Mimi Lauter at Mendes Wood DM

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In the race to excess, these currently run 1st. Not just color but adrenalized Bonnard, Redon - the positive effects of doping "oil pastel thick as frosting." Important that color, texture, perfumes, not be burdened with anything other than raw id, naiveté. Not images of the garden, these are the garden. Just arrange the bulbs, let them grow color. This is a positive review. 

Paulo Nazareth at Mendes Wood DM & Pivô & The Power Plant

(Mendes Wood DM, Pivo, The Power Plant)

An exotic image for sale. That Nazareth is aware. But unsure what level of duplicity we've gotten off on. Intentionally meeting expectations of the [x] artist. There's too many tropes at play. Enduro walks, cardboard signs, blanket sales, crusty bricks and tin cans, THE CITY, wove leaf hats, cruddy nice paintings. Its got all the tropes. AlysPopeLOrozcoHammonsKuriMendietaCruzvillegasEtal. Maybe the closest is AI Weiwei, who exchange an understanding of politics for an understanding of art. An understanding the artist. Or, perhaps some elaborate triple agent irony? We knowing that he knows that they don't care.

Solange Pessoa at Mendes Wood DM

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I think we find some comfort in dirt smeared not because of its primeval "truth" but because it seems like it can't obsolesce, it can't be superseded, blown away as dust, which we mistake for being eternal.

Dadamaino at Mendes Wood DM

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Looking back now you have to imagine life was, if not hell, at least a brutal minefield for women of the era who, free of a patriarchal home, were paroled to experience the full trauma of a world of men, those sexually "liberated" of the artworld excusing discomfort as "no major offense," the assaulters still allowed their sexual plumage to hang out openly in museums, forced to dodge big pendulous egos swung to wide berths, the male surety allowing the Greenberg-likes to steamroll the scene almost on machismo alone, to allow Judd to state as an entire thought about Anne Truitt in Art International: "She doesn't have a clear idea of what she is doing though," - that's it that's Judd's entire sentence - the defense of which is simply Judd was this much of a prick to everyone, and maybe Italy was kinder, less of the implicit patriarchal rules for gender so pervasive you still hear a generation occasionally defend as "natural," and within this then to somehow find some small elbowed room to make something soft.  Only to have echoing in your head Judd's castigation of Frankenthaler: "Frankenthaler's softness is fine but it would be more profound if it was also hard."


See too: Hannah Black at MUMOK

Luiz Roque at Mendes Wood DM

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Music videos were commercials you wanted to watch, in darkened rooms a flickering sales the subject/object created by the stream of images that swaddled it: the musician car object, attaching you in emotional and affective hooks humming strumming. When removed the sales-object removed
instead just silver celluloid, sexy form, of shiny surfaces rotating.



See too: Mark Leckey at Haus Der Kunst + Kunsthalle Basel

Nick Mauss and Ken Okiishi at Mendes Wood DM



The Okiishi TV one of the most confounding artworks of the last number of years. So obvious, ham-handed, and bungled it’s difficult discerning whether miraculous or idiotic. Brilliant commodities that’s for sure and an Artsy page that’s “SOLD” out. Everyone somehow talking about chroma-keys, as if that mattered. For better or worse, if it wasn't fashionable Okiishi producing these, no one would care. Mauss and Okiishi’s desire for the possibility of new images seems deigned to expressing less a new image than the fetishistic desire inherent in images, a sexual teasing of images that of course leave you firmly blue-balled with cash in hand.
The spoons are an interesting nice gesture but feel more camouflage for the exhibition of last year's hot tickets sold once again.