David Rappeneau at Queer Thoughts, New York

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Hold a fashion magazine up to warbled silver. The effect ostensibly providing the "nightmare" and "post-apocalypse" to what otherwise are a snapchat's night out. They just look fun. You can't out nihilist fashion - that's a loser's game - these already begun their pleasance. If they were paintings they'd already be on the high courts walls. Their crayon applies a backrooms feel, underdog, pulled from the notebook of a derelict clown. Their paper being their critical strength. Otherwise they'd just be silver mirrors. 

 

Group Show at Queer Thoughts, New York

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A group show that's color coordinated. You could almost wear it as an outfit. Color graded to a Matrix like blue-green, an Amelie use of Red. So young but so cold blues. Vampires are immortal eternal teenagers, that's why they're prone to angst. 

Megan Marrin at Queer Thoughts

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Showers as prisons, cages. Dark historical undertones. Even if these are "Edwardian" "wellness" and "welcoming"(wut) there's something about "mechanistic" and "shower" that will always dredge some historical subconscious. These are the afterimages of such. (Rid of flowers, we are the ghosts asked to inhabit.) If Foucault were alive we'd already know the spa is a prison. But he's dead and these linger with some notion of. I keep thinking of that Carolyn Lazard quote, the "uncompensated labor necessary to reproduce oneself day after day." To keep oneself "clean." To keep oneself viable. And painting to touch such nerves.

Bri Williams at Queer Thoughts

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What a time for an exhibition about soap. What is the history of cleanliness in art, the drains of Gober, the Purell of Puppies Puppies... Under certain conditions old paintings exude soap. Your body itself is barely not-soap, and soap opens your body to becoming not body, cleanses you by blurring self with soap, which goes down the drain, leaving you clean, dry.  Milk congeals skin, becoming subject, but soap is flesh become object, stuff. Classic Kristeva:

...under the cunning, orderly surface of civilizations, the nurturing horror that they attend to pushing aside by purifying, systematizing, and thinking; horror that they seize on in order to build themselves up and function? I rather conceive it as a work of disappointment, of frustration, and hollowing-probably the only counterweight to abjection. While everything else-its archeology and its exhaustion-is only literature: the sublime point at which the abject collapses in a burst of beauty that overwhelms us-and "that cancels our existence." (Céline)

Paul P. at Lulu & Queer Thoughts

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These are bit gratuitous, no? There shouldn't be this much desire, resting on the surface, as if the surface itself exuded it like the soap out of Madame X's dress, a painting condition called saponification, "a deformation often described as 'blooming' or 'efflorescence'". Centuries old paintings literally drip soap. Velasquez added too much of his painting medium to her dress in attempts to make it like oil, he desired too much a dress like a pool of onyx, and his in his desire like an inverse Icarus his painting exuded a white liquid to cleanse him. Of impurity, hubris. And P.'s structure become excuse to hang painting's flowers, blooms, cause shimmers in paint. Look how the painter's hand trembles, painting with one hand. As they become factories for desire. The steam is hung by painter.  Is this much desire, sentimentality okay?  Do these men sweat, or does the painter sweat for them? The glass of fashion. Desire placed on like a mask. DFW: "Her expression is from Page 18 of the Victoria’s Secret catalogue." Disappear behind it, no?


See too: Tony Conrad's Glass, Louisa Gagliardi at Open Forum

Lucie Stahl at Queer Thoughts

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Stahl's PR placing in it, in the lineage of a romanticism, darkly what we have come to. No longer the romantic era representing ourselves as fathomless depths, standing in front of nature's crashing; we are now better feared as plumbing: oils, flows, pumps, fluids directed, misunderstood as monsters. The human body is indistinguishable from any sufficiently complex sewer. And while the gothic has had a resurgence in style, [see: Digitalat Centre d’Art Contemporain La Synagogue Delme] there is an undercurrent of a few who find gothic horror in mere reflection of the world. [see: Morag Keil, Georgie Nettell, Gili Tal, Will Benedict, Merlin Carpenter] This is our modern not southern gothic. A world already dripping black nightmare, that we pump from the earth, have constructed our world out of; Stahl:"the fluid fruit of their labor allows us to express the feeling we got used to calling freedom."  to which Henning Bohl states earlier: "Lucie Stahl has become the oil." That this all's apparent freedom may have only just come to feel like. A product pipe-capable. Art as fluids, pipes, same as any other product. We all are forced to become fluid, make a product for channels, be pumped. Morose in banality, yes.

See too: “Digital Gothic” at Centre d’Art Contemporain La Synagogue Delme, Quintessa Matranga at Freddy, Gili Tal at Cabinet, Morag Keil at Project Native Informant, Georgie Nettell at Lars Friedrich, Georgie Nettell at Reena Spaulings, Gili Tal at Jenny’s, Will Benedict at Overduin & Co., Merlin Carpenter at Overduin & Co.

Kaoru Arima at Queer Thoughts

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Drawing was at one time a knowledge. Drawing of fetuses cut from cadavers were cutting edge science. The limits of knowledge were defined by looking at something really hard. When science and tech jettisoned oils and pencils from its repertoire modern artists got mad and crushed representation into something resembling a crumpled Coke can, seeing all sides at once, and this violence was lauded. I find it a bummer how quick artists were to give up looking at their sitters, the ones who did seem to continue looking at their sitters did so in ways subservient to the miracle of technologic reproduction all too Close, and look how that turned out. There's others ways of looking of course and surrealism and non-objective versions oscillated since. But so the PR firmly presents Arima's as looking albeit in the haptic sense, butting them up to the Francis Bacons they lean but don't ultimately fall towards. And though their reproduction isn't necessarily representational it is satisfying that the PR at least affirms their accuracy.

Mindy Rose Schwartz at Queer Thoughts

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Preciousness is difficult, overripening it bears whiffs of sentimentality, that saccharine brown fruit. [Byars probably our greatest in converting sentimentality, tempering his preciousness with a crappiness, a sort of poor man's gilding, funner to believe.] "craft methods that, although not lacking charm, are commonly dismissed as trivial or irrelevant." Which is true, we do symbolic violence, Distinction, through our tastes which we presume are some objective reasoning, not wanting to believed as a reproduction of class, its partitioning. Chintz is the realm of the agrarian, provincial, of the insipid populists, and dolts of whose outer-realms we prefer to flyover, that we, aesthetically astute, must continually decor ourselves and our realms in aesthetic objects against this, them, hang like hexes against; much of our aesthetics are built upon this.  To see craft and react.


See too: James Lee Byars at VeneKlasen/Werner

David Rappeneau at Queer Thoughts

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“Henri Matisse painted pretty pictures during one of history’s ugliest eras" and Rappeneau draws apathetic youth in one of the most disquieting. Further references: The Pieta, Starry Night and Tamagachis: the youth are bored, despondent, they are nervous and pallid, but worst they're nostalgic. Cylindric reference reflects in anamorphosis to project history as bigger than it, in a point that culminates here.  Looking back to see yourself reflected in the glass already containing all the gold you can fish, to find yourself trapped on the silver side of the mirror, your reflection. And Rappeneau's endless inscriptions in this silver surface, this hypertrophied advertorial ennui embodying all the post-manic fallout of DISmagazine, its fatigue, is brutal, tiring.


See too: David Rappeneau at Queer Thoughts

Diamond Stingily at Queer Thoughts

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How did the written form of Jungle Book's all powerful snake Kaa become the Disney film's second tier villain and comedic relief, and how did natural black hair become a 9 billion dollar industry so profoundly contentious it led Chris Rock to make a documentary about the subject with a Rotten Tomatoes 95% approval rating after his daughter at three asked why her natural hair wasn't "good?" Disneyfication, conforming a subject to dominant culture's preexisting expectations of how that object should be, making for a lot of unnecessary and uncomfortable changes. In a book rife with assimilating contradictions, in which the Medusa fights an Odalisque from obscure Quebecois myth so beautiful anyone catching sight turns to gemstone against the gorgon's stone, an elaborate fight fought through mirrors, one of Infinite Jest's major characters who wears a veil is either hideously disfigured or fatally pulchritudinous behind it, forever ambiguous until looked upon which like the quantum cat's vitals inside a box, a physical attribute achieves a superposition in culture, a sort of walking contradiction as a symbol of power at the same time it leaves open the wound for the bitter slight, "Becky with the good hair."
They're contentious things and that's why they're hanging in a gallery.

Puppies Puppies at Queer Thoughts

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This prequel's synopsis: Puppies Puppies, as Gollum, dressed as ever the inept minion, lost his love, his precious ring, to our narrator Forrest, which I guess makes him Bilbo Baggins. Unless this is part of the Trilogy and Forrest is Frodo, which would make this allegory a lot more complicated. Either way Gollum is made ugly by his love, lost to hobbit and which Gollum is ultimately doomed to a tragic death with his beloved, if our erotic fanfic stays true to canon. Whichever book we're on, Puppies Puppies quixotic quest to imbue memecore with its pathos: poor hygiene basement dwellers in love with their precious ring of internet sociality that binds them, Contemporary Art Daily our eye of Sauron. And which makes us the disgraced Boromir, which means I'll soon be dead, exposed and embarrassed. Like FGT the signs of culture are representations of latent forms, two clocks as representations of time, like a condom filled with bloody white worms of mom's spaghetti gone viral, hand sanitizer, latex masks and make-up covered nakedness, and fish slime being washed, braced within a text effusing romance, is a comedy filled with latent bodily abjection.

Episode 1: “Friday, July 24, 2015″ at Essex Street

“Rainbow” at Queer Thoughts

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Finding spaces exterior the crystal vagueness of white nowhere is commendable, but the increased interest in “off spaces” another search for authenticity existing no place at home, but the press release narrative in the shadow of capital G Global affairs of a 50 billion dollar China backed new Central American canal bisecting a country and placing the artworks there “as as a proposal for an alternative means of exploiting personal resources” is staggering even for press release bombast standards and a odd form of symbolic colonialism, shipping artists in to expose them to the harsh light of Real Issues so that they may absorb it like sunshine, and use it as backdrops for their polyurethne objects and Hollywood inspired films whose own cultural wastelanding might be reflected in this film, acquiring a tan like the best work of all.

See too : "The Contract" as Essex Street. , 1989 at Barbara Weiss

David Rappeneau at Queer Thoughts



So our references here are all tied together, we’ve got Fashion advertorial ennui in the heroin chic vein, injected with post-Akira Gabber stylings, like Tom Nijhuis's 2011 throwback /1995. A Richard Hawkinsian party complete with smoking effeminate zombie boys. The real appeal here is just seeing something drawn. The silver subject matter almost kin contemporary still life, just banal enough to seem vaguely post-critical critical. A sort of interest in the uncanny-valley of the manga rendered bodily Mad in volumetric distortions, but not so far as the outright weirding of it of by Julien Ceccaldi, to whom these will be endlessly compared.