Seth Price at Petzel

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The real technology here is that Price found a way to avoid pinning his artist-butterfly subjectivity by letting some robots in. An android Price built to avoid fully naming, exposing, the artistic myth, Seth Price, fully. We trust gesture and painting as the concretized mind of the artist - and this techno means allowed Price what he's always been after, the squid's escape. Q, what we're left holding. A, disappearance duh. His long term subject and maybe Price's longterm point is proving that this is actually an axiom of art, left clutching ink resembling but not quite actualizing a human.

Sean Lander at Petzel

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Look how the painter hath degraded himself. The banal subject, of the artist groveling to dirty populism. Warhol painted soup, but he would never have painted these. This is below commodities, this is midwestern, this is flyover content. The joke surely. 

"If Landers plays obsessively on the constant alternation between folie de grandeur and writhing in the gutter, he’s always playing to his audience, pandering a bit, begging for love even as he demonstrates—insists, well-nigh demands—that he’s a no-good loser fuck-head." - Rimanelli, Artforum

But it's a play. The dogs aren't even well painted. From afar sure, but up close the whole thing loses luster. If you're going to make the joke, commit to the joke. Eat the whole thing.

Rodney McMillian at Petzel

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Connecting the dots between rooms we would assume those too are fake modernist "decoys" - not precisely art -which, in the longstanding modernist battle to end art, making a fake version seems as apt as anything. But fake art presents the real-fake-doors conundrum - that the fake requires an authentic. Which there wasn't. It's all in service to the trophy - the token as meaning. What is a trophy? And not even sure why we wanted to kill art - but this seems less an attack on art more like attempt at self-deletion, the trophy hunter capturing himself?

Heimo Zobernig at Petzel

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There is no bedrock to terrible things. Imagine something bad, now imagine it a little worse. Make it children. Redder. Make it expressionist. Continue until you have ugliness you cannot commit to paper. There are further depths than this abyssal trench. A drill is required to get deeper technicolor horror. The baseness of Heimo Zobernig's painting. Things you can't explain to father. 

Corinne Wasmuht at Petzel

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“in the era of the LED-backlit computer and smartphone [that] often engage with the kind of spaces and effects that the electronic screen generates.” Alas, as the same catalog admits, “what can be achieved today through painting looks very circumscribed compared to what is possible in other more immersive and interactive media.”

Like Julie Mehretu, Guillermo Kuitca, every tornado-hits-architecture painter, the question of "image processing" has been replaced by ever faster forms. Visual interest is now just a technological slider. "Vibrance" "Contrast" "Interest" "New Paintings"

Rodney McMillian at Petzel

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This seems to be Petzel's first solo exhibition of a someone black?  Is that possible? 25 years. The press release seemed odd.

Jon Pylypchuk at Petzel

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What had been a more formal torture of our facial tendencies, is now a wanton mass, a poopy stuff. Pylypchuk had stretched pareidolia to absurdity; you can disfigure a face into extreme proportions and still see human. They were cleaner children then. Proportions were used with a comic's timing. The endless use little arms, doofy mouths, and hyperbolized eyes like a child aroused to Saturday morning TV. Affective little terrors. Infantile features triggering nurture responses in adults. And now I guess we deal with the nappies too, very pop-grunge.

cute: Sean Landers at Rodolphe Janssen

Dana Hoey at Petzel

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A project of perhaps post relation aesthetics, even serving up another form of Thai. "Ms. Hoey’s is a gloves-off statement arguing for women as powerful and ready to rumble against discrimination or historical stereotypes" says Schwendener succinctly. The work becomes a service announcement and overall community service with high end commodities as backdrop. An exchanging moral stakes for aesthetics that critics have in the past lamented (with various levels of harrumphing) since ostensibly if you agree with the politics you agree with the art, amplitude is what matters, adding another form of song and dance performed in front of objects to spellcast meaning in them; they are like high end souvenirs of action. I'm not totally ready to throw out the potential conflation of moral/aesthetics, but art does have a pretty poor record in said ring, particularly when telling the stories of others or universalizing its own. The recent Andrea Bowers thing for instance. Unsure whether the normalization of black eyes is necessary, though that's not my story.

Charline von Heyl at Petzel, Deichtorhallen

(Petzel, Deichtorhallen)

No longer devotionals of ab-ex maybe not only because they draw from advertising and cultural chutzpa at large, but because they are dishonest. The impressionist showed the strokes that the Academy would have buffed and, winning the historical argument, paintings ever since have performed this honesty as Truth. Which these don't suggest any cathedral of Truth. Instead just sorta flip-out, covering and masquerading a can-can, like a painting in slow state of clonic seizure, and gesticulation as a sort of cerebral-visual paradox, optical illusion, disguise. What Kelsey called Big Joy could also be a state of mania, or anxious outburst, like seeing your friend on amphetamines and wondering what about his personality you liked in the first place. Abstraction is the friend in this metaphor. Because these paintings are brutal. I keep coming back to their somehow relation to the FEED, to the anxious state of transitionary image, of scrolling. "painterly recognition that is particular, depleting, and manic." People love these and I could stop talking about them if someone would write that their praise, that what we are all enjoying, is the delirious feeling of being struck in the face with air. Your eyes are a pillow and these things like fists.


See too: Charline von Heyl at Gisela Capitain, Charline von Heyl at Capitain Petzel

Allan McCollum at Petzel



So McCollum continues his endless objects, repeating one singular idea. 31 billion hopeless object, higher than peak population, the good schoolboy bringing enough to share, no two snowflakes alike.
A strange market, even distribution amongst population and they would be valueless, without rarity in their uniqueness, but a collector’s majority stake, hoarding wealth like diamonds, irradiating gold, that old Dr.No trick, a governed population, produces power. McCollum still playing in the 1980’s 8bits when today whole new versions of crypto-wealth premised on staggering permutations of bits, 128, and the mining of time in numbers larger than the mass of a universe. This looks comparatively Kinkade quaint. A cold humanism, depressing individuality. The endgame summated in the center of far sides's black/white sea innumerate, an individual, a penguin, singing, “I gotta be me, Oh I just gotta be me.”