Klara Liden at Reena Spaulings

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Dance in the expanded sense. The ability for a body to move, across a theater stage or clipping fences to access a city's forbidden sites. Liden's early video dance beating a bike to death, or hysteric strip on train car. The literal moonwalk and ballet practice. Videos. Dance. The posters are just tchotchkes advertising this theater performance, bodily movement that Liden's practice always been invested in.
So then here, the pratfall, physical comedy, SLAPSTICK. The world turned to rubber. "In social psychology, the pratfall effect is the tendency for attractiveness to increase or decrease after an individual makes a mistake. An individual perceived to be highly-competent would be considered, on average, more likable after committing a blunder, while the opposite would occur if a person perceived as average made a mistake."There's something about our world today where slapstick isn't as funny.

“Sitting Bone” at MAVRA

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Hasn't this been like the third Giger chair we've seen in the past year? He's been mentioned in at least 2 press releases (Caroline Mesquita at T293 and Anna Uddenberg at Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler) and there was for sure another chair at Lomex in their EAT CODE AND DIE. But the last Giger chair on CAD appears to be the Swiss Institute's exhibition of chairs, Fin de Siècle, in 2015.  Gigerian chairs simply feel present in the winds of art with its trends for examining bodies through the technologies that are built around them (Lupo, Reaves, Uddenberg, et al), so the skeleton melded  architecture fit for more cushioned parts feels apt.  Chairs are an innuendo for body, an allusive or oblique remark or hint towards the meat that you don't want to be forced say aloud as the gas bag of "human" so you politely place a chair, like those placed in the corners of hotels/lobbies not to be sat in but to politely declare the room capable of relieving your meat baggage, place a surface whose softness designates the degree of welcome to your reception, like you don't want to say butt so you say Sitting Bone.


See too: Caroline Mesquita at T293, Anna Uddenberg at Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Jessi Reaves at Bridget Donahue

Klara Liden at Reena Spaulings

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At best Liden's "examinations of the anxiety of urban space" demonstrates the fraughtness on which society often rests: flippantly publishing the keys to city, (e.g. bolt cutters and flashlight); implicit threat of artist's desublimating their professions higher order bashing a bicycle to death (see too: real violence); or the small smile of this exhibition's theft of things that delineate private property (i.e. stealing the things that make private property possible). Bristling the small hairs separating us from chaos. The giddy nerves of being in break down's presence. Feel the rush of anarchism from the safety of the institution that by allowing its entrance proves it isn't so. It is fun. At worst wonder whether the rich whose wealth rely on this power that Liden ostensibly undermines don't feel some sort of safety in the irony of owning these institutional white walls, proving their invulnerability.



See too: Claire Fontaine at Galerie Neu, Claire Fontaine at Galerie Neu, Jay Chung & Q Takeki Maeda at 356 Mission, Reena Spaulings at Chantal Crousel

Klara Liden and Karl Holmqvist at Kunstverein Braunschweig

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Charming post-Naumanian displacers of content, the work's emptiness as interest (fun or dark?™) maybe finds relevance to current political situations in that one must find interest elsewhere: the contents of speaking is beside itself - nonexistent - and we must look around corners, to the edges of whited out posters, build our own shoddy unstable platforms, find the non-content of its rhetoric and ham-handed demagoguery as a new type of poetry we can't ignore it has steamrolled itself into our vision, just like our political leaders.  "In the video work Nhite Woise (2015), Klara Liden and Karl Holmqvist connect in a charming yet dilettante dance performance."



See too: Klara Lidén, Alicia Frankovich at Kurator, Karl Holmqvist and Ei Arakawa at Overduin & Co.

Klara Lidén, Alicia Frankovich at Kurator

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A desire to express a body. But of recent the body is expressed through objects and not "figuration" but its intermediary, witness ourselves by the surrogate of objects that address it.  Think of Cady Noland's institutional objects, learning something about the specifics of flesh under society. Of elder's walkers and handcuffs. We make objects for ourselves and so of course they express us. And eventually they exist for so long beside us, silently shape alongside us, that they begin to take on facets and express things that were latent, learning by proxy.


See too: Erwin Wurm at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Marte Eknæs, Sean Raspet at Room East

Marc Camille Chaimowicz at Galerie Neu



It would be unfair to bring up Portlandia’s mocking “Put a bird on it” since the spectacle here envelopes a real space, with real birds, not merely a clever documentation winking a la Gambaroff’s cats. The real trick was inviting others to take part in the party shining through the romanticism of it all with the black light of cynicism, Liden’s subtle mockery of public-housing insistence, and Pernice’s can’t-be-bothered urban blight objects, casting the whole thing as a dystopian present which, like the invasive tropical-green parrots of Brussels whose color is dissonant to their blight, the urban apocalypse is at least beautiful.

Group Show at Bortolami and Galerie Neu at Gladstone Gallery
Ian Cheng, Melanie Gilligan, Carissa Rodriguez, Anicka Yi
John Knight, Manfred Pernice, Tom Burr, Klara Liden, Kitty Kraus, Gedi Sibony, Reena Spaulings, Sergej Jensen





Bortlomi
You go see these shows only to be confronted again with its screen representation. Why do you even get out of bed, its representation, historical sediment, becomes the real version in catalogs. Arendt's we're all images to others. All this stuff is on monitors anyway save for Anicka Yi’s art-fetish-displays, or maybe Melanie Gilligan’s lenticulars, primeval .gifs for the real world, the most basic version of affirmed presence, good job you got a bed sort. And eventually with Ian Cheng’s Oculus Rift experiments, not shown here, it’ll all be here. Remember when an artist made Katamari Damacy- that was a sculpture. Carissa Rodriguez’s prints at least suggest a complicit defeat in attempting critique of the new digital supremacy, everyone else seems left-behind in the uncommitment to digital acceleration’s disposibility.

Neu
Which makes Reena Spauling’s poor portraits all the digitally-smarter for their commitment to disposable ideation. Spauling’s whole project premised on every whatever-is-beyond-insipid self-reflexive “art idea” executed with jest, and smart, social cred made to be liquidated and poured through the network of pipes, brilliant. And then you’ve got John Knight actually still dragging real objects across the world, displacing them with antiquated labor-power, and just really the most needless idea of reflexive context art that he’s known for, reminiscent of the sisyphean Heizer’s levitating the mass of his rocks to get his jollies off, and so in the context of all that it makes sense why so much of the other art is limp in these shows, barely able to erect itself in bed in the morning, and because its not hard to get really hard to get up in bed when you’ve got some form of super-cool steroids like all these people seem to have.