Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili at Kunsthalle Basel

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"Photographs" devoid of context become functionally useless - making them feel thin, not suited for our age of images mass trained for "engagement,""likes," advertorial smiling. (Its why gallery instagrams are desperate for those Happy Birthday! headshots - over their limitless holdings of art - abstraction is mere slop in the feed.) And these above rightfully own the wallpaper they are. That thinness, that feeling of lack is simply not selling us on something.

Daniel Turner at Kunsthalle Basel

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Sculpture never had its Zombie formalism. But this is it. The industrialization of aura through reference-shredded-process. This stuff comes from hospitals! And, like, chemical factories! Spooky. Think of hospitals, stuff happens there! Chemicals! I bet they linger! Wow, have you heard of On Kawara! It points! Things in the world! Oh my! Traces! Like the Shroud of Turin in relation to the face of Jesus, they are fake. But asking questions! Artworld JAQing off. A more steroidic budget. Turning human blood into wine for rich consumption. 

This value added of anecdotal content, of reference converted to sign...
While this was the central conundrum to conceptual art since its inception, the rupture and distance between sign and object (always at risk that its sign didn't actually contain its object) it has since been taken as granted, as a granting agency for value added. While On Kawara's July 21st 1969 poses the question of whether it actually contains the weight of a moon landing, [now art] is given to absorb the history. 

Jason Rhoades built a career of mocking this value-added system, performing it under absurdly comical conditions, to create his referentially seminal signature: PeaRoeFoam, a mess of so much reference and history and jest that it self imploded. A satirical factory of art aura.

The animism that pervades contemporary sculpture is a compositional strategy of curators and artists drawing out a latent feature of minimalism described already in 1967 by Michael Fried as a "theatricality," and used as a showroom potentiality, a sort of pornographic objecthood in a showroomization of art, imbuing importance with display strategies arranging attention, prioritize the presence of the object in relation to a viewer, no longer the blank mirror objects of minimalism creating a stage to hold the viewer/actor, but objects which the actor, you, holds in relation to themselves, Hamlet touching the cranial vault to his own, all under the shadow-less white light of product photography or god.

See: “Being Thing” at Centre International d’Arte et du Paysage & Treignac Projet, James Hoff at VI, VII

Michaela Eichwald at Kunsthalle Basel

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What is a couch but an innuendo for a body? Suggesting its shape and therefore resembling its function, a loaf. 

Raphael Hefti at Kunsthalle Basel

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There are risks. In the process of his still young career, the artist has subjected himself to extreme heights and endured punishing heat, he once accidentally blew up his car (and as a result was under investigation for years by an anti-terrorism unit), and his hair temporarily fell out due to the substances he was using to produce his early photograms. For a solo show in 2013, he piled more than 25 tons of sand in his then-gallerist’s tiny London space and set in motion a chain reaction that sent an unstoppable flow of 1,600° Celsius molten steel down sand channels in an act that was partly sculptural and partly performative. No one was hurt and the gallery floors held up, but that these processes remained benign could not have been predicted with certainty. To make his art, and importantly also, to show his art, Hefti probes the limits of the possible, for himself as much as for the institutions who exhibit his projects. (This one being no exception: The weight of some of his works challenges the structural limitations of the historic Kunsthalle Basel building, the electricity coursing through other pieces court a high voltage risk.) 

This would make a great character in a book. Post-minimalism, but bigger. Turned to 11. Those Serras that killed people, awesome. Dealers out of business. The sum of all lines snorted. Oh yeah that's the stuff. 

Dora Budor at Kunsthalle Basel

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A Pierre Hughye for the post-apocalypse, Budor's maybe a bit more invested in theatrics, the movies, and less in magic, instead in its dumbness, which is what we love those big sci-fi budgets for, the vast quantity of ash.

Wong Ping at Kunsthalle Basel

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Comedy in anxiety over the bile we all believe lurking beneath surface norms, in your neighbors closet a man watching you have sex with his wife. Finding yourself watching your wife have sex with a man, from a closet. Penis attacked by ants. A penis snaps. Abortions raised to kiss their daddy. The candy shell animation serving coprophilic chocolate just below. Ping's protagonists narrate their chocolate predicaments with a general numbness. Mama died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don't know. The Stranger is when you sit on your hand until it goes numb before masturbating. So it feels like a stranger. An indifference, world's slight remove. All the penises look like different alien creatures. Because they do. This is all believable because the world is already a cartoon.

Tania Pérez Córdova at Kunsthalle Basel

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Cosmetics, gunpowder, and volcanic ash walk into a gallery and smear themselves onto the wall. Conceptual art is a lot of jokes without punchlines. Instead a lapse, opening expanse like vacancy. This room is the interpretable space, the gap, where we could manifest the punchline. "The mathematician confronted with fire, proves that solution exists, and goes back to bed." The cymbals and relief of punchlines is replaced by the viewer as critic who interprets. This gap between the returns are literal here, physicalized in the holes of pots attempted to be recast into original forms. That's funny. But not like haha funny. The holes mimicking the ones placed in your head, you fill them.

Sanya Kantarovsky at Kunsthalle Basel

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10 images. Of which 7 installation views, 2 photos of paintings on walls straight, and one promotional still from a movie yet to play. Kunsthalle Basel has always been pretty miserly with their images, but this is a new low. The old low is 11 images acting as documentation but mainly just letting you know it happened through the window you have your faced pressed up to look in on. They come in a packet on the website marked "Press images." Like we've glued our lips to promotional pamphlets.


see too: Sanya Kantarovsky at Marc Foxx, Joanne Greenbaum at Crone, Vittorio Brodmann at Halle Für Kunst Lüneburg, Heather Guertin at Brennan & Griffin,

“Ungestalt” at Kunsthalle Basel

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Tube goo viscera. Bourgoise to Emin. The rotund, biomorphic. The anthropomorphic, anthropoid, and the dripping and the glistening. The meaty and the squishy, fungal. Glass etched with goo, sprayed. Wax deformed Rodins. Primordial, high definition flesh. The dirt. Psoriasic pulchritude. Your standard innuendo; vaginal negatives. The soft and photo sensitive. The band-aid awaiting its knee. Someone farts. The misshapen; hideously deformed. The institutionally nurse-like and the gore spread across asphalt. The putrescent, the rotting inside taught PVC. The colonoscopic. Our bodies inferred, touched, spread with creams oils and ointments. The sick. It was a lie to believe in machined aluminum autonomy, bodies and minds everywhere guttered. Every sculpture today inferring the body.



See too: Nancy Lupo at Swiss Institute, Klara Lidén, Alicia Frankovich at Kurator, Park McArthur at Chisenhale, Olga Balema at Croy Nielsen

Yngve Holen at Kunsthalle Basel

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The terrible emptiness of objects, an indifference that hurts, and in Holen and other's objects we begin to see boogeymen that we assume must be there filling the cold object with anything but an emptiness. We exceed at inventing gods where there are none. What is behind it is only us. It is obvious at this point that objects we design are reflections of us, this is how the field of anthropology operates. We are designers or our world, of our water coolers cut in half in attempts to find its ghost where there is only us standing around it attempting the small talk of art writing. Artists' recent turn towards this mystic auto-anthropology would perhaps be better suited to more rigorous dissertations of objects affectual torture of us that Holen and other's more symbolic moments seem primed to leech out of all-too-ready curators, but it is true that our objects haunt us.


See too: “Being Thing” at Centre International d’Arte et du Paysage & Treignac Projet, Yngve Holen at Modern Art, Mark Leckey at Haus Der Kunst + Kunsthalle Basel, Darren Bader at Andrew Kreps, Klara Lidén, Alicia Frankovich at Kurator, Park McArthur at Chisenhale, Sam Lewitt at Kunsthalle Basel

Sam Lewitt at Kunsthalle Basel

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"Keeping the lights on" is synonymous with capitalist vitality, the blood flow current signifying property over time, which Lewitt turns to heat, redirecting its energy to liminally exchange light for warmth for the corpse.

It's impossible to be certain whether the new techno-conceptual isn't anything more than a refurbished arte-povera, in which its spirituality and metaphysics is replaced with a ghost in the scary looking machines of a predestined future come to haunt us menacingly, like cultures assigning gods and poetry to corral phenomena we are at a loss to control.


See too:  Elaine Cameron-Weir at VENUS Los Angeles, Ben Schumacher at Musee d’art contemporain de Lyon, Chadwick Rantanen at Essex Street

Marina Pinsky at Kunsthalle Basel

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CMD+T. Click and drag to scale. Return. M. Click and Drag. G to fill.
Somewhere between Elad Lassry and Nina Bier waistdeep in the newfound rubbery substance of photography.  That photos do weird things in the world today. They wrap the curves of public transit, dissolve from gray paper in puddles, facade high-rises, are uploaded to clouds, stabilized by conservators, projected in darkrooms, amassed in feeds. They lack need for any substrate whatsoever yet the process of being photographed is called being objectified. You become an object and things become their representation. Photography is a purgatory between the filth of the world and the infinite white virtual. But so the wooden versions of the Cryogenic tanks too are privy to this process of objectification as we start to understand the whole world as photography.


see too: Nina Beier at David Roberts Art Foundation, Alicja Kwade at Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, Elad Lassry at David Kordansky, Jana Euler at Galerie Neu & Portikus, Amanda Ross-Ho at The Approach

Anicka Yi at Kunsthalle Basel

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Yi’s various means of display are frames. The frames, generally a referent in themselves, come preloaded with the expectation of what should be contained. Dryer portholes, aquariums with grow-color lights, positive-pressure bubbles, cooking pots, the Prada hallway, each is a self-contained system of expectations for the sculpture. That these expectations are met with bodily concoctions that actively undermine the expectation is their surrealism.  Like the surrealist classic, lobster telephones, supplanting bio-waste mystery for what should be held as the “clean” idea. Spooky bodily excrement in the pure objects of culture.

See too:  Anicka Yi at Cleveland Museum of Art

Mark Leckey at Haus Der Kunst + Kunsthalle Basel

Haus Der Kunst, Kunsthalle Basel

Sanchez called Leckey a hack ( in the sense of what "artist John Kelsey discussed"), taking issue with Leckey's lecture's magisterial administration of an audience swooning: hypnotic affection that would one day be called a Ted Talk or manipulating an audience. Thing was Leckey had always been trading in affects. It was like his thing. Taking cue from that other realm that predicated itself upon it, commerce, entertainment, advertising that was constructing the world and the commodities, objects, films, and talismans that produce it, and, Leckey, attempting to build the work from it. Fiorrici Made Me Hardcore - Leckey's seminal origin - is only and entirely affect, a semblance of surface run like warm oil over your grey orbital, and in the 15 years since a practice built of discerning this surface force, kin Sturtevant and Trisha Donnelly among others, giving birth to today's youthful irrevant abuse of it seen in the New Museum's Surround Audience and even badly by all those anonymous materialists speculated upon. What, at the moment, separates Leckey from his progeny's use of affect is attention to it, amassing at the very least an index of it, and interest examined, and not necessarily just exploiting it.


See too : Venice v Triennial , Mark Leckey at Wiels, Trisha Donnelly at Air de Paris, Zak Kitnick at Rowhouse, Sturtevant at Moma, &Thaddeus Ropac 

Vincent Meessen, Thela Tendu at Kunsthalle Basel

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"Meessen acts as both artist and curator of what is the largest show of Tendu’s abstractions to date in a kind of exhibition-within-the-exhibition.""All of these serve as a visual and conceptual backdrop for a selection of 1930s paintings by the little-known Congolese painter Thela Tendu" of which documentation for this show almost ignores. If you squint you might see them serving as backdrop to Meessen's sculptural masonry. Runic spells drawn on the floor, artist's today use history, signs and objects as incantations, seances to empower images having lost meaning in a culture awash with them. Objects today are displacers, deferring to some construct outside itself, an auratic other, occult, awash with meaning.

"...it took Tendu nearly a century longer to garner any major institutional attention at all. And in Tendu’s case, it only happened thanks to the initiative of another artist."

David Lamelas at Kunsthalle Basel



An interesting comparison between Bruce Nauman ubiquity and Lamelas left off the grid. Both with early awkward sculptures, a switch to video/film, lines on floors, mediumless. Both were ahead of their time, and yet today there is at any  moment at least one Bruce Nauman video playing somewhere in the world, 24/7, while Lamelas equally deadpan institutionally-reflexive esoterica remains firmly on the fringes. Perhaps that Nuaman’s crystalline crippling of intention and meaning was more immediately reproducible and apparent than the subtlety of Lamelas critical loose threading, creating loose threads. The institutional promotion could be attributed to Nauman’s hegemonic influence, the permeating embedded self-skeptics, an influence so complete as to be invisible, but perhaps Lamelas’s productive outward criticism of media givens would have left us all better off.