AR: Morag Keil at Real Fine Arts

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Originally Posted: April 21st, 2017

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.

Morag Keil at Real Fine Arts

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Passive aggression, that everyone knows, that operates on the affectual level, sublingual, by screwing tone and denying the target a substantive system on which to respond, functions well too for art in discombobulating the viewer whose reaction to such discrepant attitudes can only remain uncertain, the perfect art fount, the new psychedelic experience of the RFA brand updating conceptual art for a new generation of well-versed conceptually-high-tolerant semionauts, the new drug the complete meltdown of conceptual sense.



See too: Carissa Rodriguez at Wattis, CAWD on Desensitization, Michele Abeles at 47 Canal,

Liz Craft at Real Fine Arts

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We could wish our communicado could find space for ethereal content, walls to text become brick to evoke a feeling rather than language, emoji mise-en-scene. The emoji took off by passing meaning's creation to the viewer/listener with interpretative glyph.  and Against interpretation was this erotics of the communal, a seance of meaning between two people joined. The nostalgia inherent in this, against communication's hyper-ecstasy and towards more primitive mode of communication still accepts the digital as a lot like witchcraft, or, like, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from it, and you get it packaged in a nice little pottery object, sent like primitive messages.


See too: Liz Craft at Jenny’s

Maggie Lee at Real Fine Arts

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The bedroom as terrarium, the girl as experiment. Gender as a construct has reached the mainstream, conservative clashes flare and the girl-doll in her room as trials and experiments in constructing it. The glitter is razor-wire. People love these. And their Lisa-Frank-cum-punk-ethos, fun yet assumedly unassuming, "twee," are easy consumption. So to save these from the casual acceptance everyone seems so willing, think about it like this: the dolls depicted in these rooms are at that moment of radical emotional overhaul that also comes at the moment of social-aware realization that one must never express this radical emotional overcharge if one wants to be anything near the coldness of cool. In order to survive the onslaught we freeze our emotions. And these sculptures are very very cool.

Sam Pulitzer at Real Fine Arts

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Pulitzer creates dungeon mazes for its crawlers reading its signic runes, like prior commissions of artists' illustration adorning walls they are flush with potential at the same moment disenfranchised from completing a meaning within a diaspora of Pulitzer's exhibition, they are once removed, and here a schematic's projectable potential unrealized, forever in flux; which as images become further and further devalued in the gluttonous amount of them published daily the importance of artists to revalue the image as puzzling indeterminable founts, labyrinthian puzzles, to stopgap their expediency, becomes paramount.


see too: Merlin Carpenter at MD 72

Nicolas Ceccaldi at Real Fine Arts

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Ceccaldi repeating the wearables. In the original exhibition their lightness and precarity made even the survey of their fragililty feel impure. We dirtying their weight with our unclean sight, merchandise to decor the human like a Christmas tree. Projecting the missing bodies these were meant to adorn. Now the slightly more ruined adornments bear what is implicit prior: their decrepitness in sight, commodities decorating what should be free.



See too: Nicolas Ceccaldi at Mathew, Anna Uddenberg and Nicolas Ceccaldi at MEGA Foundation

Yuji Agematsu at Real Fine Arts

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Like Tetsumi Kudo's radioactive ecology, or Thek's plexi-flesh, Agematsu's warm materials of human cast-offs are reanimated by the frames surrounding them. Agematsu's delicate compositions as ecosystems, precious, a sentimental morality resituating the natural to include microplastics dissolved into heavy saturation islands in the great pacific beverage, and the bacteria wrought. Like Duord embodying the filth of packaging, in a Roth like repetition of the abject, ironically returning it to the cellophane, packaged clean self. The package which holds desire, holding the excrement of it, bears witness to the beauty of Butterfly collections of petri dish human waste, packaged.


See too : Yuji Agematsu at Artspeak, Michael E. Smith at Lulu , David Douard at Johan Berggren

Taslima Ahmed at Real Fine Arts

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Critics Picks were never meant to be reviews, and continually read more like Press Releases for artists ever-more disinterested in making coherent statements and instead showcasing their indifferent poetics. The gun reflects, like the other weaponry depicted in the show, an arbitrariness within the gloss of style, of symbols without recourse, wasted in a Wolfsonian breakdown of meaning exchanged for its gloss, “ecstasy” another meaningless word like a Calvin Klein’s Obsession, adornment to an object meant to connote through its amorphousness destroying specificity for affective branding.

Manuel Gnam at Real Fine Arts

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The end too is romantic, romanticized, see it here with the neo-ruins of culture.
Gnam’s apocalypticism, a new PR sandwich board proclaiming end’s nigh, fits well the unaligned shadows conspiracy, hypothesizing culture’s drive towards death fueled by accelerationists manifesting it, and calling criticality a vestigial romance, quaint by capitalist standards in which market survival is criticality of the most dispersed, invisible and perfect hand culling future seed to bank civilization.
You could be cynical and say Gnam’s art is merely an aestheticization of this “the end” premised in the PR, sown as anxiety held over futures to be reaped as sales for its holistic remedy against unceartainty that this art will see you through with certainty, a marketing mechanism and perfect decor for post-apocalyptic party in Brooklyn - “Have Fun” - that like Ke$ha’s transcendence through capitalist self destruction, the exhibition mirrors culture’s urgency for us to destroy ourselves so it may extract it from us.
Perhaps the best part about this all is that like Sci-Fi, which all of the Gnam’s work is, providing at least a theater of excess, that like the image of the man dressed in an almost futuristic Kabuki theater, an over the top extrapolation of now into tomorrow, a fiction pleasing like the inherent comfort of ghost stories, sci-fi predicts its after styled to meet the demands of its maker today.

See too : Flame at 576 Morgan Ave Apt 3L Gallery 

Stefan Tcherepnin at Real Fine Arts



Stefan Tcherepnin finally rid his Berlin support group-exhibitionary nest spreads wings solo in a blair-witch-style cookie-monster theater, a fill of sticks, shadows and monsters, including another Real Fine release expressing neurosis over artistic network, “Echoing [...] a classic about hypocrisy as a function of assimilation and artistic progression into the orders of social spheres, ST shows an ambivalent means for internalizing both productive and sometimes abject and shadowy qualities in the artistic search for representation.”
Like Liden’s filling of Spauling with X-mas trees, stuffing the gallery with an overload of non-communicative content, a gag for identification, artistic and gallery, Tcherepnin’s “content” is a means of delaying of identity, of presenting content that, in its deafness, refuses to settle, Tcherepnin’s hideous stick assemblages and kidstuff appropriations are like an punchless joke not meant to sit well, a long-winded shaggy dog story like the video on view.

See too: Stefan Tcherepnin at Freedman Fitzpatrick, Single Moms at Vilma Gold, Morag Keil at Real Fine Arts.

Morag Keil at Real Fine Arts



The real fine crowd seems all really want to impress on us their disgust with networks/working and the conglomerate of social sludge. Its neurotic. Beg the rabbit for forgiveness as you slaughter it; or so the press release would have it. Its like you apologize for showing at Real Fine Arts. Apologize for a room full of artworks, self ironize. Like the schrimps that magically ward off marketability, or meaning to marketability. oops. I mean if Kassay taught us anything its collectors like shiny-metal covered canvases. Silver your werewolf desires.
I mean I like the photographs, the banal disjunction, the alienation of experience in late capital. The schizo-world of scream masks and idols of imaged women, etc. I could write the press. The whole recycling thing of Kelley Walker in the united colors, and the video reminiscent of the context comedy of Zobernig’s filming of the comings and goings of Texte Zur Kunst. I can’t really read the message in the pee, but I think its asking the same question as the wall.