Georgie Nettell at Project Native Informant

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>>>Modern Gothic

This is an example of the Modern Gothic.

The strategy: employ, display, the depressing methods of our late-stage-nightmare. A celebration you nor anyone will enjoy - it's in the title. The high five of office pizza parties, the coal black drudgery of corportized fun. What does it mean to give out what you know no one wants. The Modern Gothic can't be mistaken as art, won't provide that relief. The Modern Gothic only redoubles the banality. The John Knight quote: "It’s the primary lexicon for substantiating neoliberalism. It’s the off-the-shelf language of hegemony." We all know we hate this, why does it exist, why can't we stop it, this balloon party to capitalism.

This "repackaged and repurposed disobedience" with "a raw print speed of more than 12,000 square feet per hour." MASS MARKET HOPE. MASS MARKET CRITIQUE. Like the iconic Fairey poster quickly depleting its utopic optimism, now appearing ironic gravestone. A ballon party to the corruption of desire for political agency. Replacing it with the politically negligent. The strategy of corrupting critique, corrupting our political language, ruins our ability to form political response. If you fuck up language, the rational, enough it destroys the ability to speak, to think. Enough of this causes the "learned helplessness in rats."

Rinella Alfonso at Project Native Informant

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You can't tell the difference anymore between young and old art. Is this an artist of the 20th century reemerging, or is this someone who doesn't remember Francesco Clemente  or 9/11? Today's paintings emerge from any age. Previously, you had been able to tell, you would say this is the forefront, made by a 20 something in Berlin, but today painting emerges antiquated. Today we like the old things, it gives the appearance of being longlasting. 

Paleototemism: stonehengification

Dozie Kanu at Project Native Informant

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"Is there a distinction between furniture and works of art? Where do you fall on the spectrum?"
"Sometimes I make sculptures, but for the most part right now I’m making functional works. It’s a little bit less rigorous. Sometimes I feel pressured to load work with meaning—or, when the work doesn’t have a real function, you’re sort of trying to create a perceived function. As if it serves a purpose. Worth having an existence. That can be nerve-racking sometimes. I think it should happen very naturally, very organically. With furniture, the function is its purpose, so it’s still art in that way. You can still give it that same respect, but you can justify its existence immediately because you can use it, you know?" (interview in ssense) 

"But Kanu muddles the usual divisions, highlighting the way black vernacular making—slab culture, African textiles—is excluded from rigid notions of what art is and by whom it is made." (Review by Tiana Reid in AiA)

Kanu is right about the functional object. And one of the joys of a vernacular functionalism is the endlessly alternative, the elsewise arrival at a similar solution. Think Birney Imes documenting the solutions of an impoverished south. Kanu's project might be a similar mining of alternatives to an already existing solution, selling the artworld what it wants. 

See too: Jessi Reaves at Bridget Donahue, Melvin Edwards at Daniel Buchholz, Mark Grotjhan at Karma, Robert Grosvenor at Karma

Morag Keil at Project Native Informant

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The normally groan inducing abuse of green screen is perfect here not for its potentializing the anyspacewhateverism of our onsetting digital tyranny but for finalizing the nail in the coffin of its utter banality mirroring the cheap surrounds of the congenitally bland office. You really could be anywhere inside there. Rooms so boring they are physically upsetting. People spend their lives in rooms like these. Landlords piecemeal warehouses into art studios that look like this, the furthest thing from freedom, and fire hazards. There's no way this show is up to building codes. Artists die in spaces like these, surely creating a lot of last moments' regret among the creative class. The surveillance only emphasizing the lost track of your body like phantom limbs. Keil's knack for pinpointing and amplifying the dreck comprising our doldrums would seem cruel if masochism hadn't become so fun as means of at least owning it: the if-I-am-going-to-feel-depression-I-may-as-well-inflict-it-upon-myself feeling of control. So if you're looking for a hit of coal black drudgery Keil is it. Almost baroquely morose.
Here's hoping some of those hollow core doors get sold as paintings, I would like one, mail one to me.


See too: Julia Scher at DREI, Morag Keil at Jenny’s, Morag Keil at Real Fine Arts, CAWD on Desensitization, Merlin Carpenter at Overduin & Co., Georgie Nettell at Lars Friedrich, Gili Tal at Jenny’s, Georgie Nettell at Reena Spaulings

Harumi Yamaguchi at Project Native Informant

1970s, duplicating Capital's techniques - with or without critique - that ubiquitous strategy of photography that would become postmodern legacy - the pictures generation - is all the more uncanny in painting, the craft of it, capitalist "realism" - more fantasy - making so apparent the latent desirous unconscious of the advert - the wrapping women in plastic like packages - all the surrealism that be made so stupidly apparent in Koonsian shine, years earlier.


See too: Peter Piller at Capitain Petzel

Nicolas Ceccaldi at Project Native Informant

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After an early homerun hit of Ceccaldi's surveillance child-things, we've had at least two bunts and now this walk from an artist that was rookie of the year not so long ago.

Nicolas Ceccaldi at Mathew