Group Show at Tanya Leighton with Sadie Coles

(link)

...exhibition most interesting for its documentation which turns to documentary. The work no longer accruing laurels through rent-space but argued in cultural speech. This is a subtle but powerful shift. Looking for new ways to internet its object. The press release becomes narrative voiceover. History becomes filmic juxtaposition. We've always had the accrediting power of Art21, or whatever mini-documentary, but now its put out in an exhibition, in place of it. That open headspace of clicking through images we can't let go uncapitalized, that's free real estate. Let the voiceover soothe. This might become a thing. At the time I had thought Leckey's Proposal for an Exhibition was the way forward, maybe this is what will come - Advertisement/documentary.

Paloma Varga Weisz at Sadie Coles

(link)

Like life, so hot right now. How long have we desired a living marionette, an automaton, a mechanical Turk, a sculpture so authentic our love would be able to make it real, become a real boy?  The desire to figure such a thing, to be able to envision and draw it. Now that we feel close to actualization of by libertarian tech-dweebs rather than benevolent artistry, we hang them up, disused. There are Real Dolls now. If all artists work in creating naturlist beauty was all for men to be able to fuck silicone dolls... Set the anatomical pencils down. No longer dreaming of drawing, just sort of left in the air, maybe we shouldn't erect anything else.

Darren Bader at Sadie Coles

(link)

Anton Chigurh: Don't put it in your pocket. It's your lucky quarter.
Gas Station Proprietor: Where do you want me to put it?
Anton Chigurh: Anywhere not in your pocket. Where it'll get mixed in with the others and become just a coin. Which it is.

You can see there this is going. Art, like lucky quarters, made indistinguishable from their unordained brethren, just a coin. Thrown into the pile of stuff the anxiety of an artwork lost, returning to common object, which it is.

Uri Aran at Sadie Coles

(link)

The sort of Brechtian alienation in the more too-on-the-nose moments make for sadness of communication interuppted by Uran's shoe-gazed shooting of his own feet: videos continuously interrupted, our stilted conversations scripted, half a heart in paint smeared surfaces, a plastic turkey flies in from nowhere to mock you, sentimentality tableaued in irony, a black stallion put down on a table, a teenage angst pre-rupturing its connection to prevent its predicted hurt by a distance placed clearly upon glass to let you know its there.


See too: Group Show at Salle Principale

Rudolf Stingel at Sadie Coles

(link)

"All photographs are memento mori. [...] To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability." (Sontag) Richter drained the blood from the body and Stingel the mortician meticulously copying the deceased face's crimson lips atop its sullen corpse: the mortician painter repaints the embalmed dead as motionless life for an audience that wishes for brief illusory glimpse of that thing's memory totally cold.


See too:   Luc Tuymans at David Zwirner, Michaël Borremans at Dallas Museum of Art,