Antoine Catala, Erika Landström at Christine Mayer

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We require that art "do something". So this one "breathes." A parody of life, animatronic meaning. All composition is motion artificial. A ventilator for Kandinsky. 

Sarah Bogner at Christine Mayer

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A real Matisse of smoking horses, is what they all said.

Hannah Quinlan & Rosie Hastings at Kunsthalle Osnabrück; Trisha Baga at beacon

(KO, beacon)

"The bedroom as terrarium, the girl as experiment"

"...The Model becomes predominate as the world's point of scale becomes unmoored, and reality floats between the virtual and material conditions abstracted by floating points of enumeration etc. etc. "Housing" replaces "houses," which replaces "house" distinct from "home," which is bombed out. The model encapsulates this world governed by virtual features, the planning, projected statistical everything, abstraction of everyday..."

Full sketch for the The Model 

Shannon Finnegan Slower Deborah Schamoni, Munich

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Carolyn Lazard has a similar show up with redesigned benches and transcribed artwork. And Park McArthur similarly alt-audio-texted the gallery spaces at MoMA. Which is less a critique than obvious parallels, a drippy paint for any expressionist. And less institutional critique than a softening the edges of institution, important work one could argue the institutions should be doing on their own. (A long artistic history, softening corporate facades.) Or Trisha Donnelly appropriating Robert Rosenblum's Picasso audio tour for her MoMA Artist's Choice exhibition. But oddly the audio here is kept from us, the objects/chairs disperse themselves protected by image's glass, but the audio which would digitally free itself instead seals itself in forms. Because words are cheap, and so the digital rights are managed, kept inside frames, a joke about non-accessibility possibly. 

Park McArthur at MoMA

Kirsi Mikkola at Galerie Nagel Draxler

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30 years before the future was female merchandised and Beyonce haloed herself a 30 foot font Feminist it seems Mikkola had already tensioned this feminism and commodification, the bronze Fearless Girls, and the activism of posture. There was apparently success. Then she left it. Which seems foreboding. Because as the PR states, "It's time for a new toy!"

See too: Andrea Bowers at Capitain Petzel

Maryam Hoseini at Deborah Schamoni

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Ambiguity in flesh, always fun. We like destroying people. Bend their limbs like pipes for decoration, from Bacon to Matisse, Bellmer, Picasso, axe blades to the human doll. Gore from the 80s. To form a pleasure.

Emanuel Seitz at Christine Mayer & Tess Jaray at Secession

(Christian Mayer, Secession)

Painting becomes an organization system for color. For "painting". Which then work backwards to find the logic, organization system. Which is something like meaning. 

Lucy McKenzie at Museum Brandhorst

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Displays and information, the stuff always embedded in other systems - legal grey areas because the signifier is always a bit ...removed. Inhabited. It's all fake. The painting above left is her own copy of the 2005 original. Which is not a forgery, but it is something. Slippery. In the style of. From which era are we looking. Is this mis-en-scene or are we actors? Who's thought bubble is this. 

See too: Lucy McKenzie at Daniel Buchholz

Michael Armitage at Haus der Kunst

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(Forgive some of the indelicacies on timing; Jana Euler was already Artforumly connected to social realism already in 2012, etc. The oh so spooky Zombies already labeled by 2014, etc. etc. Party's party began years ago. etc. etc. etc.)

Every hypothesis needs an experiment. And so if you see impressionist painting in the next year, know that it was hypothesized here first.

Paul Gondry, KAYA at Deborah Schamoni Paul Gondry

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By Gwynne Hogan | October 21, 2016 1:24pm
EAST WILLIAMSBURG — The artist son of "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" director Michel Gondry was questioned by NYPD hate-crime investigators after he hung a dummy from a tree on the same block where the film was shot — in what some neighbors considered a disturbing reference to lynching.

The dummy slung up by Paul Gondry, 25, Wednesday outside his Orient Avenue home was an effort to  "create some weirdness" in the days before Halloween, he said.

"I don't want it to be seen as a hate thing, it's not," said Gondry, 25, who was featured in three of his father's films, according to his IMDB page.

The artist's creation was the second effigy found hanging from a neighborhood tree in several weeks, though Gondry is not claiming credit for the first.

Following a DNAinfo report about the second dummy, police notified hate-crime investigators, who were looking into it, according to Deputy Inspector William Gardner of Williamsburg's 90th Precinct.

Paul Gondry, son of director Michel Gondry, didn't intend the hanging puppet to be a racist, he said. Gondry said he hoped his dummy — which had its head covered in cloth and its arms tied behind its back — would add to the suspenseful build-up to Halloween.

Because the dummy had a cloth around its head, police thought it might have been targeting Muslims in the neighborhood, Gondry said they told him during questioning. But the son of the Oscar winner had chosen the cloth for another reason.

"It was supposed to be more like a medieval peasant. The world we live in is reminiscent of medieval times," he said, pointing to the city's record homeless population. He hoped to "bring that back into an urban context," he said.

Gondry, who said he was "really into puppets," had some second thoughts about hanging the dummy, though he wasn't totally sorry he'd done it.

"I think I would do hanging clowns if I were to do it [again]," he said, adding, "It's always cool to create a bit of polemic."

Gondry added that there were "no Halloween decorations in the neighborhood. It's weird."

"I wouldn't go to Bed-Stuy and do it," said Gondry, who's lived on the block for seven years. "It's my own house."

Hate-crime investigators will determine whether or not to press charges against Gondry, police said.

The first dummy was found strung up around the corner, on Kingsland Avenue in front of the Cooper Park Houses, at the end of September, unnerving residents who called it a "spiteful symbol of lynching."

“Body Check” at Lenbachhaus

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As a visual pairing, a sort of symmetry, sense. And also a physical feat collecting "about one hundred selected works on loan from international collections that are rarely on public display." But we get about 16 images here. And as a conceptual pairing, a goose chase, "dramatizing the female and male bodies" pretty much end the similarities. A coincidence if not a mistake.

Lisa Holzer at Kunstverein München

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"The resulting images at once mock and celebrate legacies of abstract painting while also teasing cliches and the expectations related to the photographic medium itself. With humor and critical wit, her practice addresses conditions of labor, exposure, visibility, and power confronting artists, artworks, and the art system itself."

We're going to just cross out the second sentence.
You know what the market has shown every collector wants walled? Abstraction, and so art has become a giant machine mining sources of abstraction. And the endless ironizing of abstract legacies with its remaking in different modes (fire extinguisher, silvering, abjection, food photography) ostensibly acts as critique. Pollock was just spurting cum, symbolically accredited decoration, abjection whatever; the critique fails to, despite 40 years of it, functionally do anything. It's like battling a ghost with a longsword. Abstraction is the inkblot that acts like silver, that acts like mirrors, to place whatever you want to see in it. And we keep digging mirrors.

There's a cake and eat it too joke somewhere in here.

Eric Sidner at Deborah Schamoni

(link)

The stupid logic running through, circles and lumps, allowing for the transposition between themes, a snow man’s belly button transmutes to. Gaze into navel and


Autumn Ramsey at Park View, Autumn Ramsey at Night Club, Alice Tippit at Night Club

“Various Others” at Deborah Schamoni

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Another Condo. You get to see other artists in a different space, which stands in for excitement. As a promotion machine it makes some sense, arranging a mass effort which garners some publicity, new sights, fresh air, collectors. If the gallery is a stop on the procession to history, legitimacy is an agreement between accredited actors. The fair may have accredited but, competitive, undermined the agreeable contract of networked legitimacy. We could just send artists anywhere and watermark their images with our, this different, architecture, our signature.

Brud at Kunstverein Munich

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There seems to be two "Bruds." One a collaboration between two artists and the other the virtual influencer startup creating online fictions recently backed by Sequoia Capital for supposedly 6 million. The two Bruds would only be an interesting coincidence, if it is, if the two didn't seem to use the same heavily hyperbolized tech marketing jargon and quasi-fiction corporate facades and both started in 2014. Both are self-aware content generators. The 6 million $ Brud best summarized by this Buzzfeed article describing their solution to the fractured mirror of instagram by creating something faker, literal simulated drama among artificial images, think the Kardashians as computer renderings, which works with those disenfranchised and well plugged in because irony allows ownership of one's pain: the project is stupid and obvious but that doesn't matter relating to the self-fiction instagram forces creation of. A computer rendered teen states: “In trying to realize my truth, I’m trying to learn my fiction,” before going further:

"I’m not sure I can comfortably identify as a woman of color. “Brown” was a choice made by a corporation.“Woman” was an option on a computer screen. my identity was a choice Brud made in order to sell me to brands, to appear “woke.”I will never forgive them. I don’t know if I will ever forgive myself."

AI self-awareness of course mirroring teens' own coming into the world and "self-consciousness," those adolescents currently dealing with their own living fictions and digital facades and with it the fantasy release of "coming clean" breaking out of the fiction. Which leads back to art and it's interest in fictionalized and false corporations, Broodthaers' Eagle Department or more recently Bratsch's DAS INSTITÜT, a sham "corporation" whose fiction was useful until the paintings started selling and then irony needn't excuse them, so everyone stopped mentioning the sham. "The goal of Brud is to replace Brud with better Brud" rings like Simon Denny's "[critique] is not my goal. My goal is to make interesting content." Or who could forget Bernadette Corporation, and Reena Spaulings, the use of the ironic corporitude to market itself until finally it was just art in a museum. "Brud is pre-occupied by the psychology of tricks, gimmicks, apparitions, illusions, scams, & cons." At a certain point we just started calling it, all of it, content. Every exhibition timed with several dates for you to come back for the performance, reading, talk, live painting, dance, DJ or all at once. You were a content producer, a content manager. An abstraction leveling all types of literature/culture into one encompassed concept that simply meant some thing, anything, exchangeable for views/clicks/shares which we started calling engagement for a platform. Eventually just spamming yourself into history, the audience is invited to binge.


See too: Simon Denny at MoMA PS1, DAS INSTITÜT at Serpentine Gallery, Kerstin Brätsch at Gio Marconi, Bernadette Corporation at Stedelijk Museum

Jutta Koether at Museum Brandhorst

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because what you're looking at isn't what you're looking at: what you're looking at is cultural baggage, garbage piling your sentience, floating to the surface like diapers, clots, the noise of signal and symbols. You can't see purely, you are clogged with reference. "Koether’s own “battle” with art history."



see too: Jutta Koether at Bortolami

Seth Price at Museum Brandhorst

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There's just so much institution to this documentation. You feel the presence of the museum, the space, the frame architecture. The thing pulse, veritably breathes with capital, symbolic blood. The cavity, the bone white rib cage and the diaphragm HVAC, ventilated, for our aspiration, our hopes on the brown track running through us. Our institutions that resemble the bodies they are - space for lungs, lights for nutrients, passages for "digestion."  Passing us meals of contemplation, eventually defecates them for our plates and we eat their excitement.



See too: Brian Calvin at Le Consortium, Jef Geys at Essex Street, Gaylen Gerber at Emanuel Layr

Thomas Ruff at Rüdiger Schöttle

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The absolute banality of Ruff against the subjects depicted. Some subjects: Skies littered with stars, explicit sex, people's unique and individual faces: all are given a treatment that is attempted to be at total remove, Ruff's almost struggle to render it boring. All the grandiose pomposity used to describe the "historically and photographically fascinating source material" is given what is akin to pressing ⌘I in photoshop. The measure of the means doesn't necessarily define the ends, but the gesture's simplicity, along with all its attendant "negativity," doesn't so much revitalize the source material, as the PR would imply, as it shows the source - as any other material - as manipulable by the slightest command to alter it indefinitely, completely alter it, at a whim be reduced to complete and utter inversion, and all the stupid simplicity of that.


see too:  Thomas Ruff at S.M.A.K.

David Lieske at Lovaas Projects

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Thomas Meinecke: Yes, and did you come to any results? 

David Lieske: Not really. In the end, this magazine embodies complete ambivalence altogether and, as it is, that’s enough for me. Even more so that’s what I find particularly interesting and admirable about it as the same is true for the art that I want to exhibit and that I am promoting – its greatest aim should be to generate the highest level of ambivalence. In the same sense I am unsure whether what I am proposing here as my exhibition could still be called art.

An ambivalence at the heart of much of art today displayed as presentations of objects left to the viewer with a "deal with it" coolness, figurative sunglasses donned. An ambivalence stemming from the pictures generation, authorship and authority questioned, and now artists - as stated previous - picking through semio-rubble and arranging it in quasi-mystical totems of the anthropologically alienated. Artists are like primitives to droppings of powerful Mass Culture, even its "special interest magazines," sifting through it with an almost reverence to its ability to "mean" in a way art likely never will, artists become in awe of Culture, develop intense interests in its niches, its ability to generate slight amounts of slack in its culturally tight bunghole through the ambiguity of its insertion, the insertion that art attempts to duplicate with its ambivalence, as if ambivalence itself opens new space, like one where maybe art doesn't have to mean.


See too: David Lieske at MUMOK

Abbas Akhavan at Museum Villa Stuck

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"...the exhibition, [..] incorporates all the imperfections and drill holes from the previous show. The museum’s temperature control system has been turned off. Previously walled-up doors have been cut open, and windows are left ajar, allowing light and fresh air to permeate into the space, thereby raising questions about established boundaries of the museum..."

"The museum" comes to mean the learned subjective posture adopted in assessing the objects of art. "the museum" is the headspace selected in "considering" the object. "the museum" is the trope of New Yorker cartoons: aesthetes before artworks making proclamations, philosophic noodling. "the museum" is a virtual reality headset for the judgement of objects, the invisible HUD of pedagogical memes, historical influenza, and symbolic judgement. "the museum" is a learned set of social conditionings. Akhavan, by dispersing the object instead into a room full of gestures, turns the display to the theater itself, the museum as headspace, the fourth wall everywhere, plays itself, etc.

see too: Sophie Nys at Crac Alsace, Brian Calvin at Le Consortium, Mandla Reuter at Kunstverein Braunschweig