Alia Farid at Portikus

(link)

Monuments to our plastic shackles, lifelines, supplying water and indenturing us to its machine. Where we were once attached to rivers, springs, we are not attached to some global complex. Like the "Plastics make it possible" ad campaigns, a journey through time, cast in plastic. Deeply ironic, no? Isn't the world itself a monument to plastic, and covered in it. Not entirely sure why we now monumentalize our pain, but art seems to enjoy masochism, it is "critical."

Thea Djordjadze at Portikus

(link)

We’ve invented some kind of Stockholm syndrome to the architecture we are hostage to. An art in supplication to the building's wings that embrace it. We see a vitality, a benevolence in the architecture, like a generous god's embrace. We build to it totems, in it reliquaries. The several photos of the light in the space. Art that literally reflects its light as halos. Any architecture that will host it, a gift to it.

Moyra Davey at Portikus

(link)

It's alluring to attach the psychology of money to feces.

"For example, the miser’s hoarding of money can be thought of as symbolic of the child’s refusal to eliminate feces. The defiance with which the child withholds its precious feces in the face of parental demands is generalized over a period of time to the withholding of all precious possessions from a world perceived as hostile and demanding. Since it is readily apparent even to developing child that most people view money as a prized possession, the transition from feces to money is an easy step." "Feces themselves are perhaps the most valuable commodity in the child’s young life.

“Norman. O Brown observ[ed], ‘In its famous paradox, the equation of money and excrement, psychoanalysis becomes the first science to state what common sense and the poets have long known - that the essence of money is its absolute worthlessness.'"- Money Madness Goldberg & Lewis

And us tossing pennies into watery wells, everyday make a wish upon a throne with coins in stow, placing O. Browns into white repositories, a text released to the underworld.  Davey symbolically rooting around in latent feces, fingerprint stamps all over, evidence of molding it to your hand.



See too: Quintessa Matranga at Freddy, Moyra Davey at Institute of Contemporary Art

“Portikus XXX” at various locations

(Link)

A plucky young venture-idealist somewhere online collecting the mass sum of the artworld's published photographs of people giving readings, an art genre unto its own: a great instagram feed awaits.

Daniel Dewar and Grégory Gicquel at Portikus

(link)

Totems hewn of old-timey techniques, preloading new content with the time travel of the ancients. It works, the objects and their symbols feel pulled from primeval wells, they affect - despite their modern gastrointestinal - the look of something deep rooted. When Hirst applies gilt to goat horns or barnacles to statues it appears as chintz patinas; DD&GC's abraded by the time's digestion by building techniques pulled through with it.  In 2017, we desire wood, representations of the natural, a connection to a time when we touched things with our hands and our stores name themselves after objects of such lost: Iron Oak Spade Copper Rooster mad lib titling. Wishing our objects to connect us with a mythic past when we weren't cognitively fritzed socially gamified cyborgs, even if it isn't true the affect is there to make us feel better.


See too: Daniel Dewar and Grégory Gicquel at Micheline Szwajcer

AR: Jana Euler at Portikus

Click here to read

Originally Posted: January 20th, 2016

Note: This entry is part of August Review, our annual look back at this season’s key exhibitions. For more information, see the announcement here.

Lawrence Abu Hamdan at Portikus

(link)

The vogue of the antagonist villain artist, stemming from the myth of art's transgressive potential, nullifies the question of art's utility, protecting artists from messy question of art measured for its good or usefulness. Implicitly Art believes Ethics would void the frivolous nature of art by placing in the mud of the material world and sobering its ether high of beauty. Art would like to remain judged as art, and even Art's greatest love, politics, still voids its ethics by staging politics in the realm of poetics, destroying its link to material political conditions while still using its signs. [See Walid Raad and Trevor Paglen for two examples of a wildly different quality.] Both the villain and political artist maintain a deflective Irony dome, shooting down inquests into the artist's moral accountability. That the villain artist's defenses reflect Empire's only bolsters his/her position, while the political artist downplays this. Both throw candy to their critic by "raising questions," by maintaining an indefinite relation to their signs. See the overuse of the word problematizes. The do-gooder however can't claim irony on doing good; like, you can't do good ironically. The gesture is never in question as to its intent. Anyway, Abu Hamdan did good, a problem for art.

See too: Trevor Paglen at Metro Pictures

Jana Euler at Galerie Neu & Portikus

(Galerie Neu, Portikus)

Photoshop makes surrealism quaint, Magritte's entire practice premised on its most basic tools, transpose, cut, drag and drop; and today phone apps like magic mirrors to show you elderly, replace your face with your dog, barf rainbows at will in a world that is totally virtual.The image today is understood as a total malleability. Euler's images free themselves of the physical setting - the last vestige of the pre-virtual surrealist - floating free in hyperlink space in which images are links, expanding out ready outpour their content in a deluge to anyone ready to open them.


see too: Jana Euler at Kunsthalle Zürich, Jutta Koether at Bortolami

Meyer Vaisman at Portikus

(link)

Vaiser's career prior to the decade long drop out - aside from the press fodder it nowinstigates - almost does not exist. The ballyhooed and myth-producing 2000 GBE exhibition fails to be found on the dealer's site. Images from the "promising protagonist" exist sporadically on dead blogs and cellphone photos. (The anticlimax of the heavily mythologized sculpture portending the artist's breakdown is its main attribute.) Without today's reemergence the career would essentially be invisible, a sort of BCAD ahistory. The overproducing omnipresence of today's competition for visibility outpacing the attention to small single jpegs littering the net.

And but so, we see here - despite Vaiser's touched-by-god-theistic returns - the work still up for the intention-ugly look of its era's pack's PrinceKoonsBickertonHalley ascension; snorting up the dollars cut from the tables that made them stars; up the deadpan look of marketable appropriation.

Simon Denny at Portikus



The Highlander Rap Battle, Denny V. Schumacher.
Digital documentation’s res on approach to limits of information contained, its impossible to tell what’s going in half these photos anymore in the bits further limiting visuality, eventually we’ll be documenting mere clouds of shitty nanobot art, but until then, whatever. Denny’s exhibitions an info-graphic-webpage layered arcade, hyperlinked in icons, Benjaminian historico-materialism, thus “History Hall.” Poster Board Board Meeting minutes, even styled in a Haacke-esque politco-absurdum conference table portending Schumacher’s glossy tri-fold PRing the sub-seen IT cogworks. Denny berates, the board bored asked, made to, to care; Schumacher’s warm-liquid soothes the discrepancy between interface and cogs’s backend dilation, realizing nobody cares enjoyability. Denny’s hesitancy leaves him dusty, trying to juice some ink for the future, academically hopeful, propagandizing fear, worried about the unsung quagmire of technology’s cultural representation way too far gone to even try to begin, stuck in ominous 1993’s palliative newness, like, fuck. Schumacher seems injected into it, totally ready for whichever singularity of his future.
One could feel warm towards Denny’s slowness, seemingly having actually taken a step back, or enjoy the blazing fast interneted internalizing of Schumacher; whichever the quickening will eventually deliver.