Contemporary Art Quarterly: Richard Aldrich

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"...At the artist’s request, this archive differs in format from the others we’ve published—it includes only installation views."
What is the gallery but the wreath, the coronation, lighting bestowing your anointment like a halo. No gold frames required because white real estate provides the gilt. Installation views that attempt to distance “painting” from the hegemony of its image - to ostensibly preserve it from the porn trading cards they’ve become - seems naive at best. Privatizing it simply finalizes the gallery as the accreditor, art a fiat currency.

see too: Richard Aldrich at Adrian Rosenfeld, Richard Aldrich at Gladstone Gallery, Richard Aldrich at Misako & Rosen, Brian Calvin at Le Consortium, Sophie Nys at Crac Alsace

Contemporary Art Quarterly

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Most anomalous and interesting of Quarterly is CAD's anachronistic reach into time pre-hegemony-of-the-art-image that it itself wrought, when the earliest shows are seemingly lost altogether - there's at least one imageless exhibition here - or are images of the painter in front of her painting, or wildly green uncolorcorrected, all totally unimaginable today, there was no need for it then whereas today's paintings are only as good as their documentation proves them. That the global conglomerate who meme-like spread - if not started - the requirement for ultra-crisp white lighting of a pornographic sort is now looking back to the yellow-tinged days before what it enacted is almost a sort of pathos, a thing remembering a time before itself.

Wasmuht seems like the odd one out, but looking through it may be an important historical connection between say the Imagists and Mehretuian globalists presaging todays digitized power collagists of say Juliano-Villani or Singer.


See too: And so Quarterly has finally come to pass.

Contemporary Art Quarterly

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Cross referencing Greene-Naftali, CAQ is missing around 7 exhibitions of Bacher's, but also contains another 2 the Greene-Naft CV does not mention. This cross reference and accounting was interested in being profound. It is not. In a world of such connectivity and surveillance planes can still go missing in the dark part of the ocean. Just "Vanish." The thought of this now is unthinkable. Heads erupt on CNN speaking 24/7 to its unfathomability, babbling as a comfort nightlight. The map becomes the territory because it produced the most socially, economically, and material fungibility. The map is productive while experience and anecdotes are not. At best words, writing, babble, in comparison to the marketability of information, of knowing, is just a form of letting someone on the other side of a screen know you are there. Everyone has an opinion, but only one person has the stock from which opinions fount. Now with ease I can know what Bacher was up to in 1988, and all along a thing for granular substance spread across blank expanse, spilling items across floors, sand, baseballs, black orbs, and dusty bookplates of the galaxies, grainy film etc. etc.

See too: And so Quarterly has come to pass.

For the Vinyl Completist, the following appear to be missing.

1992 Sex with Strangers, Trial Balloon, New York
1997 Bunny Yeager LA, Los Angeles
1997 A Closed Circuit, Pat Hearn Gallery, New York
1996 Pat Hearn Gallery, New York
2005 Being There - I Like To Watch TV, (ongoing video installation at White Columns)
2005 Particpant Inc, and Taxter & Spengemann, New York
2006 Bots, Mason Gross Galleries, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ

2008 Taxter & Spengemann, New York

And so Quarterly has finally come to pass.

As the water tinges red, accumulating imitators who with ease replicate its system, seeking a piece of its pie, provide competition threatening CAD's monopoly of art world visibility, it evolves new systems, a new hustle to keep it at the forefront of this fragile new visibility-ecosystem of attention.

And so what form does the new extension take but an anabolic enhanced CV, the literalization of artist pedigree. CAD's system still clinging to the mass feed, a linear flow of artist accumulative practice, ignoring the "web" for a singular fount, flow, mainlining the image. CAD has professed disinterest in criticism as part of its institution, and the hegemonic power of the visible remains its brilliant main structure. An accumulative method which monopolizes the territory art stands on: documentation. Control the field of making visible. The only way to beat CAD now is to be faster than it. Other "features" promoted by competing websites has nothing on the completest vision of CAD as the arbitrator of the artworld's visibility.

Perusing the first of the 3, the speed of finding patterns in an artist practice becomes infinitely faster, and here we see the importance of Arakawa's body doing something, anything, an action to conjure the documentation.


See too: "The Sea" at Mu.Zee, Gina Folly and Mandla Reuter at SALTS,  “Dai Hanzhi: 5000 Artists” at Witte de With