K.R.M. Mooney at Miguel Abreu

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The problems of material convergence remain testament that the world is not entirely plasticked. That you can't just glue anything to anything. A reminder that while we can impregnate kittens with panda, injection mold ears on mice, we still have screws holding a world together. Bones stitched with bolts. Medical grade screws. The world is dumb and full of pipes rusting. There may never be a technology to solve this.  We may never invent a better substance than this. 

Sam Lewitt at Miguel Abreu

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Lewitt seems to invent covers for books, images that contain a promise, alluding to some deeper richer story. Instead we get a press release. The world and the processes that comprise these objects are interesting, in the future as the works become historical documents of these technologies possibly the art will become too. Not a book by its cover and all that.


see too: Sam Lewitt at Kunsthalle Basel

Liz Deschenes at Miguel Abreu

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A career spent negating the photographic window, pressuring the viewer out, left at surface, like looking out a window and seeing only glass. Early on Deschenes made landscape photographs of a spa town whose steam was eventually traded for silver, smoke for mirrors. And then there was also salt flats so grey and irregular they appear as mere noise, and the Moire patterns short circuiting your eyes and viewing, or the green screen years photographing what was intended to be digitally removed.  The photograms now are the result of a photograph without a lens, no focus but collecting all the light it touches into its photo-sensitive halides fixed as silver, photographs that feel like the information paradox of black holes: does the light that falls into the traps retain any of its information? Could you put back anything of the time or place? Maybe it doesn't matter, the point is to accumulate light for the gleaming of pressed diamonds.

AR: Yuji Agematsu at Miguel Abreu

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Originally Posted: April 1st, 2017

Note: This entry is part of August Review, our annual look back at this season’s key exhibitions. For more information, see the announcement here.

Pieter Schoolwerth at Miguel Abreu

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Every gallery has that painter, the stylistically performative running the permutations of their look. They’re fun, fine, you could do far worse than Schoolwerth and the PR which, turgid, aptly describes the loss of your viewer-self within, metaphor for the free floating body that everyone everywhere is at pains to describe but not touch. So we’ll say it here, it hurts to touch nothing. So when looking at the coldness and feeling the stylistic chrome they contain know it’s a real possibility.

Rey Akdogan at Miguel Abreu

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What we aren't supposed to notice literally highlighted, brightly stripped, illuminated. Art's hanging hardware, the seams of garbage. In 2012, PS1, describing Akdogan, used the term "particularlizes," a verb apt for the then trend of what could have been called "feng shuing the institution" but probably more like "making compositions of space," i.e. offsetting objects to give the boring venue actual particularities, attributes, things that could be noticed when it was assumed we were all to weary to. Its lovely colored asceticness was a moral ethic, anti-ostentatious, "emphasizes that hard work, discipline and frugality," and predicting the trend for "presentness," or apps on your phone randomly pinging you reminding you to take in your surroundings because they're generally handsome. It was a lot like that.


Oscar Tuazon at Le Consortium & Paradise Garage, Ian Kiaer at Lulu, Ian Kiaer at the Neubauer Collegium,

Nancy Lupo at Kristina Kite & Yuji Agematsu at Miguel Abreu

(Nancy Lupo at Kristina Kite, Yuji Agematsu at Miguel Abreu)

"Our growing attraction to garbage makes a psychologic sense as we become hostages to the trauma of dealing with it, the deranged images of garbage spewing, animals asphyxiated, learning of its intravenous networks sprawling across unstoppable leaky pipes, garbage moved though our landscape sprawling veins..."

Continuing our interest in making Stuff as a technical word. Stuff is the eye goo of objects. Like eye goo, stuff's service is its waste, a continual sloughing, so we can remain fresh, clean. Stuff accumulates, piles, is shed. Stuff is quasi things, is transient, transactional. A disposable fork is, like, quintessential stuff. Stuff depletes, frequently, though not always, disposable. Stuff is like object-food, a storage of energy for consumption, use. Stuff differentiates itself from things because everyone is putting energy toward it not being a thing: Companies/consumers press for stuff's cheapness, the user wants it only for what it can do, then to get rid it of it as soon as possible after, a pressure for stuff to be biodegradable. Stuff's thingness is a problem.

If there is something abject, itchy, about the Lupo's installation it is because stuff is being forced to become thing, stitched like rafts, like the The Great Garbage Patch, which too is stuff becoming thing, object, and anxious.
If Agemtasu's trash is comforting, lovable, it is because the stuff has been already digested to waste, paradoxically less anxious than stuff because it doesn't have the anxiety of stuff's thingness, just waste, and repackaged in the safety of cellophane to return it once again to product, we find comfort in products.



See too: “May the Bridges I Burn Light the Way” at STANDARD (OSLO), Nancy Lupo at Swiss Institute, Nancy Lupo at 1857, Yuji Agematsu at Real Fine Arts,  Yuji Agematsu at Artspeak

“Grounding Vision: Waclaw Szpakowski” at Miguel Abreu

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Hermetic and self-contained. The line begins on the left and ends on the right. "Szpakowski worked in complete isolation, indifferent to the art of his time." Architectural engineer, working for the Polish Ministry of mail; the flight paths of letters and our fetish for Bureaucratic Transcendence, Kafka. Etc. Continuing Abreu's Borgesian commitment to the fictional realized, self-reflexive, sovereign, autarchic. Szpakowski, precursor to the Stella-bot and self-indexing now found in likes of Cheney Thompson (weirdly not seen here), all of them a sort of reveling in the psuedo-automatic processes that less and less we believe to be revealing some underlying universe and more and more comforting for their adherence to the fiction, their self-imposed autonomy somehow proving a new world, however cold.



See too: Cheyney Thompson at Raucci/Santamaria, R.H. Quaytman at Miguel Abreu

R.H. Quaytman at Miguel Abreu

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Miguel Abreu surrounds itself in a very distinct aura, it desires so strongly to be fictional literature, like a Borges labyrinth, where fiction is made to feel real, and the library the realest of all, from which entire worlds stem. Not even that Quaytman chapters her work, all the exhibitions feel like arcana and leaden magic where complexity's turgidity make it feel all the more real for its almost bureaucratic commitment to the fiction.  This PR treats us to the tale of a painter chasing an engraving that a philosopher loved so much to own inspiring a much loved passage of text, finding upon finally seeing the work, that something was hidden behind the print, a whole other world, but the thing couldn't be spliced and x-rays couldn't reveal, and this painter, Quaytman, poured over databases and archives dedicating herself to the task of attributing this engraving behind the engraving, a man in black robes. Eventually it is found not from obsessive pouring, but instead "a little luck." And the painter produces a whole new appendix to the chapter about the discovery revealing "an answer that does not satisfy so much as add complexity and mystery to this icon of ideology." Of course its just a google search away, but the point of the Borges story is would you want it revealed?

Sam Lewitt at Miguel Abreu

(Sam Lewitt at Miguel Abreu)

Technocratic sculpture, symbols of technology and information as banners draped over the bones of the Unmonumental styles, an art that appears new, shiny, and once again copper, made to be placed on the covers of philosophical texts as illustrations of the spooky newness of our condition, emblems. Bochner measuring with the giddy glee of new technologies.  These aren’t conceptual objects but representational ones. They depict the information they contain.The world and the processes that comprise these objects are interesting, in the future as the works become historical documents of these technologies possibly the art will become too.

See too: Ben Schumacher at Musee d’art contemporain de Lyon , Darren Bader at Andrew Kreps

Jean-Luc Moulène at Miguel Abreu



The inflated masks while brilliant, aren’t all that interesting to look at. Their dull plasticity on the goo-gloss of grey enamel floors looking cheap in comparison to the copper pieces’ more-than-just-the-color-of money hanging behind them, beauty’s patina masking the cultural currency, the thick chunks forged of the symbolic-mine. And in the other what-used-to-be-gallery-entire is now the back showroom for a single artwork in what has become the brokerage of conceptual power-art, wasting space like it’s L.A.
Moulène seems best when his objects are bordering banal, like DIA’s huge clown-tent missile; unexpectedly mixing power, glitz, and ugliness in equally estranging components, a tumor of confoundment more than the skull-balloon on view here, though Moulène's commitment to the head-subject is interesting.
It would be hard to not acknowledge the kinship to the younger Michael E. Smith, both using what appear to be skull chips in pairs, both recycling refuse into mysterio-objects denying explanation’s assuaging.

See too: Michael E. Smith at Susanne Hilberry