Dashiell Manley at Jessica Silverman

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A lot painting today is excuses for getting bright striking colors onto canvas. Paint excused because we don't trust "expression." PRs become the spellcasting against anything that could be mistaken for irrational, and we spit-firing reasons, definitions, reference, backloading the work to look like weight. The compressive strength of bamboo. Excuses become important when we've conflated painting with its history. Both the history of the art-form, in which painting must become a marker for its own context, a placeholder of itself, for curators to elucidate, but also because of this the individual canvas must have a raison. This is the tension of all that neanderthal painting, of trying to make paintings so stupid it couldn't possibly be mistaken as reasonable. And yet here we are. Perhaps brilliance, like Grotjahn, in just not even excusing oneself. A confusion of whether or not these are dumb.

“Kinship” at Jessica Silverman

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The bowels of August. How's your summer going? Are you strapped to a chair forced to gorge upon the group shows the artworld has brought like stale pancakes that purport to show tomorrow's young?  But then a press release in such deadpan earnestness, its plainness appearing almost offkilter for all its straightforward detail cutting summer haze. In a sea of overwrought excusing that is summer press releases, this offers a lifetime for it. Really no excuse at all. This and then that and here now.  Our heart recognized barren in its several sizes grown. It's grouping of art that doesn't have to make sense, or be made sense of; it's a personal collection.

Judy Chicago at Jessica Silverman

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As ambiguous abstraction and bio-innuendo makes a stunning return to art, it would make sense Chicago comes with. There's been a resurgence of cats too. Orifices and cats, pussies, the feline, Schneemann, Carolee, and her cat kissing. A long history of cats in art, Bonnard, Manet, Egypt, etc. The dog doltish in comparison. The cat more sly, artistic, essentialistically feminine.


Literally, Cat butts: Autumn Ramsey at Night Club, Autumn Ramsey at Park View, Alice Tippit at Night Club, Trevor Shimizu at Rowhouse Project

Sean Raspet at Jessica Silverman

(Sean Raspet at Jessica Silverman)

Peter Eleey's exhibition The Quick and the Dead was an expose on the Conceptual art’s hinging of itself on the poetics of its functionlessness, even the driest conceptualizations of dead art scrolls were in lineage with a Caspar David Friedrich existentialism, positioning art within a cerebral vastness and nothingness, conceptual art latently filled with men standing before crashing waves of their romantic ideals. The go-to form of conceptual art now is a mannerist product version of it, sited within minimalist tendencies of theater, ascribing precepts to objects which evoke an endless myriad of poetic feels. The recipe for this process is well understood, the problem lies in making its concoction more concentrate, more acidic, a better product, and once Raspet finally rid himself of the hairgel cubes to present the near nothingness of his thesis show in which the concentration reached peak, and here the ouroboros of its olfactory conceit in which everything and nothing happens in inevitable returns, the vast nothingness spreads before us and the conceptual cymbals crash.

See too : Jason Dodge at Franco Nero