modern Art

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the more vulgar excesses of Humphries's paint always excused by its obliviousness to the demands of "making a painting." Humphries's almost without-composition but still composed, paintings like an accident, car or bed sheet. And these are readymade, the previous paintings reduxed with the latest deployment: ASCII printing. And so Humphries' drip, brushstroke, mark, neither expressive nor quotational of expression, paint is instead already perfectly dumb. This separates them from the hordes of zombies: no search for brains. Instead the cannibal-without-purpose seems pleasant after so many decades of painting's conceptual juicing. Like Richter whose painting exists in the netherworld of a stupid transcendence, instead just give us what we want, paint, flesh, dumbly.


see too: Jacqueline Humphries at Carnegie Museum of Art

Jacqueline Humphries at Carnegie Museum of Art

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The thin distinction of Humphries from the song and dance of all those other silver abstractionists is that the well worn jazz hands of "expression" aren't, for Humphries, totally choreographed yet by Dr. Frankenstein. While the corpse may have its fluids replaced in technicolor to be paraded around in chromes and newfangled chemiluminescence, it's the activation of this new deployment of means, materials, not just silver paint but making the silver paint shine like candied yams. Painting a vehicle to showcase silver paint, for trippy material fetish. This song and dance is actually a visual pleasure of a long dead corpse embalmed really well.

See too: Albert Oehlen at New Museum, Raoul De Keyser at Inverleith House