Venice 2019, Danh Vo, & at kurimanzutto

(Arsenale, kurimanzutto)

"Vo has acquired objects from the estate of Robert McNamara [...] This first contact with the McNamara family led their son Craig McNamara to befriend Vo and later gift him with a walnut orchard*, its timber destined to make rifle stocks. Instead, the timber has been used by the artist to make replicas of designer furniture or to be used raw and unfinished"

Remember "process orientated abstraction", those set of instructions - a conceptual rubric - that was enacted to be left as traces surfaces the painting? Spraying of fire extinguishers, extracting dyes from flowers, silvering paintings, et al. Vo's is the conceptual art version of that. Vo allows legend to become perfume, an adornment mystifying its objects. Like an unironic Jason Rhoades, exhibitions become spaces for the process of mythification. Whereas for Rhoades it was a  comic process of figurative trash becoming some hokey possibility for art, for Vo the pre-christened becomes involved in the permutations of further embedding it in objects. I think somewhere here there is a conflation of terms or ideas. The aura of art, of objects, is somehow smeltable, is made able to be repoured into new objects through a form of storytelling. Vo is a factory for this witchcraft, for the production of belief in these ghosts. This is not to denigrate storytelling, or myth, but that somehow (through conceptual art) we've equated the aura of art with the mythologizing of objects with a narrative, a press release. Replaced something's raison d'être with any reason for being whatsoever. What exactly do the walnut tables actually contain?

*According the Guardian, Vo was gifted 10 hectares of lumber, not an actual orchard. (24.7 acres of Sierra Orchard's 450. Though some of this acreage is dedicated to olive oil and other things. However, according to Time Out London, this was all the wood from a recent clearing.)

Abraham Cruzvillegas at Kurimanzutto

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the excellent sculptures that particular regions of urbanites create to reserve parking places? Wikipedia's article calls them Parking Chairs, Chicago calls them "dibs" but you see many versions across the world less furniture orientated. Mexico City's particularly robust parking-object scene. The sculptural emergence from, seemingly, several requirements, first that they be of no particular value (negating theft), constructed of what's available, and, lending their aesthetic quality, must designate their intentionality and refute themselves as refuse or castoffs, detritus, but instead purposed, creating a particular design problem of how to use trash to denote property, the construction as symbol for intent, and all the incredible vernacular and jury-rigged beauty with it that Cruzvillegas pilfers.


see too: Mark Grotjhan at Karma

Rodrigo Hernandez at Kurimanzutto

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Icons distribute meaning; and,. they, like art infer an order that is meaning, a rationality to be understood complying to the code that governs, and so when we meet an icon that we cannot infer definition for, it appears ominous, alien.


see too: Julien Ceccaldi at Jenny’s, Richard Rezac at Isabella Bortolozzi

Mariana Castillo Deball at Kurimanzutto



A pre-existing map turned flooring like the rugs pre-printed in roads played on as children, not everyone had one, but still the imaginary allure of walking over the map holographing your body imaginarily into the scene, tying one to the place, investing them in it.
Adela Breton the map’s first facsimilist in 1890’s, and anti-psychotic 80’s ads are interesting along with swedish coincidences, references, of which this show is built, everything referring, deferring, are all there in an attempt to tell a story through a connect your own dots adventure, of colonials and appropriation, and its fine, important stories, the archival impulse along with its partner the sentimental impulse, but as art moves further into skepticism over its propagandistic impulse it risks saying merely what is already contained in the texts in an emotive impulse, its loss. You're supposed to put your face in the mask since you're already imaginarily walking in their shoes.