Sandra Mujinga at The Approach & Angharad Williams, Mathis Gasser at Swiss Institute

(Approach, Swiss)

Remember S.O.A.P.Y? Remember Cameron Jamie? Sturtevant's carnival. The haunted house's continual slow rising but never quite crescendo. (It has to remain lo-budget somehow, for fear of turning to full amusement park.) Object's Friedian presence amped to hyperbole, almost comedy, but these don't seem intent on funny: the camp relief valve, that laughability post spookability, doesn't seem here. Good art is said to haunt you, and so maybe it's brute force attempting that. 

Past: Mathis Gasser, Sandra Mujinga

Mathis Gasser at Ginerva Gambino

(link)

"illustrate his thesis: that the collective unconscious’s anxiety—of the end of capitalism, the end of the world—has emerged in sublimated form as spaceships." Hovering "Big Dumb Objects": "They [Big dumb objects] function as science fiction’s equivalent to a MacGuffin, plot devices which serve to awe the viewer with mystery and intrigue yet bear little to no narrative explanation. The objects we face are visually so striking that they quash further inquiries into their exact raison d’être." The big dumb object, be it tumor or bubble, manifest fear as a physical object so it can be overcome, defeated by the plot. It is an effigy, a device to allow our dream-selves to create a monster that we can see defeated, turned over in hand, felt, and thought.
The big dumb object is painting.

Mathis Gasser at Centre d’édition contemporaine

(link) 

Like taking sips from a firehose, Gasser's sampling of the deluge of images: "thousands of signs collide and are multiplied in an explosive combination [...] diffracted by the immateriality of the digital world and by the invasion of information. [..] They oscillate between a nihilistic vision and an interrogation of the limits of a world ..." Using of the fountain to make a construct your own adventures storyboard, when the world is flooded dance in the rain.

“National Gallery” at Grand Century



The exhibition was a month ago but its good timing this late-entry-prior Miami arrivals to get the free advertising, labelled on the map of relevancy, legitimation and visibility. Before there be just serpents in the uncharted. But a few famed friends shed light as german markers of this new territory, addendum to Empire’s realm.
The show hung on the ceiling.
Looks fun - Genzken at 66 still has it, and Kennedy’s work was always made to do this - but in it’s desire for “a heightened physical awareness that serves to explore the idea of vision as corporeal” and “a temporary resistance to mass circulation” the irony of its installation upset lies in the fact that it was always going to end up in the trading routes of it not Empire, then any of the other outsider networks, pretty much made for it by the gallery National’s standard two day party affair, documentation for the hungover circulation, and that that is all that is left, temporary resistance as a good foreplay, because every good sea man does eventually want to get swallowed.