Adam Pendleton at MUMOK

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Pendleton's work is supposed to look like photocopied art history, a zine of bricolage referent, and in this repetition we are told is some new space that "renews the instability of discourse and identity" or "refashions history into something that opens out into the new." But this new space that art continuously opens always seem to be more trophy abstraction.

 

You know what the market has shown every collector wants walled? Abstraction, and so art has become a giant machine mining sources of abstraction. And the endless ironizing of abstract legacies with its remaking in different modes (fire extinguisher, silvering, abjection, food photography) ostensibly acts as critique. Pollock was just spurting cum, symbolically accredited decoration, abjection whatever; the critique fails to, despite 40 years of it, functionally do anything. It's like battling a ghost with a longsword. Abstraction is the inkblot that acts like silver, that acts like mirrors, to place whatever you want to see in it. And we keep digging mirrors.

 

see too: Lisa Holzer at Kunstverein München

Hannah Black at MUMOK

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You may recall Black as penning the "urgent recommendation," destruction of Schutz's WhiBi painting, and subsequent firestorm of art-world hand wringing and giltedged-sanctioned rebuttals by figureheads such as Fusco and Rankine arguing the painting's worth as discussion catalyst seemingly not recognizing Black (and Bright's) request for painting bonfires seemed the real catalyst otherwise the art-world may have continued its merry silent way of soft congratulatory back patting and subsequent relief of white people self-affirming their feeling absolutely aghast at racism with a painting of it. 

In comparison to all that brute forcing a small frail show.

Anna-Sophie Berger at MUMOK

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Coming from a Bochnerian indexical or Kosuthian ontological fashion design to now what is firmly looking like art: diaspora of objects, parabolic playthings, affected benches, weight-pinned jester, Frankenstein's hat, warbled whites, set peas, objects admitting nothing but a clue like game of whispers across things. It's a fun game if you got someone to play along with, otherwise you're just sending words across space, luckily Berger seems well-attended so the objects get the attention. Ten art experts invited seventeen artists to apply, an international jury consisting of mumok director Karola Kraus, Georg Kapsch, CEO of the Kapsch Group, Eva Birkenstock, director of the Kunstverein Dusseldorf, Yilmaz Dziewior, director of the Museum Ludwig, and Stephanie Weber, curator for contemporary art at the Lenbachhaus Munich, selected the artist Anna-Sophie Berger as the first prizewinner of this new art prize.

John Skoog at MUMOK

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Excerpts are the perfect embodiment of the visibility machine's viral power, "a process of simple visibility." One hand, We haven't actually experienced the work and are thus unable to critique, while the other hand takes the pamphlet of press, the implicit statement that the exhibition has worth, strung up along with the name of a museum, featured on CAD. Visibility outpacing thought we aren't able to think, just that we know its accreditation, and spread unthinkable, given in to feeds of publicity. And thus both hands are bound, to the publicity machine misplaced as exhibitions, bent over the computer screen, and we take it.

David Lieske at MUMOK

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In the wastelanding of the sign, the fallout of it post-Harrison-vs-Genzken nova let's say, Lieske was of the first of the cargo cults reassembling the totems of meaning in the desert of it, picking detritus. The issue was resolved not by necessarily by making objects mean again - which they couldn't, its hard to make an empty bottle mean in arid land - but by situating objects so that they looked to mean, they connoted meaning despite inscrutable blankness, hieroglyphs. What was important was exuding the affect of meaningful objects, regardless of whether there was any and it didn't matter anyway was what we were all beginning to pick up on and what the commercial world had known for decades (that you can create "meaning" at will with attitude, aura) which while Lieske pondering whether this was a problem was suddenly flooded and drown by more ephebic artists already having decided for him it wasn't and now this is the water we live in, a flooded terrain of objects imbued, over-saturated "meaning." If so much art looks like Broodthaers today, it is because Broodthaers was of the first invested in the situational arrangements of the display as a credence to meaning, institutional or otherwise.

And so see before, after Lieske's theatrical resignation from the artworld, his return came with press release of defeated reasoning, his realization of commercial exchange as the granting entity of his work's import rather than any institutional legitimization, "The decision of what constitutes a work of art is determined, in the end, by purchase transactions and not, as previously thought, by reproductions in art magazines or similar, none of which have any definitions giving powers anymore," or so the gold standard, exchange, was the actual backing of the symbolic value of his works, and thus the creator of meaning since everything was inscrutable anyways, and thus Lieske was then offering re-arrangements of his objects to try and sell, or make them "mean," once again. Something like in a flood, the empty bottle floats above.


And see too, Zak Kitnick at CLEARING & Rowhouse Project, Sophie Nys at Crac Alsace, Flat Neighbors at Rachel Uffner,