Angela Bulloch at Simon Lee

(link)

As movements and their banners fade the artistic remainders, no longer surrounded by their fanfare, makes apparent all the mannerism. What conceptual premise even was there against a blinding stylization? Why were we into the ephemera of design projects? The the final 2008 trumpeting of its moment now reads as literal explanation, theanyspacewhatever. And all the critiques reacting and filling the vacuum, Bishop's antagonism or Scanlan or whatever. The work has aged horrifically. And as much as the now any space - devoid of its party - showcases all its vacant stylings for said party, it is also perhaps that our current moment, dominated by the circulated image (and its ability to be read immediately) as tantamount makes these images appear vacant, that 2008 was perhaps the last gasps of when theory, academia, Artforumal banter, or any sort of thought outside surrealist imaginings had some sort of sway in art, filled the air with chatter, a lack of which now make the past appear vacant because we lack chatter.

Heimo Zobernig at Simon Lee

(link)

This is as close as Zobernig will ever get to tie-dyed, and the distance is important one. Zobernig's approach is far too flat-footed to pace even stoner psychedelia. The colorful fuck-all isn't pleasant to weary red eyes but an irritant meltdown of modern values, gobbling all tabs before freaking out and regurgitating it back out all over the squares. This is a joke about post-war babies running races against their parents values sort.

See too: Than Hussein Clark at Futura, Heimo Zobernig at Indipendenza, Heimo Zobernig - Petzel,  Krupp, MUDAM

Sherrie Levine at Simon Lee

(Sherrie Levine at Simon Lee)

Not to mention the infiltration of certain forms of cultural capital into emerging markets.

The opacity of Levine’s practice, what at first seemed political eventually dispersing to the desire clouding their surface, the first photo cancelling Levine’s second, leaving it as fetish, its surface, an erotic act of medium. Krauss writing it’s “act of theft, which takes place, so to speak, in front of the surface of Weston’s print” made it impossible to see hers, and others theorized the feeling of third sets of eyes, implying a form of moral stakes in which the viewer really was birthed in a consciousness that signaled the end of edenic ignorance. Levine eventually ditching the overt specificity of appropriation proper, and began rendering unplaceable genericisms and monochromes under the burnish of banal surface, a less cruel and more seductive version of Mosset monochromes, whose destruction of content made their opaqueness a violence, and more like commodity forms, whose reproduction was their content and total-allure of surface their meaning.