Park McArthur at Essex Street

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The world is mediated and there are no natural forms of that mediation. That forms of mediation appear to naturalize as similarities establish themselves throughout the artworld is as often the mere failure of art's imagination (and signals of its conformity) as it is one of the worst forms of normalization that make it seem as if a consensus has naturalized these forms. But you might choose differently if other options were available. The most basic boring forms of art's mediation are political choices, a system we choose and reinforce. You might choose to filter the world while for others it might not be a choice. Like when you buy another bad painting based on a JPG and CV.

Park McArthur at MoMA

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Imagine this space as an apartment. With a sort of Asherian bend to the institution as material, reflecting its navel for it to self assess. But whereas the historical genre had been content to hold up broad mirrors, McArthur's is a little more pointed if not necessarily legible. Like a monochrome, like a Robert Ryman the white constant pushed interest to the peripheral, attachments, names, edges and construct of its medium, context.

"Let’s begin with a description of the area where McArthur’s exhibition is located. The 4th floor space is rectangular and has 2 entrances connected by a spacious hallway. Depending on which way you enter, the sound of automated glass doors opening and closing arises to your left or to your right. These doors lead to other galleries. [...] As you face the windows, there is a long white wall to your right. Up high on the wall, close to the windows, grey letters in the same style as The David Geffen Galleries spell out: The Werner and Elaine Dannheisser Gallery. The Dannheissers gave most of their art collection to MoMA, and this 4th floor gallery bears their names. The Projects series, of of which this particular exhibition is a part, was re-named the Elaine Dannheisser Project Series in 2006 in honor of Ms. Dannheisser. 

The description of the almost terminally boring museum spaces (museological architecture an exercise in steroidal-elegance through omission) is either comedic for the dry descriptions of things  generally ignored or necessary for its recognition of things of what we have the ability to ignore. Leave the path and encounter "terrain." Suddenly the land, the hike, becomes difficult, experience nature differently depending on you ability to move through it. Would mountains have been still beautiful to the Donner party trapped within them?  We can mostly ignore things until they become a problem for us as a major theme of McArthur. Reading about all the elegant facilities of 53W53 feels like brambles.

Park McArthur at SFMOMA

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"Detailed in the sketch are the structure, materials, and measurements required to span the distance over the building's rock step. By depicting passageways that called for adjustment, these works highlight our reliance, in our everyday movements, on sculptural forms that do not always acknowledge all the bodies..." -pr 

We deform the world, adapt it to our bodies, sculpt it. Our world is its largest open-pit mine, dug out and backfilled with human scaled objects. Stones pulled to be placed back down in a size we find fitting. The paver is the pillar to our locomotion, the lawn to our jurisdiction. It's hard to appreciate how manicured the world is, and how inhuman when it isn't. Walk off trail and encounter "terrain." There are wide-reaching governing bodies putting vast resources into making our world navigable. To a body not adjusted to these measurements the world would be experienced as alien, probably the point here.

Park McArthur at Chisenhale

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Salves, balms, ointments, bandages, cushions, condoms, bumpers, foam, wraps, loading dock ramps, a pathos in the materials we find to mediate our touch to the world. Foam which evaporates, disintegrating merely with exposure. Heat as replacement for warmth. Darwin, living in the 1800s, could see a flower and draw a moth undiscovered until after his death. The objects here, designed for ourselves, in a similar way infer something about the bodies which they govern. A way for an object to "speak" without resorting to symbolism or surrealism, but objects which exist as a circumstantial evidence of a reality. These accumulations are tragedies of a world we must continually attenuate. A growing number of mostly women sculptors seem attuned to this.


See too: Erwin Wurm at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Klara Lidén, Alicia Frankovich at Kurator, Nancy Lupo at 1857, Darren Bader at Andrew Kreps

Group Show at Emanuel Layr

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Another group exhibition's anthropomorphic objects, the animism arranged to slough meaning off the waxy image surface. Objects Curated to displace their center, their aboutness, diverting it to dissolve and we looking around, feel a presence, the object juiced to mean. The dumb object speaks in the noise of the viewer reflected.
"Hearing the echo / Of your own blood in the shell but picturing / The ocean is what I meant by"*

*Ben Lerner

see too: Ian Kiaer at Lulu , “Seven Reeds” at Overduin & Co.

“The Contract” at Essex Street

(“The Contract” at Essex Street)
Artists: Jay Chung and Q Takeki Maeda, Maria Eichhorn, Wade Guyton, Hans Haacke, Park McArthur, R. H. Quaytman, Cameron Rowland, Carissa Rodriguez

Haacke’s overt literalism was due to its merely exposing what was read between lines, its belief in the act of transparency. Oddly everyone in this exhibition - which takes its title in reference to Haacke - makes work that is overtly opaque, obfuscating and mysteriorizing itself in the opacity of its use of cultural symbols. If Haacke’s work was about transparency in the value extracted from art objects, the rest of the work in the show is about contemporary art’s extraction of value/content from culture, complicit in its own theft of value, “borrowing” symbols that were never lent. While appropriation foregrounds its act of theft, this exhibition’s implicit form is a possibly insidious version that guises itself as a form of critical doubling. Quaytman’s “borrowing” of Andrea Fraser’s most vertiginous performance, reprinting it under her own brand image - even if old orchard friends - placing even what has become her logo over the top of the image, what is this but a strange form of theft among friends? Is this exhibition an homage to "Haacke’s" seminal contract, which attempting through transparency to ink slight power to artist’s, or a simple vampiring of cultural capital of it, placing artists, literally, around it as if osmotically credibility it would absorb.
"Haacke’s" poster, contract, and idea was free; I can’t imagine anything else in this show is.