Eric Wesley at Midway Contemporary Art

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Wesley's ability to mock what contains him, a laughable institutional crit whose assault is the brilliant dumbening of art dialect. The Burrito is hot right now. You've got Murillo's 300k one, Flame's mockery of, Bader's continual replenishing it as category, and Wesley's endless one. The difference here is Wesley's insistence of the burrito not its signifier which art has long found a way to be protected from, but to actually work with the burrito, which morphs to Taco Bell here, to force that most base of architecture to reflect on the walls of Midway. The joke isn't Taco Bell placed in art, but actually maybe caring about it.

“Room & Board & Crate & Barrel & Mother Vertical” at Midway Contemporary Art

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Delivered with the PR's concepts as talking points, Arakawa's content delivery system continually refreshes itself through chameleon adoption of the background artists and cultures upcycled into its staging system under the spotlight of Contemporary Art, a system in which the production of artistic meaning is itself made clear as a series of gestures and movements that encode work with whatever aura is distinct to contemporary art separate from the objects subsumed. Anyone could play along at home. Arakawa may or may not have instigated the current trend for dancing in front of paintings as a means to accredit them, but he was the one to make it the focal point, and while everyone wants to go back to Gutai, Arakawa didn't need the paint as sediment of the action still mechanistically marking the authorial hand, the semio-social spirit would embed itself without touch.


See too: Karl Holmqvist and Ei Arakawa at Overduin & Co., And so Quarterly has finally come to pass.

Loretta Fahrenholz at Midway Contemporary Art

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Ditch Plains was as a success as one can have, preceded by its perfect promo-stills replicating across the art-network in a self-generating promo campaign. The stills reproduced so well, and functioned so perfectly to manifest desire for a summer blockbuster (still in theaters 2 years later) difficult to separate its expectation from arrival, but Plains fulfilled perfect the blockbuster function of libidinal fun for our eschatological drives, a post-apocalypse film-trailer, functioning itself as an ad, a future, fragmented images distending to project a unfolding and manifest a desire now for more.
 It's two years later now and it seems like still no one has had anything interesting to say about the film despite the massive press because like any blockbuster it has more to do with our cultural desires than any thing the film is "about," - which brilliantly Fahrenholz's film isn't - just black bodied apocalypse hip-hop and us who desire it.


See too: Frances Scholz at Tif Sigfrids

Alejandro Cesarco at Midway Contemporary Art

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Cesarco's interest in the book lay in this very distance. The poetic is the rupture in the signifiers ability to conclude its meaning, a fissures for the breath of the subject, the gap in meaning.  Establishing the lineage of romanticist sublimity to Conceptual art's non sequitur. Like Gonzalez-Torres, Cesarco's distance (continually expanding and collapsing) between the signifier and its lost or depleting signified amends a weight to this gap, it itself representing an emotional distance. E.g. our suspension from high-def's physicality, touch of other's neck, flowers erotic, establishing the disconnect as the pathos.  The man with a cane considering the crashing of waves mirror the person rifling a Roni Horn catalog depicting a woman over years and seconds.
Cesarco's appendix projects a book the viewer constructs, provisional and incomplete. Like Heubler's project of the same name, the gaps in the construction force viewers fill of it, extracting it from us, “The story is a surface” projected by the thousand mottled points of reference, you standing before their rupture, poetic.


See too :  Jason Dodge at Franco Noero , Sean Raspet at Jessica Silverman , Simon Starling at Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago

Florian Hecker & John McCracken at Künstlerhaus KM- , Midway Contemporary Art

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Sparkling green lawn's invention a fashionable show of power by an aristocrat class whose wealth made superfluous their land's need for production. Wasted space a show of luxury wealth in a symbolic economics trickled down to a middle class who too wanted shows of their own version of middle class luxury in a suburban plot. And so too today Manhattan bank and corporate office enormous lobbies are left unimaginably empty in the highest rate real estate markets today in a show of symbolic violence, waste as power. And then so too is the empty gallery a flaunting of space value, of sited sound's physicality and weight; value transferred from the real estate it occupies, $/sqft, the equation bare, voids given presence and meaning through the land, harnessing the original form of wealth, or at least subsistence, by farming the capitalist value for itself in effigy to its own grandeur. Minimalist modes as theater to its own presence, the precarity of Hecker's audio opulence set the gallery on pins.

See too : Paul Cowan at Clifton Benevento , Seven Reeds at Overduin and Co.

Mitchell Syrop at Midway Contemporary Art



A Baldessari-like dissonance of image and text, placing Ruscha non-sequiturs in the grey palette of conceptualism to be less self-ironizing, like the 80's ads it mimics. “Watch it. Think it.” The barrage of advertorial propaganda berates in hollow declarative, the nonsense of the advertorial address. An obfuscation highlighting that all advertising is obfuscation. That despite enticement into reading its premise all language slips, but like the lifting of too heavy weight we become stronger at the reading of advertising nonsense. Like the yearbook photos we get acclimated to the alienating distance created by once familiar subjects.