Group Show at New Museum

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"Grief and Grievance was partly inspired by Black Lives Matter’s astonishing deployment of grief as a politics, but there is no equivalent sense of urgency here. Again, circumstances are partly at fault: in Enwezor’s initial concept, performance work evoking physical presence was supposed to give the show a pulse, but COVID changed the music. Kevin Beasley’s sculpture Strange Fruit (Pair 1) (2015) is usually intended to mediate performance, but a curatorial note instead offers its silence as a gesture of plague-era respect. Despite its evident care and seriousness of purpose, Grief and Grievance’s focus on melancholy as preeminent black expression invites the question: Why hold a funeral for the living?"  - Hannah Black, 4 Columns

New Museum Triennial: “Songs for Sabotage”

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A triennial scorned, its overt political posture embedded in monuments as gestures for wall and catalogue texts throwing around almost unanimously reviled underdefined politics as big ideas:

"New Museum Triennial Looks Great, but Plays It Safe" -nyt
“Songs for Sabotage,” the New Museum’s 2018 Triennial, tethers fresh artists to stale palaver." -newyorker

"Fielding the hazards of art as activism." - 4columns
"How the New Museum’s Triennial Sabotages Its Own Revolutionary Mission" -artnet

"Ignoring its faux-dissident title" -frieze
"And the curators’ understanding of a systemic problem like this doesn’t diminish it" -art-agenda

Which McGarry goes on: "The most conspicuous effect of introducing them to the market via the museum is the institution’s own accrual of various capital—intellectual, geopolitical, and, with regard to claiming names untouched by rival fundraisers, territorial. The fastidiously heterogeneous selection of artists constitutes a risk-adverse portfolio that secures growth for a museum whose projection of its identity, in an especially crowded local context, has been remarkably ambitious." 

and ends with an honesty: "Part of me wonders if I should continue reviewing international group exhibitions when I am so predisposed to be bored and disappointed by them. I consider it my duty to speak out against the convention when given the platform. I don’t know if it’s fair to cast artists as victims and curators as complicit, if often well-intentioned, facilitators who are ultimately either too weak or too disempowered to change how biennials and triennials are done. With a handful of discoveries, this show does its job, but “Songs for Sabotage” doesn’t sabotage the mold of the triennial itself, so in most respects it feels like lip service."

But perhaps most telling, in Artforum Chloe Wyma's preview had already presumed the critiques at before the show even opened in a single quip, "But will the master’s tools, as Audre Lorde famously cautioned, ever dismantle the master’s house?"

So what does it mean then that we can pre-critique our exhibitions, we already know the aperture for knife's insertion? Whose game is already played out, reviewer and curator.

Jim Shaw at New Museum

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200 million images are uploaded to Facebook everyday, another 60 million to Instagram daily. Shaw's investment in good old artisanal, traditionally constructed images could seem asinine in comparison to the endlessly juxtapozing and surreal mass Instagram feed journaling the dreams of the slumbering. It has been argued before that both premade tubes of paint and photography's invention each radically shifted the ground of painting, and so the disposability of images now must too be having radical repercussions, and so it's hard to tell if Shaw is a relic or a seer, but it looks pretty good right now.


see too: Jana Euler at Kunsthalle Zürich

Sarah Charlesworth at New Museum

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Stripped of their container, context, the images mutate amoeba-like. They abstract, branching to grasp reference, a fluid in search of conceptual container, they become Rorschach blots, meaningless shapes drawing meaning from the viewer who wishes to name them, and from the society who would place them there, these images of people leaping to their death.

Albert Oehlen at New Museum

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Reviews of Oehlen's throw a lot of adjectives; as if adjectives themselves could make good on the pact of a reviewer's positivity. While Oehlen's paintings are adjective heavy, full of attributes and modifiers, this seems to miss the point that the adjectives of Oehlen's painting generally are interesting only in their distance from their general use in painting.  Tangled, virtuosic, derelict, elegant, ironic, jazzed, these schmaltzyest of painting's descriptors match Oehlen only in an askew perverted means, a knight's move, the longest way to it. When called "the most resourceful painter alive" the interest is in the way resourceful becomes an ironic term of painting, Oehlen's "resourcefulness" is less a clever solution than a brutal overcoming, Oehlen isn't much resourceful at all.
Oehlen proved you could have critical-punk and painting too, without the meta-games of Kippenbergeresque politic, that you could fiercely champion painting without quotes around it and not be shown the door. Schjeldahl is right to point out that this may leave us in the realm of painting as formal jazz, a cloistered relevance, and the second generation of Oehlenist abstraction currently flooding markets -which seem content with careers extrapolated from single ticks of their father's - might bolster the point, but there is something humanist about hanging one's face out the window and really letting it hit you.

And so see too: Albert Oehlen at Skarstedt

Venice vs Triennial

Venice, Triennial

Cold adult sobriety vs hothouse youth. The difference is generational. 10 years ago avenues to visibility were tightly controlled by finance beholden gatekeepers pedigreed and willing to bestow public accreditation to neophytes in line, behaving to a system; Today youth of the post-net are really post image-democratization, a time in which all images come preloaded with mass audientential capabilities, and accredited publications (with expensive paper real-estate) are matched by cheap raw visibility's fungible version, exchangeable with any world (fashion, commerce, literature) equally, the gold standard of different disciplines. Views now actually equatable with dollars, concretizing vague importance of public attendance numbers with dollar signs. This isn't that the New Museum is going full populist, but rather that it must manage now a cultural idea of art that they present back to it. The Bienniale, a pretty much artworld only affair, must conform to an artworld's image of itself, reserved and tasteful, and look how staid most of it in comparison is. And the preponderance of the Triennal exhibition's viral capable art that flowed through the net alongside it is as symptomatic of cultural changes in art as it is the new liquid spirit. Old guards' approval no longer perquisite to fame, Artists can produce visibility organically, through, it turns out, interesting images and so if the Teletubbies look through you, disinterested in your presence, chalk it up to art that isn't predicated on Fried's theater attending to the viewer's presence, but the populist behind it, and so this new art, frighteningly enough, is actually kind of entertaining.


See too Chris Ofili at New Museum, Seven Reeds at Overduin and Co.

Chris Ofili at New Museum

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Ofili always was a decorator, and the neo-nouveau finds itself welcome as decor to a museum in need of something to look at, and all images David Zwirner's courtesy.  The museum stirs publicity from a press able to create mass visibility convertible into admissions sedimenting as prestige and hopefully donors, from work rented out (“lent”) by the commercial powerhouse hoping to leap economic strata with the museum’s imbued validation read by collectors as investment’s mark of approval, a stamp of permanence that is the museologic myth the museum implicitly condones.
Look at that sculpture.
Like CAD, the museum is a visibility box containing a machine working to control the attention of an audience cultivated as willing to accept its voice, which attention then able to be exchanged for other forms of capital. The expanded field of cultural production.  The writer exchanges his proof of extended attention by the culturally accredited, the writer hopes not to fuck it up, parasiting off the attention turned, to draw attention to oneself. This text wishes to extract your attention in in hopes of future exchange. The museum becomes a gatekeeper of history, of history’s image, of visibility sedimented, a lineage which reinscribes its power as objective, and exhibits a beautiful show.