Morag Keil, Bedros Yeretzian at Commercial Street, Los Angeles

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Word clouds exploded as the vacuous form of auto-generated poetry that - as art - found meaning through artifactifying culture. Pulling objects from the wreckage to totemize - ascribe aura as font-size to. And generate an ostensible meta-layer of meaning. Doesn't this sound like art? Like art, it was stupid. Turning text into an inkblot to search for signs of what ended up being only your mother's indifference. Yourself in a warbled mirror. 

See too: Click Merlin Carpenter at Overduin & Co., Lutz Bacher at 3320 18th St

Morag Keil at Project Native Informant

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The normally groan inducing abuse of green screen is perfect here not for its potentializing the anyspacewhateverism of our onsetting digital tyranny but for finalizing the nail in the coffin of its utter banality mirroring the cheap surrounds of the congenitally bland office. You really could be anywhere inside there. Rooms so boring they are physically upsetting. People spend their lives in rooms like these. Landlords piecemeal warehouses into art studios that look like this, the furthest thing from freedom, and fire hazards. There's no way this show is up to building codes. Artists die in spaces like these, surely creating a lot of last moments' regret among the creative class. The surveillance only emphasizing the lost track of your body like phantom limbs. Keil's knack for pinpointing and amplifying the dreck comprising our doldrums would seem cruel if masochism hadn't become so fun as means of at least owning it: the if-I-am-going-to-feel-depression-I-may-as-well-inflict-it-upon-myself feeling of control. So if you're looking for a hit of coal black drudgery Keil is it. Almost baroquely morose.
Here's hoping some of those hollow core doors get sold as paintings, I would like one, mail one to me.


See too: Julia Scher at DREI, Morag Keil at Jenny’s, Morag Keil at Real Fine Arts, CAWD on Desensitization, Merlin Carpenter at Overduin & Co., Georgie Nettell at Lars Friedrich, Gili Tal at Jenny’s, Georgie Nettell at Reena Spaulings

Morag Keil at Jenny’s

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Possibly the culmination of Jenny's program towards rendering the cloying dread of banality's final boss. It's not so much empty as toneless. Thus the hollow soundtrack. While at one end there's the renderstenialists whose tonal overabundance manicizes, say RoseHenrotProuvostAtkinsWolfson, at the other, this affectlessness of "clean" objects scrubbed to that everyday clean feeling of pleasurelessness. Think just how much tone you're subjected to in so much current art strapped into a chair, how well this show conjures without it. Banality isn't a word strong enough. Those particular door handles, the defining feature of cheap mass apartments. Nettel once left the dirty dishes out and has Keil washed them, put them away behind that brown door,  in each others apartments for their collaboration, "The Fascism of Everyday Life" forcing day to day drudgery's recognition, the things we care to forget, every one of us socialists but as roommates we don't share hot-sauce.

""Entering or exiting through a doorway serves as an 'event boundary' in the mind, which separates episodes of activity and files them away," said the lead researcher. "Recalling the decision or activity that was made in a different room is difficult because it has been compartmentalized.""

Our brains are haywired continuously, forced to deal with frizzing nonsense, cheap dishes and smart tvs, that old joke: "My work is inspired by [...] paintings so boring the human mind is incapable of remembering them, creating the impression that you are seeing them for the first time, everytime." Daily amnesia of us trying to remember our lives.



See too: Morag Keil at Real Fine Arts, Carissa Rodriguez at Wattis, Karl Holmqvist at Sant’Andrea de Scaphis

AR: Morag Keil at Real Fine Arts

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Originally Posted: April 21st, 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.

Morag Keil at Real Fine Arts

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Passive aggression, that everyone knows, that operates on the affectual level, sublingual, by screwing tone and denying the target a substantive system on which to respond, functions well too for art in discombobulating the viewer whose reaction to such discrepant attitudes can only remain uncertain, the perfect art fount, the new psychedelic experience of the RFA brand updating conceptual art for a new generation of well-versed conceptually-high-tolerant semionauts, the new drug the complete meltdown of conceptual sense.



See too: Carissa Rodriguez at Wattis, CAWD on Desensitization, Michele Abeles at 47 Canal,

Morag Keil at Real Fine Arts



The real fine crowd seems all really want to impress on us their disgust with networks/working and the conglomerate of social sludge. Its neurotic. Beg the rabbit for forgiveness as you slaughter it; or so the press release would have it. Its like you apologize for showing at Real Fine Arts. Apologize for a room full of artworks, self ironize. Like the schrimps that magically ward off marketability, or meaning to marketability. oops. I mean if Kassay taught us anything its collectors like shiny-metal covered canvases. Silver your werewolf desires.
I mean I like the photographs, the banal disjunction, the alienation of experience in late capital. The schizo-world of scream masks and idols of imaged women, etc. I could write the press. The whole recycling thing of Kelley Walker in the united colors, and the video reminiscent of the context comedy of Zobernig’s filming of the comings and goings of Texte Zur Kunst. I can’t really read the message in the pee, but I think its asking the same question as the wall.