Mark Grotjahn at LACMA

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Production itself becomes interesting, massing it, output. As Bayrle, his own resurgence now, called it: "The quality of quantity." Remember Josh Smith hammering his name into our heads, how villainously insipid it seemed, and now here we are, assaulted again with a man hammering his signature at us. We're not even post-warhol because opportunely someone is the keeping the corpse artificially warm for all these artists to wring it for one more drop of blood, standing in his Shadows, except there aren't any here, instead how white those walls, how pushed to verge of overblown, photographically enhanced to candy. A Museum for Ice Cream. Neapolitan! Mint! The sugary libidinal to quench our thirst.


See too: Josh Smith at STANDARD (OSLO), DAS INSTITÜT at Serpentine Gallery

Carlos Almaraz at LACMA

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“He was the depictor of that community and scene just as well as Monet or Renoir depicted their communities,” Marin says. Its true he got LA's acidic light right, the car "Crash in Phthalo Green" is barely brighter than the astringent sun, all the colors in Almaraz's paintings seems chalked by the sun, bleached to a sort of wasted otherness, just like LA.

Pierre Huyghe at Los Angeles County Museum of Art

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If even for a moment you let yourself become cynical or critical at all of Huyghe’s practice it dries and crumbles.  Huyghe’s work is premised on “magic,” the tiny miracles of a child’s account of things*, like children’s stories a magical world in which people with absurdity endeavor expeditions, parties called at whim, puppets, and videos a jumble, with fog and mirrors still magical as home science fairs, and bees on heads, and snow in Los Angeles, and coloring the dog's leg pink, the work as though made by an unjaded art students run gleefully aloof (moreover than Höller's terrors) and given the patina of serious greys at times pompous and overblown to an extreme, (A Journey That Wasn’t punishingly excessive) but wildly affective if you can enjoy the magic of Disneyland Paris, but doesn't stand up well to under the light of adult’s critical cynicism, so make your choice before forking over the $25 at wherever this heads next.

*A surrealism oddly in proximity to Bader’s in which objects become de-specific in their categorical order. Edges fuzzed - dogs in galleries, parties called at “whim” - that magnifies that strangeness of "objects" de-ordered by economic rationality, the manic fallout of Judd’s very specific box.

See too : Darren Bader at Andrew Kreps , Flat Neighbors at Rachel Uffner