Mark Grotjahn Backcountry Blum & Poe, Los Angeles

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Probably one of the best parts of being crowned with the blue-chip, you get to start mass producing absolute eye-gougers and people accept it, are forced to take it, saying thank you thanks, asking for their slaughter. 

see too: Mark Grotjahn at LACMA, Mark Grotjhan at Karma

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

Mark Grotjhan at Karma

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Artists' private esteem for the simple, functional object. These objects against which art feels inconsequential, inadequate against their elemental usefulness: the crafted integrity of functional objects that nobly perform their service, blue-collarly. Of course the painter feels a private respect for the signboard, it performs what the artist cannot. The handcrafted simplicity creating a directness of intention that art is forbidden.
Grotjahn says as much in in the PR.
And then detached from their context they return to performing the art trope of functionality without purpose, of signifier detached from its -fied, we receive them but there is no hotdog or High Life to manifest. They become totemic or omen-like, mystified, connote but do not mean, become hieroglyphs of a culture lost.


See too: Gedi Sibony at The Arsenale , Oscar Tuazon at Le Consortium & Paradise Garage , On Kawara at the Guggenheim