Kaspar Müller at Société

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Because it stirs the pot, ripples the surface of mythos, of art, content. You cannot kill content if you tried because art is baggage, preloaded with a cultural et al. So make it look good on a wall, even toilet paper.


Read all posts tagged Kaspar Müller, Ripples in the Surface

Sean Raspet at Société

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For all conceptual art’s fetish for bureaucratic language and dry instructions Raspet presents a shutout on their game by introducing a linguistic specificity from which art - whose amorphous problems produce vague words - could never compete. Less a Carey Young legalese, than a Weinerian instructional awkwardness, (“Matter caused to cease as it had”) producing, in its specific jargon, a scientific “great doubt” at the edge of understanding between phenomenology and experimental vs speculative understanding, of asking the sound of chiral cleaning chemicals clapping.
It could seem derivative aside from its deployment of a hyperbolic language within its pre-given forms of poetics if the questions asked weren't so stupidly designed to be answered. We can answer now the kōan, “What does the coke in a mirror taste like?” I, unfortunately, would like to know. The answer would require at least 3 papers expressing its at least 3 answers, and where are they Sean? I'm sure it is expensive, but surely someone would like to buy the world a synthesized enantiomerically opposite Coke.

See too : Goutam Ghosh at Standard Oslo , Sean Raspet at Jessica Silverman

Kaspar Müller at Société

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And see here Muller inhabits the generic image of lake, Lake Zurich, and although the images are “his,” their interchangeability with any lakeside photograph known from a collective memory, produces an opaque identity; It is hard to see “Kaspar” or his subjective "hand" through the photographs "which contains things under its surface that can’t be seen. It’s like a mirror in which you search for deeper things, but just reflect yourself. One will want to read something into it, force it even, because it’s not acceptable for it to stop there. Only very hard-boiled reception would leave it there, then it would feed from disappointment and tragedy because more was expected. But one might assume there must be a dark potential. Or a twin potential. That there must be another side. If not, the rejection of any depth would almost amount to aggression." A photograph as severance, a wall between you and Kaspar like a guillotine.

See too : Kaspar Müller at Federico Vavassori , Seven Reeds at Overduin

Petra Cortright at Société



Like many today, Cortright deals with a subject whose new identity is expressed through the grate of the digital realm’s corporate packaging, pressed through ready-found effects and constructs for personalization.
Whereas others construct a stand-in (avatars) for the self - Atkin’s mask, Wolfson’s “Shylock” or punk, Stark’s ready-made avatars, or Trecartin's identity ad nauseum; Cortright's rejection of the third person instead uses the ubiqutious pseudo-self that most conform online, creating a sort of Sherman like paradox of inseparable artist/performer.
And while most of the digital-existentialists stand to thematize and problematize the new identities, those operating from internet modes seem not only indifferent to the skepticism of its promise, but also content with the play in the sandbox and to occasionally bring some of the found network detritus back into the gallery. It becomes a sort of Naumanian axiom of, as an artist whatever I do in the studio is art; updated as whatever an internet artist does on the internet must be art. The difference is that today, everyone has this studio, and privileging the play of those who call themselves artists as somehow more self-aware or capable is a crumbling distinction. Taking pieces and artifacts of the internet into the gallery for its scrutinizing pleasure seems to miss the vast sea operating right now. At worst used by theorists to form a rational order, or theories of internet based upon these examples.
The allure of internet-platformed art comes again implicitly with the ideal of a merging of art and virtual-life. It is a throwback in the form of neo-60’s-happenings, performed on the new-found democratic platform of the a global everything-available network where finally everyone can see. But as Youtube’s “censorship” of Cortright’s early video shows, most of the internet cares nothing for art's particular interests and detournments. At a certain point the artworld has to acknowledge that merging of art and life can't be premised on the insertion of what it owns as art into life, but respecting what is outside of it, that as Youtube made clear, making no distinction between spam and art spam.

See too: Ed Atkins at Serpentine Gallery , Rachel Rose at High Art

Ned Vena at Société



How has it come to pass we find Ned Vena enjoyable? We like it. What indoctrination has brought us here, this artificial and chemical form of quotational painting. Or is that the enjoyability of it? The Toxic Avenger version of abstraction. Clinically chemical. Finding “life” in the tiny space of the handmade glitch, itself a totally dead gesture - the accident that births the swamp thing: a “crosshair.” The permeating rubber vapor entrenched against that which would purify it. Everything derivative, prepackaged, a readymade conceptualism again again again in the arms-race of the most dead, bludgeoned, form of modernism. How can we kill it again, and again they ask, until it becomes its own genre, a mannerism of cold supposed irrationality that actually makes total sense: the press release draws out every referential hook from the work, and reads like a thriller, the detective chases clues left by a self-exposing criminal, who so desperately wants to be found naked, alive and diddling to be hoisted to the courts of fortune and fame.
Not to even talk about the exhibition’s title, “MENACE II SOCIÉTÉ.”