Michaela Eichwald at Marian Goodman

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But Eichwald finds the edge, the moment before a Frankenthaler turns into a dog's sick. 

The neanderthal nappie merchants - Joe Bradley, Josh Smith, et al - attempted proving beyond doubt: paint just always looks good. But Eichwald makes one really sit in its question. 

An-My Lê at Marian Goodman

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We killed truth in the documentary, so photographs now adopt a sort of totemic blank state, slow and brooding. The peppering of vast landscaps becomes ominous. Fruit trees come with our knowledge of their labor, the perhaps original sin [photographs] carry. We have come to, at root, fear photography. We have come to acknowledge that photographs carry a guilt. And when it's bigger it is worse because there is larger tray for it.

Nairy Baghramian at Marian Goodman

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Dental anatomy, some of our first experiences of being medically manipulated and on a regular basis while awake a man drilling holes into your skull's open mouth and drooling. A pump and vacuum system to suck the spit so it doesn't fall down your throat and choke you. While most medical instruments are at pains to round themselves into soft contours reminiscent of the bodies they attend the dental is stainless medieval, which like horror films preoccupation with the torture reminding us of our corporeal selves. Torture is eased by the promise of death, the dental gives no such respite. Duchamp himself hired a dental mechanic in creating Étant donnés, using dental plastic to invoke the body in one of four "erotic sculptures." All which were negatives of the body, and none too specific, but overwhelmingly sexual. The biomorphic ambiguity invokes the body better than any specific image, the ambiguous evokes feelings which we relate to corporeality rather a concrete image we would relate to as information. It's why what is unseen has such stronger potential in torture scenes, ears cropped or arms chainsawed. We don't actually get to see our teeth be worked, but we feel the drill, the needle prick, the picking, scraping and pressure of tools near our soft sensitive gums, our bodies' manipulator, our strong associations with the dental.




See too: Nancy Lupo at Swiss Institute, Nairy Baghramian at Museo Tamayo , Klara Lidén Alicia Frankovich at Kurator. Martin Wong at P.P.O.W, K.r.m. Mooney at Pied-á-terre, Henrik Olesen at Reena Spaulings, Erwin Wurm at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Michael E. Smith at Zero

John Baldessari at Marian Goodman

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Baldessari's career spent on a dismantling mockery of art's formal givens, puppeteering its dumbified literal versions, removing the protective aura of seriousness so a skepticism could seep into it cracks, paving the way for today's boorish Pop conceptualism.
Here focused on dissonant image/text relations, including a PR that may or may not correspond the exhibition on view, leaves a viewer floundering to connect the basic formality of art: that the text relate. That we still find this Baldessarian gimmick relevant 800 exhibitions later, sometimes even comically worth it, even when unable to ascertain its intentionality, shows how strong this base impulse is ingrained.

See too : Heimo Zobernig at Indipendenza , Vern Blosum at Kunsthalle Bern , Mitchell Syrop at Midway Contemporary Art