Rainer Ganahl at Kai Matsumiya

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Institutional critique, was, at its base, a reflexive gesture, navel gazing en abyme, setting up a giant system of mirrors of various funhouse effects within the institution, but if we've learned nothing its that silvered surfaces sell really well. We desire nothing more than to see ourselves. And seeing everyone else is like ourselves in a strange mirror. And seeing other art patrons is like seeing ourselves in relation to ourselves, seeing a grand and baroque vaulting network of ourselves in a hierarchy of ourselves. And seeing a Jeff Koons painting is like seeing ourselves replaced with Barbie plastic.  We see ourselves in so many ways. It's all we really want.

See too: Peter Piller at Capitain Petzel , “Seven Reeds” at Overduin & Co.

“RR ZZ” at Gluck50

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Assemblage 2.0, a nostalgic affair. If everything looks out of an 80's film depiction of basement techno-carpentry, its not so much remergence of childhood's latent memories, but a link to a time still inclusive to all the weird science of going back to the future's possibility, copper and shoe-string objects representative of when, though we didn't understand the flux capacitor, it still held a possibility that today technology no longer does hidden behind opaque fronts of clean glass commodities. For most today, the iphone is closer represented to 2001's Monolith on a moon of Jupiter than the tungsten of Edison. And we feel cold for it. And emerges a wish that one could still believe in our control over technical objects, over magick from the tongue, over the advertorial usurp bodies filmed, for objects that though we don't understand its primitive occult, still seem more understandable than the blank fury of an iPad.

See too: “Flat Neighbors” at Rachel Uffner, David Lieske at MUMOK, Amy Lien & Enzo Camacho at 47 Canal