Manfred Pernice at Anton Kern

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That weird little painting-thing makes a comeback in an exhibition as "recap". Funny because like all Pernice's assembled objects seem on their way to being sculptures, this restating of the past seems on its way to being an exhibition.  (Even a greatest hits doesn't really count as an album, even if the cream and the not mere b-sides or storage remains.) The point being, Pernice seems once again to not quite "performing," failure to fully erect anything. It's been six years. But sometimes the depressive gets attached to a blanket feeling like comfort.


Manfred Pernice at The Modern Institute, Manfred Pernice at Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, Manfred Pernice at Galerie Neu

Manfred Pernice at The Modern Institute

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Of course cans, as named, invoke emptiness (a filled cans would be called by what they contain, a soda, sardines, refried beans) but, clean, the possibility for containment, the ability to can, canning, the process for preserving, pickling,  a funny metaphor for the preservation of an artist's hand severed from them, held in brine, they look green through the glass museums place to frame them, objects which maintain the objects, pickled. Artists willingly put their objects in such canisters, even the most ephemeral are given some package tradeable, they are the bridge between two hands shaking. If it wasn't, at least in some way transmissible, tranistable, it would be broken.


See too: Manfred Pernice at Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, Manfred Pernice at Galerie Neu

Manfred Pernice at Galerie Neu

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There are emotional stakes. Sluggish works burdened by difficult existence, the 1000 years of an Imperial Cathedral bears the same weight as a Cheeseburger, all strewn the same next to a deflating globe. Construction, for Pernice, is made like a complaint, the decisions feel heavy and won. Manfred Pernice at Regen Projects had trouble getting erect, the depressive often does, but at this new gallery gets it up with a troubled aloofness: stacking premises the possibility for it but it doesn't feel like real monumentality but faking it for the onlookers, stacking like the pained smile as response.


See too: Manfred Pernice at Regen Projects,  Group Show at Bortolami and Galerie Neu at Gladstone Gallery

Marc Camille Chaimowicz at Galerie Neu



It would be unfair to bring up Portlandia’s mocking “Put a bird on it” since the spectacle here envelopes a real space, with real birds, not merely a clever documentation winking a la Gambaroff’s cats. The real trick was inviting others to take part in the party shining through the romanticism of it all with the black light of cynicism, Liden’s subtle mockery of public-housing insistence, and Pernice’s can’t-be-bothered urban blight objects, casting the whole thing as a dystopian present which, like the invasive tropical-green parrots of Brussels whose color is dissonant to their blight, the urban apocalypse is at least beautiful.

Group Show at Bortolami and Galerie Neu at Gladstone Gallery
Ian Cheng, Melanie Gilligan, Carissa Rodriguez, Anicka Yi
John Knight, Manfred Pernice, Tom Burr, Klara Liden, Kitty Kraus, Gedi Sibony, Reena Spaulings, Sergej Jensen





Bortlomi
You go see these shows only to be confronted again with its screen representation. Why do you even get out of bed, its representation, historical sediment, becomes the real version in catalogs. Arendt's we're all images to others. All this stuff is on monitors anyway save for Anicka Yi’s art-fetish-displays, or maybe Melanie Gilligan’s lenticulars, primeval .gifs for the real world, the most basic version of affirmed presence, good job you got a bed sort. And eventually with Ian Cheng’s Oculus Rift experiments, not shown here, it’ll all be here. Remember when an artist made Katamari Damacy- that was a sculpture. Carissa Rodriguez’s prints at least suggest a complicit defeat in attempting critique of the new digital supremacy, everyone else seems left-behind in the uncommitment to digital acceleration’s disposibility.

Neu
Which makes Reena Spauling’s poor portraits all the digitally-smarter for their commitment to disposable ideation. Spauling’s whole project premised on every whatever-is-beyond-insipid self-reflexive “art idea” executed with jest, and smart, social cred made to be liquidated and poured through the network of pipes, brilliant. And then you’ve got John Knight actually still dragging real objects across the world, displacing them with antiquated labor-power, and just really the most needless idea of reflexive context art that he’s known for, reminiscent of the sisyphean Heizer’s levitating the mass of his rocks to get his jollies off, and so in the context of all that it makes sense why so much of the other art is limp in these shows, barely able to erect itself in bed in the morning, and because its not hard to get really hard to get up in bed when you’ve got some form of super-cool steroids like all these people seem to have.

Manfred Pernice at Regen Projects



The documentation fails to impress the sculptures self-relegation, sent to the corner.  Made to appear cast asides. The structures are rigid but the fill, limp; a pathos of lost objects dejected, collected by "cassettes"’s magnetic nostalgic mix-tapes. You could attach all the arcade games of Benjaminian spirituo-materialism, but Pernice's made to ask who could be made to care.
They're depressive basins. An inability to get out of bed, the depressed person finds it difficult to meaningfully construct, to even get erect. Anhedonia. Against the continual rigidifying erectness of R. Harrison, - finally stripped to their commodification essence of perfect reproducible po-mo gems and boring - the loosey-goose game of Pernice is a breeze, a little bathetic, but that's, like, probably the point, you're being made to feel empathy.