Henning Bohl at Karin Guenther

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"Chappelle discussed the use of his image on Prince's single, admitt[ing], "That's a Prince judo move right there. … You make fun of Prince in a sketch and he'll just use you in his album cover. What am I going to do, sue him for using a picture of me dressed up like him? … That's checkmate right there."

The above image is actually from Bohl's last Balice Hertling exhibition, but the whole wrap up is summarized in the PR of this one if you wanna play along. It's hard to discern the knot when one is tangled in it. A brilliant tactic to ensnare the critic in the brambles they are ostensibly intended to disentangle, forcing seeing briers for the forest, grounded from the critic's usual ivory vantage, quagmired. Added to the "narrative." CAWD's attempts to remain deaf to artworld festivities like putting headphones on at Christmas and uncle Bohl's hearty and "dialectical" bearhug is impossible to discern as friendly or hostile so that when asked how you feel about Christmas your professional opinion always stated through a hostage's clenched and smiling teeth. Like, neutered. "not the social drama, but its modes of expression" and Bohl's hands proffering the original mugs.

Ellen Gronemeyer at Karin Guenther

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Chagal for Dubuffet fans, smiling manically. History is filled with men behaving stupidly, the ape-theater praised interminably for it, the assumption that painters, no matter how hamfisted, are only acting stupidly, acting ostensibly different than being.  Amy Sherlock in Freize relates Gronemeyer's anecdote, learning ballet: "She didn’t know the steps, but something stuck with her: the teacher telling the dancers to ‘grin as stupidly as possible’, to imagine they were totally idiotic. To be relieved of the tell-tale responsibility of her own expressions, to abdicate the need for the correspondence between outer appearance and psychological reality, was, Gronemeyer found, totally liberating." The mania of today, of history so laughable we may, Toufic relates, die from it; the modern paradox of whether to laugh or cry related well by Lloyd Wise in Artforum, the question, "Is that a grin or a rictus?"


See too: Judith Hopf at Museion, Rob Pruitt at MOCAD