Cassandra Press, Kandis Williams at LAXART, Los Angeles

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Cassandra Press is good and interesting thing and this is an exhibition to put the laurels around that. Basically proof that more interesting "aesthetic politics" exist, it isn't whatever generation of conceptual navel gazing we're on. (Possibly this is because what has become "aesthetic politics" has been so gelatinized by art discourse PR that the "political" itself has become a non-sequitur.) So much so that just recollecting discourse for a reader is more interesting. Just like an imaged wall of culture is more interesting than a wall of art. The point is that, like Jafa, we can be direct without sacrificing art's poetic opening.

“Remote Castration” at LAXART

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"Remote Castration" irrupting on city as graffiti which is like the subconscious's nocturnal emission, perhaps conjuring "Remote Viewing", sending Lorena Bobbit by dream, like a Freddy sorta Scissor-hands to snip the membership to patriarchy. I like this definition since the exhibition's abundance of drawing, which always felt like a means of pulling from the subconscious a diagram to send like a telegraph in to consciousness of another person. Drawing is like schematics for trojan horses that the viewer erects in their head. Painting is an object outside you but drawing form inside you, feeling a lot more like writing: equations building images, sending Ms. Bobbit inside your head where she stands ready, you can see the hole you get fucked through.

David Hartt at LAXART

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Chris Kraus spent a book speculating where art belongs, and Hartt wagers a similar bet that its at the cusps, the liminal sites of production where thriving is reciprocal to collapsing  - "interstices" - siting its video depciting the limits of culture, (a video channel for each Siberia and Alaska's edges) within that endlessly theorized de-centered center of post-modern enterprise, the Bonaventure hotel, Jameson, Berger, Baudrillard et al. The symbolic gesture, heavy handed as it is and theorized to no end by the takeaway, recedes with the video's actual deft estrangement of the entirety of its enterprise. The documentation does no service to the weirdness of taking time out of your beautiful Los Angeles day to enter this both bustling and dying image of de-centered centered post-modern architecture, somewhere between mall and airport, and entering a now defunct, dead, flower shop, and see the video's imagery make the comparison almost ham-fistedly well between the these forms of death-in-life existence of the Russian left and American right (reversed in the documentation) centered at this supremely weird hotel.  The power less in the juxtaposition of its symbols, but the differing sensibilities of the founts, reflected en abyme as one revolves again and again through the doors of its manic brand semiotics of fractured capitalism, the video at its best when its toys with the tone of meaning, going from Levi's ad to generic cohort of stock images reflecting its jazz soundtrack. A revolving floor capitalist realist funhouse disavowing the usual white walled gallery "purity" by adopting the sale's floor as its code, and all the art fairs along the way, a capitalist gimmick that works really well.

See too : "Rainbow" at Queer Thoughts , David Hartt at Carnegie Museum of Art