Louise Lawler at Metro Pictures

(link)

It's lights out. The big sleep, render art in some purgatory, between the ghosts of artistic mythology, and their cynical corpse: "they are but objects." Render an inkblot: whether you see spirit or corpse depends on your personal faith in an afterlife. There are two types of art person, and the afterlife is a dividing idea of whether art's sacrificial Christ-like MEANING have intrinsic value/spiritual uplift to a culture, or whether it's just a story told for comfort against a great yawning cold. I.e. What you see in the shadows. An inkblot.

Night at the Museum would show that, at least culturally, we believe in some form of afterlife. Ben Stiller gesticulates. 

Olaf Breuning at Metro Pictures

(link)

The big dumb. A more cartoon sculpture. Ironic paleo-totemism. With a smile. Breuning's interest in our connection to laughable things. The cruder it is, the more archaic it looks, the more permanent we perceive it. Interminably stupid rocks last an unfortunate forever. So paintings like pictograms, petroglyphs. Give a rock some doe eyes.

"As the world feels closer and closer to destabilization, isolationism, far-right tolerance, moves closer towards its end, we find solace looking towards the primitive technologies we might find as our future, and the deities we will worship in the trees we once had."

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comfort in dirt smeared not because of its primeval "truth" but because it seems like it can't obsolesce, it can't be superseded, blown away as dust, which we mistake for being eternal."

See too: Olaf Breuning at Metro Pictures, Solange Pessoa at Mendes Wood DM, Aaron Angell at Koppe Astner

Cindy Sherman at Metro Pictures

(link)

"Renowned for her depictions of female stereotypes" says the PR.

"From the first lightning bolts of Cindy Sherman's Untitled Film Stills, the artworld continuously electrified by depictions of women in societal bondage gear. Artists depicting the strictures that force women to conform to cultural mores; images of women made, if only momentarily, powerless or complicit. Which whose artistic doubling, or performance of, is the critique. ... And despite the critical intention's now obvious powerlessness to successfully confront or diminish such roles - as evidenced by its 40 years of continuous updating and still ringing true - Sherman et al. enjoy success in the market, press, and critical etceteras."

Critical etceteras amounting to mostly, "haha women are constructed."

Art needs to contend with the fact that - if its cultural critique was successful - it would outmode itself to that culture, make itself irrelevant. So what is 40 years of Sherman's critique? That not only is Sherman still successfully mocking the mores of "woman" but also the  re-regurgitations of Sherman-esque in younger careers. That, maybe, there is no critique at all, maybe culture just enjoys the befuddlment of women.

See too: Amalia Ulman at The Gallery at El Centro,

Gary Simmons at Metro Pictures

(link)

Obvious paradoxes of' "erasure" in objects intended to endure as art. Which, obvious, is allegory for the racist caricatures themselves, history preferred to erase but endure. Not quite erasure at all. Erasure is a fantasy of white imagination surely. But who buys these things?

Alexandre Singh at Metro Pictures

(link)

An "imagined dystopic future." Says every press release today. Dystopia ripples through the artworld with the Gothic, occasionally hand in hand. Though Singh has been invested in Dystopia for some time - you may recall 2008's "Hello Meth lab in the Sun" - which now does feel very 2008 doesn't it. (Breaking Bad and antagonism to relational times.) This was then at the waning moments of the US's 8 years of George W. Bush. We were only hearing about Hope then. "Dystopia" spikes in Google Search Trends in 2005 (a video game released under the name) and, well, January 2016, correlating with another shifting US Presidential epoch. Why were we searching for Dystopias if we hand one on our hands? Why do horror themes correlate to each age's neurosis; Nuclear fears: Godzilla; Climate Change: environmental cataclysm films. Latest research on dreams says we perform in sleep to practice duress, invent the situation to imagine our performance. Our anxieties are given the fantasy of horror, dystopia, to watch and say, surely it won't be that bad, make them feel like fantasy.


See too: Andrei Koschmieder at Jenny’s

Miguel Cardenas at Metro Pictures

(link)

As reference to Rousseau's "Sleeping Gypsy," homage here feels more like haunted. Who was Rousseau stealing from anyway?  (Who exactly, were they all stealing from?) Stories of Rousseau's trip with the "French expeditionary force to Mexico are unfounded." However Rousseau referred to them as his "Mexican Pictures." "He likely never left France." "His colleagues’ adventures in Mexico inspired him." "This story seems to be a product of his imagination." Isn't that haunted? "Mexican pictures." Who's ghost? Where do these apparitions float in from? Where do we form ideas of the "Pre-Columbian" and their mixing European lineage. Endlessly misinterpreted until the original is a mistranslation. A image that feels if not without ownership, partially destroyed.

Nina Beier at Metro Pictures

(link)

The world converted to nougat, or asphalt. Expeller pressed in great lengths. Would you like your tar with nuggets? Adding peanuts makes it a Snickers, emulsification with added soap and water makes it cold-mix asphalt-concrete.  The Mars bar is similar to the American Milky Way (which is different than the European Milky Way which is more like an American 3 Musketeers.) The American Milky Way produces about 25 thousand miles of its bar a year. This is about double the 13 thousand of miles of roadway the US adds a year. Weirdly human use of asphalt predates human use of chocolate by a couple millennia, and weirdly nearly 99% of asphalt concrete is recycled, turned back into roads, whereas all those miles of chocolate nugget are passed down pipes in brown cigars. How many miles of brown cigars does the average person move?  We can convert things to other things through these points of pass through, surrealism predicated on making things look like other things, this ability for misrecognition that capitalism has gotten so adept at my making everything so convertible for other things that everything really does feel like a number, like a cartoon, like nugget, like asphalt, feel like shit, because the world fungible with it.


See too: Nina Beier at David Roberts Art Foundation,  Nina Beier at Kunstverein Hamburg, Nina Beier at Croy Nielsen

B. Wurtz at Metro Pictures

(link)

That despite cheapness, a care that is fastidious. Like a mother combing her child's hair, a job well done. It's picture day. Not fussy. Mildly doting. but mostly, sympathetic. Wurtz seems sympathetic to his materials, even sanding to round the corners of cheap wood, like polishing a pair of meager shoes. Not all artists are sympathetic to their objects. Most use material for scorching stabbing churned molding into the god-whims of their creator hands. What little fascists most artists are. It's picture day.


See too: Paul P., B. Wurtz at Cooper Cole, B. Wurtz at Lulu, “The Crack-Up” at Room East (B. Wurtz)

Hanne Lippard, Nora Turato at Metro Pictures

(link)

Lots of artists like to put phrases on signs, do it in a similar way. A particularly satisfying gesture: language, propelled with advertorial oomph, instead deadpans with its empty cymbal crash; be understanding the words but, devoid of context feel a little haunted, disembodied, ghosts of something far. Like Lippard's audio work, we glean through archaeology of their words the character. But Turato's texts and her own performances gleefully amplify a schizophenic fracture through estrangement and affectual register shifts. Disallowing complete connection, we instead begin to feel its loss through ears numbed by corruption. The garbage of the "infosphere." In an era when everyone spends their time off creating protest signs against politicians having clipped the sound bite down to two word phrases, the fun of creating your own haunting version, headlines like haikus, is fun. Cut the ends off a sentence and be left with a poem.


words on walls: Matt Keegan, Kay Rosen at Grazer Kunstverein, Gene Beery at Shoot the Lobster, Karl Holmqvist at Sant’Andrea de Scaphis, Sue Tompkins at Lisa Cooley, Jenny Holzer at Blenheim Palace, Barbara Kruger at Sprüth Magers Peter Fend at Essex Street, CAWD on Fetish

Jim Shaw at Metro Pictures

(link)

A friend once commented that, against Freud, there was nothing worse than having someone telling you their dreams, they could say literally anything, conjure or erase any detail, that the dream only mattered if you invested enough to interpret its event in the psyche of the dreamer, see the shark was actually the subconscious manifestation of the girlfriend. And trust the honesty of their manifestation enough to let slip some detail telling. A lot of work for occasional reward. The analysand preconceives the analysis coming, meaty burger lady mystery.


See too:  Jim Shaw at Metro Pictures

Robert Longo at Metro Pictures

(link)

Everything of Longo's looks like a cock, looks like a giant rippling penis. Wet and brooding penises. Militarized dicks. Throbbing and stupid. Images of "power" drawn as massive black portenders. As "examinations of violence" they extrapolate out, reuse, clad their look in the same black garb of SWAT, to make you feel small. Mutate their humanitarian subjects into a threat with the Darth Vader aesthetic they purport to critique, Longo's assault drawings, men and their big scary black guns.

“Sputterances” at Metro Pictures

(link)

No myth that curators are beholden to a "conversation," one that manifests by reinscribing and working around the general pool of artists we see commonly. Curators show certain art/artists to prove (and thus renew) their access to the structure that legitimates them. Reciprocal legitimization by no single curatorial/artist node but instead the conversational majority, arranging consensus by those delegates already given authority, e.g. curators, institutions. Access starts to look like legitimacy. This insight why CAD took off. Read Sanchez's "Contemporary Art, Daily."  This why we see artists/exhibitions in triplicate, the same ones proffered around the globe. You proffer 3 givens, and one unknown.  And so maybe artists make more enjoyable curators because they're freed from the profession's need to prove the contemporaneousness of the vision, you get something a bit more idiosyncratic, interesting.

Camille Henrot at Metro Pictures

(link)

Leckey engaged in entertainment insofar as understanding the viewer as a receiver, not cryptographer presented an object-code for contemplation. An "object" instead active toward the viewer as receiver, and a for once happiness to pacify audience that so much art wished to shake "awake."
Nolan's Inception is the comic concrete (slapstick) version, a parable of the Hollywood model lulling viewer's into the theater's dream state, inserted with the various registries and synaptic firings of plot, awaking from a Hollywood feeling having somehow participated in it.  Entertainment the long thin wire pushed deep past cortex and pulsing.
Anyway this entertainment has something to do with Henrot, the surface means, and the telephones delivering comic haywire monologues into a viewers ear, the carousel, the overabundance of registry achieving big fatigue, delivery vehicles for the assuage of how fun it all is, so much fun.


See too: Venice vs Triennial, Mark Leckey at Haus Der Kunst + Kunsthalle Basel, “Puddle, pothole, portal” at Sculpture Center,

Olaf Breuning at Metro Pictures

(link)

Clownic terror is their emotional indifference to our own, irony as slapstick, forcing a replacement of our feelings with manic versions, to feel better. Happy or sad, the clown face draws its emotion as large as possible, overpowering the nuanced plane of facial expression, overshadowing our own, powerless and impotent. Breuning's horror vacuii of expressionist ebullience, in video or images, leaves no space, everything feeling filled with manic awful glee. Even an expression of solidarity, "It is hard sometimes," writ in colorful sponge overly cheerful, is covered in the image of a woman hefting the weight of the world with a playfully stupid incompetence, a weight we can't carry, and mocking us for it. Breuning a villain swaddled in fun that is no fun at all.

Trevor Paglen at Metro Pictures

(link)

The art trope of highlighting the discrepancy between surface depiction and the latent content; Paglen’s I-spy photographics, making spectacular-banal photographs that await the moment of their reveal: finding the tiny dot denoting drones that mar the expensive print of skies, or the anonymous building turning out to be a possible “black site” discovered by the artist, or this exhibition's nonsensical phrases revealed as government code names. Unlike Christopher Williams, for whom the endless textual production surrounding the photographs acts like a spigot draining the privilege of the visible, Paglen’s photographs make visible something meaningful that is ultimately meaningless, there’s nothing to be done with this information, these absurd names, but watch them pass like a poisoned and interminable river, a discrepancy affective but belittling. Having more to do with art than politics. You’ve found Waldo, but you’ll never get to shake his hand.

Jim Shaw at Metro Pictures



Like everyone’s surrealist hopes and dreams, there’s an implicit premise of speaking truth, reveal the latent subject, the myths of a culture embedded in the juxtaposition of subjects, making us each an interpreter of dreams. The political and religious narratives assembled are ostensibly satire, putting them at one end of the political spectrum but establishing any sense or evidence in the Fantasia-mire ends up reasoning the Farrah Fawcett wig atop a tank. Pop was always about Freudian dreams, now it’s literalized. Get out your talking cures.