Ulla von Brandenburg at Barakat Contemporary

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The vacancy that pervades, it's more understandable when the artist comes from scenography. They're supposed to lack subject. That emptiness you feel, that's art.

There was the briefest micro-genre of "theater art" - Otto-Knapp, Lutz-Kinoy, Okiishi, Mauss - for whom art leveraged its ostensible excuse/raison as painting-as-backdrop to make totally gentle paintings. Which went wayside when people just started making paintings again, no excuse needed. But the original "real-fake doors/paintings" may be Heimo Zobernig (also coming out of theater scenography)  - who made a stupider and therefore more menacing version, a truly fake art that by getting mixed into the real stuff presented a pretty scary question, until we decided it didn't matter, the art party needed its backdrop.

See too: "in the style of ancient plated mirrors, an object of vanity for the rich, giving them back exactly what was loved most, their surroundings, their homes, their empire and visage."

Covey Gong, Hong Kong & Robert Zhao Renhui, Singapore & Richard Hawkins, Hong Kong & Wael Shawky, Seoul

The last four shows in Asia. Not sure what to do with this information. (The fifth show was also architecture but in a slightly less dim room.) The question is which outlet is responsible for the creation/trend/trope pipeline. Not that this is. 

Manuel Solano at Peres Projects

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Solano's might seem cloying because its sleeves are so obvious with themes and questions. A painter who can't see their paintings, like dutch artists dying before their fame, a childhood lost through the sieve of VHS decay. Is memory the same thing as seeing? Does the memory exist better the mind of the painter than the paint, than the VHS? Does the record recall better than what we contain? Is the painting always a failed handshake? Our paintings ostensibly live on past us, past our eyes. These only catalyze the already running processes of time. Like painting beyond your death.

Not sure our paintings need to be so cultivatedly disinterested, nor esoteric in questions. These are fine illustrations of the problem.

Josh Kline at Various Small Fires

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The PR states this "explores the catastrophic implications of America’s political dysfunction." No, it doesn't. For the students in the room this is called "puffery" "a promotional statement or claim which no 'reasonable person' would take literally." A generous read is that it is simply an anti-display, inverse to the usual ebullient displays of US nationalism, the equivalent of how in high school I wore a t-shirt with an inverted flag and thought that was cool. This is Piss Christ but with a flag in a TV and stained. A perhaps formally interesting technique (like, how did all those clowns fit in that car) this should have been one of those quiet shows you use to make a buck in a new city but now boom it is on CAD and mildly soiled underpants for everyone to see.


see too: Josh Kline at Modern Art

“iwillmedievalfutureyou1” at Art Sonje Center

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"I will medieval future you" a curse with hints of the apocalypse - drawn to sci-fi catastrophe, an exhibition conjuring gore and Hollywood-esqu FX. "suspends our conception of linear time by fusing past and future" like any dystopian Thriller. Art as our sandbox and artists enjoying the rush of the crushing of its wet castles. The limits of art's playpen, the tiny emperors and artistic roleplay, begin to feel depressing when you place art in a chronology of society, placing art against societies' arbitrary advancements - did anyone predict a phone like a portal to god - art feels not only like make believe, but not even really the best make believe. You start to nostalgia primitive forms of art like cave painting, just painting, because, as this tech-sfx-scifi presents, we're just building backdrops for our global immolation.

Candida Höfer at Kukje Gallery

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Taking photos of jewelry would have been clearer. The act of appropriation here attempt subversion of the institution by spotlighting it. As if a highlighter critiques its excised words. The Bechers, as post Sander taxonomists, prophesied a world that was complete document, threatening the world with their cold camera whereas their now even-more-famous students wielded this mechanical coldness  to excise from the world the blank jewels that undergirds so much contemporary art. Blankness becomes the lure for the viewer to feel rewarded for the ability to backfill the emptiness with everything they can throw at it: there's a thousand things we can say about these because they are illustrations without text, use them for anything. We invent ghosts inside machines, or architectures without people. The "technical perfection" that Höfer is always by writers rewarded for is the very thing that negates any fingerprints for more perfect mirrors, creating a perfect duplicate of the architecture it wishes to encase in glass. We fill in the rest.