Shinpei Kusanagi at Altman Siegel

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How far these painting seems. It enhances their fog, an increase in atmosphere between you and subject like rain. Yes, it's the same photographic distance as say Stephen Pace at Altman Siegel, but these recede even further, the fabrics imbibe their melting ice cream, slurping them into the canvas an impenetrable window away.

Stephen Pace at Altman Siegel

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Hard to hate on something so breezy, so made for summer. Breezier than Katz. And compared to today's faux neanderthal naiveté of say Nava, Bradley, Smith or Craven - these retained vintage palettes and foot in traditionalism makes them just nicer to be around. None of their teenage middle fingers that have come to associate "rule breaking ugly" with genius, or more so, interest. Less authority, just pleasant paint.

Alex Olson at Altman Siegel

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The squiggle is the icon of inconsequence, faff, become the middle finger that Laura Owens made her career on. Lily van der Stokker's pink punk. Hanne Darboven just passing the time. But its important to sediment time, stitch yourself to it, say, "I was here."  And Art is a means to attach whatever is in your head to forever, aggrandize thought with color and composition's altar piece. Here, the squiggle. The graffiti cast into time. 

See too: Lily van der Stokker at Koenig & Clinton

Ruth Laskey at Altman Siegel

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A stitch denotes time, expenditure, so labor becomes a sweat condensing on its image, commitment to the geometric bit. You burn time to consecrate your image. Engrave it in the stone of labor. Lend time to meaning, to proof its beauty. 

"This separation of our social relations we've so completely assimilated that labor itself returns as fetishism, stitches mark this labor, look compelling, can be brought out onto white walls, as aura, as artwork. Labor itself becomes auratic, the look of it. Simulacra. Because every cheap objects is an equal tapestry. The stitches in time are smoother, hidden. Hold up your child's plastic toy and feel another at its end." - Read full: Notes on Stitches

Arthur Okamura at House of Seiko

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Okamura is probably too weird for the artworld, too elusive, slippery in content, not in a conceptual way, in a professorial painter way, too many ugly paintings, too much seasick gray, too much risk for jewels too complicated to sit easily behind desks. Content drifting between academic and symbolist, surreal, abstract. He worked with poets, a huge mistake. He represents an interesting case of what is allowed. He is interesting. He will be forever probably monikered an artist's artist. He will disappear. In five years time someone will take all this, streamline it for production, add some hue, and get their return. 

Shinpei Kusanagi at Altman Siegel

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This is our most nostalgic era. Our "great again" era, a rehash era. Our reboots. Remakes. The artworld nostalgia that pervades like Marvel universes. The broad brushstrokes are already all there, the script merely updated. Or not. All things must pass. Unless you just endlessly perpetuate them. 

Liz Deschenes at Fraenkel Gallery

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 Like a more bejeweled question of On Kawara: does the index/signifier retain anything of its original? The question is repeated ad nauseam throughout contemporary art. Like all worst aberrations of art, it's a question on life support, unanswerable and asked for affect of evoking it. 

conceptual art as one hand clapping: Yuji Agematsu, On Kawara at LA MAISON DE RENDEZ-VOUS, On Kawara at the Guggenheim, Kirsten Pieroth at Mathew, Sam Falls at 303 Gallery, James Hoff at VI, VII

Sula Bermúdez-Silverman at Friends Indeed

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the cultural detritus pressed into reverential windows. Let the light in. The highlighter attracts thought. The flypaper of civilization. Our cargo cult now building advanced architecture to prayer: please let this waste our world have meaning. 

See too: “Flat Neighbors” at Rachel Uffner, “Breathing Through Skin” at Antenna Space, “A Love Letter to a Nightmare” at Petzel, David Lieske at MUMOK, Rachel Harrison at Whitney Museum

Josh Faught at The Wattis Institute

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After the post-apocalypse of the sign, in the wasteland, we began picking up the rubble. We needed meaning, which was old, vintage, possible authentic. We started storing it in reliquaries, placing it in altars. Aura by the altarfull. The relics were asked to speak. We pressed fragments to foreheads and contemplated skulls. Which was a very old pastime. 

Teresa Baker at Pied-á-terre

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Crust composition, stitched twigs, punk weavings, arranging "painting" like a conductor waving his hands to conjure the cultural myth music. 

Group Show at Altman Siegel (Wade Guyton)

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Because history is more interesting than painting. Because culture more surreal than surrealism. Because the unconscious of society already printed for you. Now it's a plaque-as-painting for a museum to own. To allow them to put the didactic next to. In a museum you need a painting to mark it. That's just how museums, dumbly, work. 

See too: Wade Guyton at Academie Conti & Le Consortium, Wade Guyton at Friedrich Petzel

Koak at Altman Siegel

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People bent like pipes for their decorative purposing. The painter demands composition, extraction, humans repurposed for painting's ends, how modern. Arabesque motifs get harsher until the ballet seem inhuman doll-like, Picasso rips apart models and we find this intoxicating. Our runway models and their own body's El Grecoing. Etiolated for the consumption. There is discrepancy between what things represent and what they are: beautiful.


see too: Julien Nguyen at Modern Art, Lisa Yuskavage at Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, Louisa Gagliardi at Open Forum

Dashiell Manley at Jessica Silverman

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A lot painting today is excuses for getting bright striking colors onto canvas. Paint excused because we don't trust "expression." PRs become the spellcasting against anything that could be mistaken for irrational, and we spit-firing reasons, definitions, reference, backloading the work to look like weight. The compressive strength of bamboo. Excuses become important when we've conflated painting with its history. Both the history of the art-form, in which painting must become a marker for its own context, a placeholder of itself, for curators to elucidate, but also because of this the individual canvas must have a raison. This is the tension of all that neanderthal painting, of trying to make paintings so stupid it couldn't possibly be mistaken as reasonable. And yet here we are. Perhaps brilliance, like Grotjahn, in just not even excusing oneself. A confusion of whether or not these are dumb.

Shannon Ebner at Altman Siegel

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There's too much information on the text - depictedly wet letters on photographically dewy walls - that don't function as fonts in maximizing readability, instead letters in competition with statement. Which this short-circuiting of language - renege on its duty to communicate cleanly - could create some weird warping as reading becomes an act of will against text, no longer communication super highways but entering the bushwhacked terrain of Christoper Wool say, or diverse cultural fauna of Jack Pierson. The desire to sediment text as object terrain is a long time one. A love for text to self-expose. Typography nerds rejoice. Brecht's distancing effect and a self-reflexive indexing in quotes about photography. Finding interest in one's belly button again, how much can you mirror your navel, type of deal.

Diamond Stingily at Wattis

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A shelving not quite inspiring confidence. A bookshelf is a form of social signaling, marking class, worth, status. This one is made of compressed dust to which it shall return.

Google "no participation trophies in life." You'll get hundred of results, get NYTimes debates. Rapid opinions, Millennial castigation. This despite childhood development studies saying you should reward effort, not achievement. "You did so well" is less positive reinforcement than "You worked so hard." Rewarding achievement threatens the hand of failure. Effort can be contributed without risk.

Sports are a form of systematized and controlled adversity. For a certain class of children this will be their only form of adversity.

Trophies, shelved, imply the past that looked through tint rose, nostalgia on achievement.

No one seemed to really mention the stark shadow these cast. 

Things said in recollecting the past, against the trophy of achievement they do not contain, become lamentations for a past that isn't garnered any such social trophies like a real wood bookshelf.

K.r.m. Mooney at Altman Siegel

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Cady Noland's handcuffs were jewelry for metallized wrists, about how we attach people to a world. A pearl sets off the clavicle. SFchronicle called them "spiritless" after getting it correct that"their relationship to the body is part of the art." And the gallery wears them, their wreckage as jewels. Lack the imagination to see the institution as the digestive body that it is. The engraving block shown here is intended to anchor small fine things to the earth. So they can be manipulated into delicate forms. Here - without its rubber base - untethered, a listless buoy weighted. In the other room copper bite plates allow you an orthodontics to ground yourself in the case of electrical storm as well as wear the institutions like bling: the white walled architecture clenched to your teeth like a grill. Some of Paul Wall's grills cost $30,000 but these walls cost more.

See too: Lucy Skaer at MRAC, K.r.m. Mooney at Pied-á-terre

“Kinship” at Jessica Silverman

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The bowels of August. How's your summer going? Are you strapped to a chair forced to gorge upon the group shows the artworld has brought like stale pancakes that purport to show tomorrow's young?  But then a press release in such deadpan earnestness, its plainness appearing almost offkilter for all its straightforward detail cutting summer haze. In a sea of overwrought excusing that is summer press releases, this offers a lifetime for it. Really no excuse at all. This and then that and here now.  Our heart recognized barren in its several sizes grown. It's grouping of art that doesn't have to make sense, or be made sense of; it's a personal collection.

“School of Chairs” at 500 Capp Street Foundation

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Generally faux pas to quote Deleuze and Guattari in art PR but done here sans quotational segmentation its easter-eggization kindly declines to brandish authority, a sort of refreshing removal of authorial heft, mirroring the experience of David Ireland and the 500 Capp Foundation itself in which the border between capital A Art from the much less authoritied world is fuzzed, like we removed parentheticals from the world, like if Art placed into the world simply became undifferentiated world, removed the differentiating potential of quotation mark's spell holding all the aura of all their respective authors and mediums with it. What if you mixed all Anicka Yi's sprayers with those of those of the hardware store. But instead the spell of an exhibitions checklist clearly delineating the objects in the room, those of art from those which, apparently, are not, and clearly establishing provenance, lineage. Which against like D&G's Rhizomes' whole point, don't follow roots, grow potatoes.


See too: Darren Bader at Sadie Coles, Michael E. Smith at 500 Capp Street Foundation

Ken Lum at Wattis

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Whereas for Baldessari the image and text ruptured to dissonant stupidity, for Lum the relation between text and its image, or stylization as font, vacillates in complicating tone, affect, and comprehension, fritzing usual relations to vertical text so usually standardized, corporate, and sanded of any possible misunderstanding. Vertical text is intended to be clean, sleek and lozenge like, a clearly defined transaction between speaker and reader, and Lum's version bubbles with all manner of nerves in us. You see the human erupt through the advertorial transaction which is supposed to remain free of subjectivity - there is never a plaintive plea in advertising, and in witnessing this breakdown of decorum we feel pity.


See too: Mark Grotjhan at Karma, John Baldessari at Marian Goodman, John Baldessari at Sprüth Magers

Sarah Morris at Berggruen

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"Both Morris’s paintings and luxury merchandise operate like memory-obliterating machines. In order to arouse the consumer’s intense longing for a brand-name product - a creamy, lustrous lipstick by Clinique, for instance - memory must be successfully erased. Flagrantly confronted with the object of desire, we gladly relegate to oblivion all good intentions, as well as the knowledge of what we really need and what we have already accumulated. Sensible recollection gives way to an irresistible longing, whose presence is far more intense and acute. 

“Morris’s paintings must also reckon with two kinds of desire: either, we surrender to them, pleasurably allowing ourselves to be mirrored in their high gloss surfaces, or we simply take them to be a strategic attempt to launch a trademark and scrutinize them no further. One might then conclude that this seems to be no different from the various ways in which ordinary brand-name products are perceived. But there is a telling difference. Morris’s paintings offer not only the object of desire but its flip side as well: a desire that does not want to be ‘fulfilled’ and is defined by absence. They show us the dizzying voids and abysses that open up the moment we succumb to desire [...] the trance-like feeling that follows hard on shopping spree: for instance when you’ve finally given in to your passionate desire to buy that lipstick. But instead of ‘satisfaction,’ you find yourself facing an even greater void...”  - Isabell Graw "Reading the Capital"

That hammering emptiness that writers with less deft than Graw attempt backfilling with all they reference they can mine from titles and films to go interminable explications of the architecture they repute to reference, of displays of information signaling content, data, that they lack actually denoting, just the impact of information's look with hollow drums like conga lines.