Leigh Ledare at Office Baroque

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Leigh's is titillating surely, anxious, naughty, filled with all the nervous transgression of an arthouse "social experiment". Haha what if we took an anxious group psychology project but added a documentary panopticon. Of course the projects are interesting as they are well polished mirrors, psychology is turned into a formal exercise of cinema. And this thing is made for essay explicating all the formal structures that mirror its conflict. Watch "psychology" made into object of art, humans into a petri-dish, cross-sections of a people for microscope slides. "Arguably more anthropological than therapeutic..." The problematization method,* a sort of making-confounded. Greying the waters with the tangling of culture: people made demographics made signifiers, and forced to abut and spark. People are made to be art's object which gets conflated with analysand. Good cinema is not necessarily healthy outcome.


*Think Renzo Marten's Enjoy Poverty, Jordan Wolfson's Animation Masks, Korine's Spring Breakers.  
(Watch the film through Ledare's website here.)

Sophie von Hellermann at Office Baroque

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Such softness, it's abject. Saccharine. Like walking around with cotton candy between toes, sugary resolve to true grit. Till your teeth fall out your head. But their softness something of a ruse, a narrative lacking definition. So that the man who looks like burnt matchsticks and the angel who provides his splayed toe ecstasy in an embrace too ambiguous for the smile he beams. Everything we see in the paintings based on expectation, that we recognize an angel at all.  Low resolution.

Tyson Reeder at Office Baroque

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An interesting choice that "in his words, Tyson is 'temporarily suspending the burden of art history...'" A bold move to call time-out on history. A caesura of criticism, a tenative cease-fire from the shelling of critical damnation that these await. Reeder has always teased hippie-hipsterdom, sometimes even well, and this pause used not to let loose, but get sweatpants bloated comfy in gentle unassuming corporate abstraction, probably the most radical gesture left in art as a new category of "painting" not even Josh Smith would envy, to make art fit for Starbucks, if the rules hadn't been called off. Dear, Albert Oehlen. What say you?

See too: Zak Prekop at Shane Campbell , Joanne Greenbaum at Crone, Merlin Carpenter at Overduin and Co. , Albert Oehlen at Skarstedt , Trevor Shimzu at Rowhouse

Mathew Cerletty at Office Baroque



An adaptive logic, staying slightly ahead of predictability within a semi-consistent style so as to appear consistent (the first rule of any good game), Cerletty’s long run involves the interminable re-routings of someone evading, or being evasive. Any broad assertions about Cerletty’s work are made to come prepackaged with the clarification “except of course when it isn’t.” Identity, rather than constructed as “sameness over time” path, instead attempts fracturing, balloons to a meta-level, where the map looks like maze, endless deferrals, backtracking notes in succession but never in any repetition.

“slight deviations from normalcy”
“most exciting when you make something that’s not immediately recognizable as your own”
“like a jigsaw puzzle link.”

It could force us to look at individual paintings, but the paintings themselves, in their askew settings, also defer “sense.” With their illustrative clarity they offer hints, appear as clues, to some pre-established mystery of what their direct and illustrativeness - highly rendered petroglyphs - might be telling us, appearing as so much evidence, but the mystery never resolves itself, as it shouldn't in all “great art” until you feel as though maybe this is the game, of course, being played. The work is thus premised on having the illusion of containing, or being able to convey, some sort of necessary information but never, of course, actually revealing it, or even revealing the rules of the apparently very logical game, as mysterio objects and totally fun. When it works, such as the Algus Greenspon show, the work creates a sort of vertigo, a reeling from having truly been a culprit one step-ahead of the viewer as detective.