“International Laundry 2″ at Parisa Kind

(link)

In art, all violence becomes symbolic violence, tearing paintings, cursing, showing tits and blood, is an acting out within the proscribed realm of one's own room owned by the hands feeding you, in the bed you've made. Art by its form neuters rebellion to the rebellious act. Aggression in neat little packages, and the louder artists yell the greater the distance between the two parties. The 4th wall's glass thickens and frosts, and no amount of angst, even a level requiring black eyeliner, has ever bridged the divide. This paradox of affect is one of art's central tenets. You just can't yell loud enough. (It works better in text, as Clerk Fluid attests, because we let you into our home.) But so this is why Christoph von Weyhe's paintings look so good in this room of everyone shouting.

Mike Bouchet and Paul McCarthy at Marlborough Monaco



The Battleship Bilbao Billboard project was refreshing, a simple attack at the level of image/brand shaking the behemoth that the endless arrows of well-scripted criticism, aiming at Guggenheim’s museum as franchise model, couldn’t. Brand image was where the reality lay. But in the exhibitions since it seems its a collaboration 25 years in the making to go back to making work in the coincidence-valorized-as-auratic-material art making narratives of Jason Rhoades, McCarthy’s student and Bouchet contemporary. Rhoades who in his own time couldn’t get McCarthy himself off his back as a reference. Influence comes full circle in just not enough time to forget totally, and the funny-fresh irreverence of Rhodes symbolist networks lives in McCarthy/Bouchet’s titillation of their own brand strategies; Ivory Snow becoming Bilboa sunscreen and Battleship films - even with its own a-hole prepackaged. Though for now not nearly wildly inventive or all encompassing as Rhoades magisterial ability to tie it all together as if it somehow made sense, and not just a bunch of art scrap in a room.