Lutz Bacher at Galerie Buchholz and Sarah Rapson at Essex Street

(Clockwise from top left, Lutz Bacher, Susan Cianciolo, Sarah Rapson, Park Mcarthur)

Yellowing archive.

While early Conceptual Art was interested in the document (the instructional as a virtual, a program, cerebral) its second generation is a bit more lossy, interested in the fossil, more precisely the fossilization, that slow decomposition into eternality, history. Recoups its own acidification, hazing, foxing, all the condition reports it will accumulate. This "second generation" invests in the degradation of generations of bootleg tape. Fossils existing as strange evidence of a world. a pathos in the materials we find to mediate our touch to the world. ... The objects here, designed for ourselves, infer something about the bodies which they govern.

It would not take a freudian to posit why particularly women appear to be more sensitive to material conditions of the world. Like, while Kosuth was concerned for all the mysteries of "Chair," Wex and Mary Kelly were like yes, but we also get pregnant. The "cerebral" of men's white concerns was treated as the higher plane and, for all its agnostic posturing, the "conceptual" allied itself with a reverence akin the religious divinity it ostensibly exiled. Men, oblivious to their own bodies that had never been in question by culture, had the privilege to etherealize themselves above everyone's heads to some assumed universal while women's were increasingly entrenched in politic ground war.

Minimalism's infatuation for the industrial process, of say Judd et al, was, in part, premised on these industrial processes deletion of the body and its "expression" (if not a promise of subjectivity lifted entirely) in looking "pure," like objectivity, removing the human. ... Of course this was the lie of any commodity: that the clean aluminum sheets comprising boxes or laptops weren't simply wiped of their indentured sweat. Minimalism hid the body in the closet. Edward's balls coagulated these castoff bodies minimalism so desperately wanted to forget.

the body is expressed not through "figuration" but its intermediary.. 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.

And today we are so acclimated to objects and commodities adapted to us that any object blurrying suggestion for the function they provide (to us) produces an uncanny effect. We say they look otherworldly, alien, simply because we don't know what good they are to us...

Knowledge is kept on rapidly acidifying papers, stored in databanks we anodize against oxidation in deep storage basements to feign permanence, our security. But the world slowly deteriorates, look into the issue of archiving, it's complex nuanced and impossible, it's baby blankets spilled on, barfed on, a biological archive cum Banker's boxes purchased by the gross. Your touch leaves a mark, sews a patch, you reproduce yourself in the objects you attend. Preciousness in warm cardboard, wearing touch, eroding to someone

which Bacher recurringly recall, cosmos xeroxed into the noise of their granular flooring, stellar scales spilled across expanses like baseballs or sprawls of sand. Mountains dissolve in grains that resemble liquids in geologic time. This recurring theme. The biblical "for dust you are and to dust you will return" is, as far as we know of entropy, scientifically accurate.



see too: Susan Cianciolo at Modern Art, Marianne Wex at Tanya Leighton, Ser Serpas at LUMA Westbau, Ghislaine Leung at Chisenhale & Essex Street, Laurie Parsons at Museum Abteiberg, Park McArthur at Chisenhale, Park McArthur at SFMOMA, Richard Rezac at Isabella Bortolozzi, Henrik Olesen at Schinkel Pavilion, Henrik Olesen at Cabinet, Henrik Olesen at Reena Spaulings, Pati Hill at Essex Street, Klara Lidén & Alicia Frankovich at Kurator, Melvin Edwards at Daniel Buchholz

“Magic Ben Big Boy” at Matthew Marks

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You can see what was already in the later work then, that endless turning from inside to outside, what is open and what is hidden. While ever more skeletally baroque now, the similar rotations then, into shyness then. A portal opens, a cork plugs, things are sealed, places buried. What happens inside these "Shirley Temple Rooms" is what's at stake, but the exhibition's "Ben" is a Michael Jackson song about a boy who love his rat, and the "Big Boy" is adult sized sexual assault trauma doll, and the "Magic" is some old crone with a box of roses, cats wideyed at their prey, Magic Ben the big boy, and our eyes the size of eggs, I'm sure you can put the story together.

Lutz Bacher at 3320 18th St

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As a coping mechanism for liberal anguish this makes sense, a shelter to lick wounds and reassert our values printed in critic's picks and press stated it a "Superb San Fransisco Show"; resistance through opening magazine space for such critics to state their picks, which are not Trump. A conservative artist emphasizing autographs, say Obama's floral own, would be about equally meaningful, the floral signaling weakness, whereas Trump's palsy divines the polygraph critics wish. But graphology has long been decried as pseudoscience - as well as lie-detectors - mattering little here: the Trump signature been given the Bacher buzz, mimeographed to noise, and whereas the less culturally adept would have put the scrawl on melting icecaps, on the corpses of refugees, redundantly, theatrically, Bacher's noise, hung in the hallowed halls of art, echo what was already been ringing in its chambers, our skulls. Both graphology and polygraphs used for decades by those in authority to assert objectivity in their generally pretty awful biases, see what they want to see, like art, its critics.



See too: Robert Longo at Metro Pictures, Rachel Harrison at Greene Naftali

Lutz Bacher at Daniel Buchholz

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Some days spent in bed wondering: Does CAD love anyone more than Lutz Bacher? answered by the appearance of another before us. Gotta Catch 'em all Quarterly. If Bacher's theme of the erosion of the monument-as-sign's ability to mean isn't still apparent, the spamming of its images should make it: The semantic satiation of saying it again and again mirroring Bacher's interest in the loss, in the meaning photocopied to death. Like Gonzalez-Torres - who CAD also obviously feels some large affinity towards - significance is in the continual depletion and refill of an ability to appear -significant or loved - in the face of another, an artistic problem if there ever was one.


See too: Lutz Bacher at 356 Mission, Lutz Bacher at Statens Museum for Kunst, Lutz Bacher at Daniel Buchloz, Lutz Bacher at Daniel Buchholz, Contemporary Art Quarterly 2, On Kawara at the Guggenheim

Lutz Bacher at 356 Mission

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In "Entropy and the new Monuments" Smithson's term "hyper-prosaism" for Morris, Flavin, LeWitt, and Judd described his artistic cohorts' inadequacy in the grand scales of time and entropy, the culturally catatonic monuments in human "progression." The bracing absurdity and nihilism of cosmic scales entering the personal ones, which Bacher recurringly recalls with invocations of cosmos xeroxed into the noise of their granular flooring, synecdoches of stellar scales spilled across expanses like baseballs or sprawls of sand. Mountains dissolve in grains that resemble liquids in geologic time. This recurring theme. The biblical "for dust you are and to dust you will return" is, as far as we know of entropy, scientifically accurate. Bacher never as deeply ironic or hurt as Smithson seemed by the crushing juxtaposition, the monuments themselves invoke already this loss.





See too: Lutz Bacher at Statens Museum for Kunst, On Kawara at the Guggenheim, Lutz Bacher at Daniel Buchloz

“Friday, July 24, 2015″ at Essex Street

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In this episode Forrest pens a love letter. The love letter is open letter, made public PR, an address sung upon the highest mountain top found: the LES exhibition, and then posted on his own factory of the visible, but addendums abound at pains to make clear that it was CAD's board of directors choosing to announce the letter and not Forrest, because that would be like weird, and but who is going to tell their boss their love wasn't worthy, and but who wants to be a critic of a love letter anyway, particularly when people's literal lives and loves are at stake, not us, the letter is undeniably sweet. Jealous singles swell. So from our team to yours we all wish you and yours a happy outcome.

But so the most interesting reveal in this episode that for all CAD's fears of nepotism, CAWD actually wrote the review for Puppies Puppies back in March, back when it was quickly becoming an expectation for Puppies Puppies next solo to be featured on CAD, one of the extremely few penned early in anticipation for its eventual coming, PP an obvious CAD favorite, before knowing anything about the love revealed here. So here's hoping it comes.

Lutz Bacher at Statens Museum for Kunst

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Every Bacher work is its tombstone, the thing which represents its end, the last person remembering their name.
The framing is contextually ambiguous and stripped of their time and negated by the remoteness of their handling a viewers attempts to position themselves in relation to the subjects feels instead their meaning transpire and fade. The small facts make them mean less, caroming off the possibility of understanding. A hallucination of connection, of information adrift from meaning.

See too: Lutz Bacher at Daniel Buchloz

Lutz Bacher at Daniel Buchloz



All the “information” in this show, the symbols etc whatever, already contain within them their loss. The WTC in snow, the Buffalo, the men as soldiers, the words scrawled, the random plunking of keys. The pathos of much of Bacher’s work is heavy here in its nihilism. The bareness of the rooms offset by a horrible subconscious construction, a non-sculpture of jagged metal reminiscent of the things you cough up at night, a cubist torture device. It offsets the clean minimalism of the photographs. An empty surrealist sculpture of half formed buffalo, over-slaughtered symbol of the American west, here vessels or volumes, who, in their skeletal incompleteness, let their empty contents vaporate, disperse vaporously through the sieve of chicken wire like loosely intertwined fingers. Their “Paleolithic cave painting” look an omen of the future crumbling.
The word desolate strikes you again and again and again.
The oft-premise of Bacher work is loss, the loss of humanity, of information, of containable knowledge, a hands-in-air gesture of trying to contain, label, some part of humanity as it makes it way towards expected apocalypse, the cusp of obliteration. The buffalo sculptures deploy their feel of a culture half there half on their way out. The scrawled text’s intermediary feel pre-premise their future obsolescence, “the title of this book, the theory of everything” hypothesizes then an endpoint for the work beyond one of human time, in the far reaches of nothingness with mock laughter at the soldiers and men who once occupied it, smiling and stern, goodbye.
The work continuously occupies the place similar to nostalgic photographs, creating the empathy for the present as if its already the past.

Lutz Bacher at Daniel Buchholz

“... revealing the poetic inadequacy of depicting and describing the cosmos.”

Poetic Inadequacy.

The xerotic appropriations a peel of dead skin; an isolation in which images are stripped to their imprint. The aggressive desolation of the original life or allure left to a tertiary alien distance, as though foreign, reduced to objective information, to what they may have once connoted to a human race. The nihilistic double-bind of the images thrown in your face leave the author’s hands in air’s surrender, as hostage, the images left afloat in the air of heavy white gallery frames.