Math Bass at Mary Boone

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Like billboards they virtualize space, reaching across it through simplified forms until they are no longer lossy in scale, they become vectors, translate over space. Billboards are designed for distance. Designed for your phone. But them in a big wet space and yet they shine.

Math Bass at Mary Boone

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Like Halley, the expression of the day becoming compartmentalized, rigid. Expressionist language set to cels. Painting becomes the transactional language of advertising, images are streamlined to the force of icons, they are said to "pack a punch" a wallop of the virtual in physical space. It makes for paintings that can be painful, sensitivity traded for force. Bass somewhat retarding their transactional discomfort with an ambiguity: that though they may trade in the blows of advertising they're only trying to sell themselves, there's no unloading of some tiny salesmen in your head, just the painting. Like von Heyl, haywiring the blitz of signs today, their address is perfectly suited for the transactional pipes of the network, ads for themselves.

see too: Charline von Heyl at Capitain Petzel, Charline von Heyl at Gisela Capitain, Annette Kelm at Gio Marconi

Allan McCollum at Mary Boone

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McCollum's brute force attack on "creativity," ironizing uniqueness with its interminable variation, like try and stand out in this crowd kid, pulling out the cornerstones of value with machine made uniqueness, the scary "algorithm," and handcrafted replaced with stand-ins, surrogates, and stage props. Making uniqueness bland. How cruel. Showing on the doll where the creativity hurt him. It all ends in death. Did you think your bones were unique. etc.


See too: Rob Pruitt at MOCAD

Sadie Benning at Mary Boone & Callicoon Fine Arts

(Mary Boone & Callicoon Fine Arts)

Cushioning their hard edges with padded walls of cartoons that allowed the wiley Coyote to suffer enormous blunt trauma because he was soft stretchable taffy amplifying the ambiguity of Benning's drawing against the inserted images which are hard immalleable records against the malleable flesh of the body, the equally amorphous icons.

Judith Bernstein at Mary Boone

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Always interesting the late career rise, speculating the difference then that occluded the work and now what allows its flourish. Judd's three separate 1960 repetitive comments on Anne Truitt reveal mostly what he himself couldn't handle and kept incanting against her, unsystematic color. Judd getting it wrong reveals way more about the culture than it does about Truitt. And for Bernstein painting what had always been repressed as explicit - the large male "personality" embedded in art's very culture - of course couldn't be acceptable, art despises the frank open, it must be embedded; the great irony that Boone is showing these now: think of a giant crusty cock painting hanging in the same room as Schnabel, asserting maybe just where all that great thick paint on large canvases was coming from, the Yale professors of course uncomfortable by this exposing, like totally classic Freud. And so now 2016 this is for many reasons acceptable and but we should be nervous again about now what isn't.

Peter Saul at Mary Boone

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In a Saul all objects seems made of the same balloons of pocked flesh surface holding the same filler. Saul's world is made of all the same arbitrary "stuff" regardless what it is. All objects are like zits ready to pop the same cream substance. The dogs seem prenatal and pink. That the world is actually all made of the same arbitrary stuff lends some creedence to Saul's horror. The smile of curtain above.